Love, Life & Work: Being a Book of Opinions Reasonably Good-Natured Concerning How to Attain the Highest Happiness for One's Self with the Least Possible Harm to OthersHubbard, Elbert
Religion
Love, Life & Work: Being a Book of Opinions Reasonably Good-Natured Concerning How to Attain the Highest Happiness for One's Self with the Least Possible Harm to Others
Hubbard, Elbert
Conduct of life; Happiness
The indelicacy of the revivalists who recently called meetings to pray
for Fay Mills, was shown in their ardent supplications to God that He
should make Mills to be like them. Fay Mills tells of the best way to
use this life here and now. He does not prophesy what will become of you
if you do not accept his belief, neither does he promise everlasting
life as a reward for thinking as he does. He realizes that he has not
the agency of everlasting life. Fay Mills is more interested in having a
soul that is worth saving than in saving a soul that isn't. Chapman
talks about lost souls as he might about collar buttons lost under a
bureau, just as if God ever misplaced anything, or that all souls were
not God's souls, and therefore forever in His keeping.
Doctor Chapman wants all men to act alike and believe alike, not
realizing that progress is the result of individuality, and so long as a
man thinks, whether he is right or wrong, he is making head. Neither
does he realize that wrong thinking is better than no thinking at all,
and that the only damnation consists in ceasing to think, and accepting
the conclusions of another. Final truths and final conclusions are
wholly unthinkable to sensible people in their sane moments, but these
revivalists wish to sum up truth for all time and put their leaden
seal upon it.
In Los Angeles is a preacher by the name of McIntyre, a type of the
blatant Bellarmine who exiled Galileo--a man who never doubts his own
infallibility, who talks like an oracle and continually tells of
perdition for all who disagree with him.
Needless to say that McIntyre lacks humor. Personally, I prefer the
McGregors, but in Los Angeles the McIntyres are popular. It was McIntyre
who called a meeting to pray for Fay Mills, and in proposing the meeting
McIntyre made the unblushing announcement that he had never met Mills
nor heard him speak, nor had he read one of his books.
Chapman and McIntyre represent the modern types of
Phariseeism--spielers and spouters for churchianity, and such are the
men who make superstition of so long life. Superstition is the one
Infamy--Voltaire was right. To pretend to believe a thing at which your
reason revolts--to stultify your intellect--this, if it exists at all,
is the unpardonable sin. These muftis preach "the blood of Jesus," the
dogma that man without a belief in miracles is eternally lost, that
everlasting life depends upon acknowledging this, that or the other.
Self-reliance, self-control and self-respect are the three things that
make a man a man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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