A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and EssaysBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and Essays
Bradlaugh, Charles
Free thought
Every child is born into the world an Atheist; and if he grows into a
Theist, his Deity differs with the country in which the believer
may happen to be born, or the people among whom he may happen to
be educated. The belief is the result of education or organization.
Religious belief is powerful in proportion to the want of scientific
knowledge on the part of the believer. The more ignorant, the more
credulous. In the mind of the Theist "God" is equivalent to the sphere
of the unknown; by the use of the Word he answers without thought
problems which might otherwise obtain scientific solution. The more
ignorant the Theist, the greater his God. Belief in God is not a faith
founded on reason, but a prostration of the reasoning faculties on the
threshold of the unknown. Theism is worse than illogical; its teachings
are not only without utility; but of itself it has nothing to teach.
Separated from Christianity with its almost innumerable sects, from
Maliometanism with its numerous divisions, and separated also from every
other preached system, Theism is a Will-o'-the-wisp, without reality.
Apart from orthodoxy, Theism is a boneless skeleton; the various
mythologies give it alike flesh and bone, otherwise coherence it hath
none. What does Christian Theism teach? That the first man made perfect
by the all-powerful, all-wise, all-good God, was nevertheless imperfect,
and by his imperfection brought misery into the world, when the all-good
God must have intended misery should never come. That this God made men
to share this misery--men whose fault was their being what he made them.
That this God begets a son, who is nevertheless his unbegotten self, and
that by belief in the birth of God's eternal son, and in the death of
the undying who died to satisfy God's vengeance, man may escape the
consequences of the first man's error. Christian Theism declares that
belief alone can save man, and yet recognizes the fact that man's belief
results from teaching, by establishing missionary societies to spread
the faith. Christian Theism teaches that God, though no respecter of
persons, selected as his favorites one nation in preference to all
others: that man can do no good of himself or without God's aid, but yet
that each man has a free will; that God is all-powerful, but that few
go to heaven and the majority to hell; that all are to love God, who has
predestined from eternity that by far the largest number of human beings
are to be burning in hell for ever. Yet the advocates for Theism venture
to upbraid those who argue against such a faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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