Professors John Dewey, E. A. Burtt, and Roy Wood Sellars are among the
signers of this statement. It is an excellent and comprehensive
statement, but one is left wondering why the name "religious humanism"?
It is difficult to become enthusiastic when one realizes that these men
take to themselves the thunder of the atheists of the past, and under
the misnomer, "religious," place before the public what all atheists of
the past ages have been preaching.
It is most gratifying to perceive that such distinguished men as signed
this statement are frank enough to admit the extent of the religious
revolution, and determined enough to take a hand in the clearing away of
the debris that clutters the crumbling of all religious creeds. Yet it
is only fair to point out that this statement contains nothing that
would not be recognized by those intrepid atheists of the past, and
little more than they urged in their time. I refer to those brilliant
French atheists La Mettrie, Helvetius, d'Holbach, d'Alembert, and
Diderot.
CHAPTER XIX
THE DOOM OF RELIGION; THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM
_One should recall the charge of atheism directed against the
keenest thinkers of antiquity and the greatest of its moral
reformers. But what was personal and incidental in the past,
depending largely upon the genius and inspiration of seers and
leaders, has now become a social movement, as wide as science_.
JAMES T. SHOTWELL.
_The drift from God is a movement of events, a propulsion of vital
experience, not a parade of words to be diverted by other words_.
MAX CARL OTTO.
In the Babylonian and Assyrian mythologies we have the chief deities as
Ishtar, Tammuz, Baal, and Astarte. In the Phrygian religion we have the
Goddess Cybele and her husband Attis. Among the Greeks we have the
Goddess Aphrodite and the God Adonis. The Persians had their Mithra.
Adonis and Attis flourished in Syria. In the Egyptian religion was found
the Goddess Isis and the God Osiris. The Semites have their Jehovah, the
Mohammedans their Allah, and the Christians the Goddess Mary, the God
the Father, and a son Jesus.
Christianity has divided itself into Catholicism and Protestantism; and
when Protestantism gave the right of interpretation of the Bible to each
individual, there were evolved such forms of Protestantism as Christian
Science, Holy Rollerism, Seventh Day Adventism, Swedenborgianism, and
the cults of the Doukhobors, the Shakers, the Mennonites, the Dunkards
and the Salvation Army.
In the early days of the Church were seen the wrangling of sects, the
incomprehensible jargon of Arians, Nestorians, Eutychians, Monotheists,
Monophysites, Mariolatrists, etc. Today we behold the incomprehensible
jargon of the first-mentioned sects.
Christ, born of an immaculate virgin, died for mankind, arose from the
dead, and ascended into Heaven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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