I don't know, do you?Ricker, Marilla M. (Marilla Marks)
Religion
I don't know, do you?
Ricker, Marilla M. (Marilla Marks)
Agnosticism; Free thought
It is time for the pulpit to stop repeating the old superstitions about
God and about what he has done for man. He has never done any more
for man than he is doing today; never spoken to man any more than he
is speaking today; never revealed himself to anybody any more than he
stands revealed to you and me and to every human being everywhere.
Every word that ever came from the mouth of God man put in his mouth,
and every book revealed by God was written by man.
Half the work of man for the next one hundred years will be to kill the
lies told about what God has done.
Whether there is in all the vast universe a higher and nobler being
than man, I don't know. Whether there is in all the vast universe a
better place for man to live than on this earth, I don't know. And no
one knows any more about these matters than I do.
We have found out much that is not so; now we want to find out all
we can that is so. And it is of no use to go to the Church to learn
anything. The Church is only a place where falsehoods are kept in cold
storage. The man who thinks and studies is the man who is helping the
world most, not the man who preaches and prays. To find the truth one
needs to get as far from the Church as possible.
Christians of all denominations have lots of pity for the man without
a church. Let me assure these persons that the man without a church
doesn't want one. As a rule, he is satisfied with what he has. He
has a home, which is better than a church. If those persons who are
pitying men and women for not having a church would, instead, pity
the man without a home, and pity him enough to help him get one, they
would show much better sense and manifest a truer sympathy with their
fellow-beings.
* * * * *
I can not see any good in painting a thing white that is black, or
calling a thing beautiful that is ugly. There are persons who talk as
though they believed that a Northeast storm was sunshine. I am not made
that way. I am as ready and as willing as anybody to acknowledge the
good in Nature, or the good in life, but I do not believe in lying, in
saying that wrong is right, or that suffering is to be enjoyed. There
are lots of hard things in our life, and it does not alter facts to
call them by some other name. A man dying with a cancer can not be made
to believe that he is having a good time.
The most that any man can do who goes through this earthly existence
is to use his fellow-mortals right and square; to give them an honest
day's work when he works for them and an honest day's pay when he hires
them; to say nothing to hurt them and everything he can to assist them;
to help them out of trouble and not get them into trouble. If one does
this, and does no more than this, he has done what beats every religion
on earth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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