![]() It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study. ![]() The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. ![]() All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. I earnestly believe that I am right I cannot help believing as I do. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have been working on the same lines for many years. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim. I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day. “.What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might.
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