An Address to Men of Science: Calling Upon Them to Stand Forward and Vindicate the Truth....Carlile, Richard
Religion
An Address to Men of Science: Calling Upon Them to Stand Forward and Vindicate the Truth....
Carlile, Richard
Science; Superstition
Why might not the Linuean system of classification, arrangement, and
description, both of animals and vegetables, with all the improvement
which has already been made, or which might be made in future, upon that
system, be taught in our schools to children? What can be more simple,
more amusing, or more useful, and more instructive? What other system
of education can be so well calculated for a proper expansion of the
juvenile mind? How much more advantageous to society would such a system
of education be, connected with a knowledge of Chemistry, Astronomy,
Geography, Geometry, and the Mathematics, than all that lying and
stupifying lore about religion and its offspring; for the support of
which mankind are so excessively robbed? If religion be a word that has
any substantial definition, or if it be a proper word, and can be made
applicable to Nature in its meaning, or the action it indicates, I have
no hesitation to say, that the System of Education which I now propose
forms the basis of the only true, the only rational religion. The word
religion implying a fixed faith or belief, and having its etymology in
the Latin verb _religo_, to bind fast, there can be no true, no just,
no rational religion, but that which applies to something we can
comprehend, and which has its foundation in Nature and her laws. We
cannot strictly speaking fix our faith on a phantom, unless we admit
faith itself to be but a phantom of the mind, yet such is the pretence
of all those who make so much clamour about the word religion. A study
of Nature and her laws, alone forms any substantial faith or religion.
This study I would make the basis of all education, to the exclusion, or
explosion, of all the remaining mythological nonsense of the day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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