"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it - even if I have said it - unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
- The Buddha
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State.
My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death."
- George Carlin
"An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who
doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths. Everyone is an
agnostic as to the beliefs or creeds they do not accept. Catholics are
agnostic to the Protestant creeds, and the Protestants are agnostic to
the Catholic creed. Any one who thinks is an agnostic about something,
otherwise he must believe that he is possessed of all knowledge. And the
proper place for such a person is in the madhouse or the home for the feeble-minded.
In a popular way, in the western world, an agnostic is one who doubts or
disbelieves the main tenets of the Christian faith.
I would say that belief in at least three tenets is necessary to the
faith of a Christian: a belief in God, a belief in immortality, and a belief
in a supernatural book. Various Christian sects require much more, but
it is difficult to imagine that one could be a Christian, under any intelligent
meaning of the word, with less. Yet there are some people who claim to
be Christians who do not accept the literal interpretation of all the Bible,
and who give more credence to some portions of the book than to others.
I am an agnostic as to the question of God. I think that it is impossible
for the human mind to believe in an object or thing unless it can form
a mental picture of such object or thing. Since man ceased to worship openly
an anthropomorphic God and talked vaguely and not intelligently about some
force in the universe, higher than man, that is responsible for the existence
of man and the universe, he cannot be said to believe in God. One cannot
believe in a force excepting as a force that pervades matter and is not
an individual entity. To believe in a thing, an image of the thing must
be stamped on the mind. If one is asked if he believes in such an animal
as a camel, there immediately arises in his mind an image of the camel.
This image has come from experience or knowledge of the animal gathered
in some way or other. No such image comes, or can come, with the idea of
a God who is described as a force.
Man has always speculated upon the origin of the universe, including
himself. I feel, with Herbert Spencer, that whether the universe had an
origin-- and if it had-- what the origin is will never be known by man.
The Christian says that the universe could not make itself; that there
must have been some higher power to call it into being. Christians have
been obsessed for many years by Paley's argument that if a person passing
through a desert should find a watch and examine its spring, its hands,
its case and its crystal, he would at once be satisfied that some intelligent
being capable of design had made the watch. No doubt this is true. No civilized
man would question that someone made the watch. The reason he would not
doubt it is because he is familiar with watches and other appliances made
by man. The savage was once unfamiliar with a watch and would have had
no idea upon the subject. There are plenty of crystals and rocks of natural
formation that are as intricate as a watch, but even to intelligent man
they carry no implication that some intelligent power must have made them.
They carry no such implication because no one has any knowledge or experience
of someone having made these natural objects which everywhere abound.
To say that God made the universe gives us no explanation of the beginnings
of things. If we are told that God made the universe, the question immediately
arises: Who made God? Did he always exist, or was there some power back
of that? Did he create matter out of nothing, or is his existence coextensive
with matter? The problem is still there. What is the origin of it all?
If, on the other hand, one says that the universe was not made by God,
that it always existed, he has the same difficulty to confront. To say
that the universe was here last year, or millions of years ago, does not
explain its origin. This is still a mystery. As to the question of the
origin of things, man can only wonder and doubt and guess.
As to the existence of the soul, all people may either believe or disbelieve.
Everyone knows the origin of the human being. They know that it came from
a single cell in the body of the mother, and that the cell was one out
of ten thousand in the mother's body. Before gestation the cell must have
been fertilized by a spermatozoon from the body of the father. This was
one out of perhaps a billion spermatozoa that was the capacity of the father.
When the cell is fertilized a chemical process begins. The cell divides
and multiplies and increases into millions of cells, and finally a child
is born. Cells die and are born during the life of the individual until
they finally drop apart, and this is death.
If there is a soul, what is it, and where did it come from, and where
does it go? Can anyone who is guided by his reason possibly imagine a soul
independent of a body, or the place of its residence, or the character
of it, or anything concerning it? If man is justified in any belief or
disbelief on any subject, he is warranted in the disbelief in a soul. Not
one scrap of evidence exists to prove any such impossible thing.
Many Christians base the belief of a soul and God upon the Bible. Strictly
speaking, there is no such book. To make the Bible, sixty-six books are
bound into one volume. These books are written by many people at different
times, and no one knows the time or the identity of any author. Some of
the books were written by several authors at various times. These books
contain all sorts of contradictory concepts of life and morals and the
origin of things. Between the first and the last nearly a thousand years
intervened, a longer time than has passed since the discovery of America
by Columbus.
When I was a boy the theologians used to assert that the proof of the
divine inspiration of the Bible rested on miracles and prophecies. But
a miracle means a violation of a natural law, and there can be no proof
imagined that could be sufficient to show the violation of a natural law;
even though proof seemed to show violation, it would only show that we
were not acquainted with all natural laws. One believes in the truthfulness
of a man because of his long experience with the man, and because the man
has always told a consistent story. But no man has told so consistent a
story as nature.
If one should say that the sun did not rise, to use the ordinary expression,
on the day before, his hearer would not believe it, even though he had
slept all day and knew that his informant was a man of the strictest veracity.
He would not believe it because the story is inconsistent with the conduct
of the sun in all the ages past.
Primitive and even civilized people have grown so accustomed to believing
in miracles that they often attribute the simplest manifestations of nature
to agencies of which they know nothing. They do this when the belief is
utterly inconsistent with knowledge and logic. They believe in old miracles
and new ones. Preachers pray for rain, knowing full well that no such prayer
was ever answered. When a politician is sick, they pray for God to cure
him, and the politician almost invariably dies. The modern clergyman who
prays for rain and for the health of the politician is no more intelligent
in this matter than the primitive man who saw a separate miracle in the
rising and setting of the sun, in the birth of an individual, in the growth
of a plant, in the stroke of lighting, in the flood, in every manifestation
of nature and life.
As to prophecies, intelligent writers gave them up long ago. In all
prophecies facts are made to suit the prophecy, or the prophecy was made
after the facts, or the events have no relation to the prophecy. Weird
and strange and unreasonable interpretations are used to explain simple
statements, that a prophecy may be claimed.
Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human
document? We now know pretty well where the various books came from, and
about when they were written. We know that they were written by human beings
who had no knowledge of science, little knowledge of life, and were influenced
by the barbarous morality of primitive times, and were grossly ignorant
of most things that men know today. For instance, Genesis says that God
made the earth, and he made the sun to light the day and the moon to light
the night, and in one clause disposes of the stars by saying that "he
made the stars also." This was plainly written by someone who had
no conception of the stars. Man, by the aid of his telescope, has looked
out into the heavens and found stars whose diameter is as great as the
distance between the earth and the sun. We know that the universe is filled
with stars and suns and planets and systems. Every new telescope looking
further into the heavens only discovers more and more worlds and suns and
systems in the endless reaches of space. The men who wrote Genesis believed,
of course, that this tiny speck of mud that we call the earth was the center
of the universe, the only world in space, and made for man, who was the
only being worth considering. These men believed that the stars were only
a little way above the earth, and were set in the firmament for man to
look at, and for nothing else. Everyone today knows that this conception
is not true.
The origin of the human race is not as blind a subject as it once was.
Let alone God creating Adam out of hand, from the dust of the earth, does
anyone believe that Eve was made from Adam's rib--that the snake walked
and spoke in the Garden of Eden--that he tempted Eve to persuade Adam to
eat an apple, and that it is on that account that the whole human race
was doomed to hell--that for four thousand years there was no chance for
any human to be saved, though none of them had anything whatever to do
with the temptation; and that finally men were saved only through God's
son dying for them, and that unless human beings believed this silly, impossible
and wicked story they were doomed to hell? Can anyone with intelligence
really believe that a child born today should be doomed because the snake
tempted Eve and Eve tempted Adam? To believe that is not God-worship; it
is devil-worship.
Can anyone call this scheme of creation and damnation moral? It defies
every principle of morality, as man conceives morality. Can anyone believe
today that the whole world was destroyed by flood, save only Noah and his
family and a male and female of each species of animal that entered the
Ark? There are almost a million species of insects alone. How did Noah
match these up and make sure of getting male and female to reproduce life
in the world after the flood had spent its force? And why should all the
lower animals have been destroyed? Were they included in the sinning of
man? This is a story which could not beguile a fairly bright child of five
years of age today.
Do intelligent people believe that the various languages spoken by man
on earth came from the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, some
four thousand years ago? Human languages were dispersed all over the face
of the earth long before that time. Evidences of civilizations are in existence
now that were old long before the date that romancers fix for the building
of the Tower, and even before the date claimed for the flood.
Do Christians believe that Joshua made the sun stand still, so that
the day could be lengthened, that a battle might be finished? What kind
of person wrote that story, and what did he know about astronomy? It is
perfectly plain that the author thought that the earth was the center of
the universe and stood still in the heavens, and that the sun either went
around it or was pulled across its path each day, and that the stopping
of the sun would lengthen the day. We know now that had the sun stopped
when Joshua commanded it, and had it stood still until now, it would not
have lengthened the day. We know that the day is determined by the rotation
of the earth upon its axis, and not by the movement of the sun. Everyone
knows that this story simply is not true, and not many even pretend to
believe the childish fable.
What of the tale of Balaam's ass speaking to him, probably in Hebrew?
Is it true, or is it a fable? Many asses have spoken, and doubtless some
in Hebrew, but they have not been that breed of asses. Is salvation to
depend on a belief in a monstrosity like this?
Above all the rest, would any human being today believe that a child
was born without a father? Yet this story was not at all unreasonable in
the ancient world; at least three or four miraculous births are recorded
in the Bible, including John the Baptist and Samson. Immaculate conceptions
were common in the Roman world at the time and at the place where Christianity
really had its nativity. Women were taken to the temples to be inoculated
of God so that their sons might be heroes, which meant, generally, wholesale
butchers. Julius Caesar was a miraculous conception--indeed, they were
common all over the world. How many miraculous-birth stories is a Christian
now expected to believe?
In the days of the formation of the Christian religion, disease meant
the possession of human beings by devils. Christ cured a sick man by casting
out the devils, who ran into the swine, and the swine ran into the sea.
Is there any question but what that was simply the attitude and belief
of a primitive people? Does anyone believe that sickness means the possession
of the body by devils, and that the devils must be cast out of the human
being that he may be cured? Does anyone believe that a dead person can
come to life? The miracles recorded in the Bible are not the only instances
of dead men coming to life. All over the world one finds testimony of such
miracles: miracles which no person is expected to believe, unless it is
his kind of a miracle. Still at Lourdes today, and all over the present
world, from New York to Los Angeles and up and down the lands, people believe
in miraculous occurrences, and even in the return of the dead. Superstition
is everywhere prevalent in the world. It has been so from the beginning,
and most likely will be so unto the end.
The reasons for agnosticism are abundant and compelling. Fantastic and
foolish and impossible consequences are freely claimed for the belief in
religion. All the civilization of any period is put down as a result of
religion. All the cruelty and error and ignorance of the period has no
relation to religion.
The truth is that the origin of what we call civilization is not due
to religion but to skepticism. So long as men accepted miracles without
question, so long as they believed in original sin and the road to salvation,
so long as they believed in a hell where man would be kept for eternity
on account of Eve, there was no reason whatever for civilization: life
was short, and eternity was long, and the business of life was preparation
for eternity.
When every event was a miracle, when there was no order or system or
law, there was no occasion for studying any subject, or being interested
in anything excepting a religion which took care of the soul. As man doubted
the primitive conceptions about religion, and no longer accepted the literal,
miraculous teachings of ancient books, he set himself to understand nature.
We no longer cure disease by casting out devils. Since that time, men have
studied the human body, have built hospitals and treated illness in a scientific
way. Science is responsible for the building of railroads and bridges,
of steamships, of telegraph lines, of cities, towns, large buildings and
small, plumbing and sanitation, of the food supply, and the countless thousands
of useful things that we now deem necessary to life. Without skepticism
and doubt, none of these things could have been given to the world.
The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the
death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation,
and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.
The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world
was the child of fear and faith."