United States or Réunion ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Perhaps it will be thought that an exception to this statement ought to be made in favour of John Stuart Mill's posthumous essay on Theism; but from my great respect for this author, I should rather be inclined to regard that essay as a criticism on illogical arguments, than as a careful or matured attempt to formulate the strictly rational status of the question in all its bearings.
A moral element enters also here, and the analogy there is in this respect between Christianity and theism speaks eloquently of their primary derivation from one common author. Thus we might expect that it would be a vain task to seek anywhere in nature for evidence of Divine action, such that no one could sanely deny it.
It sees in morality the basis of religion; it discovers the fact of man's freedom to conform or not to conform to the eternal law; it unveils the reality of life beyond this earth-stage of existence, and last and chiefest of all, it discerns, in the words of Immanuel Kant, "a natural idea of pure theism" in the unmistakable reality of the moral law, from the very obvious fact that laws do not make themselves, but are enactments of reason or intelligence.
Protestantism is a combination of two factors the authority of the Scriptures and free inquiry; as soon as one of these factors is threatened or disappears, Protestantism disappears; a new form of Christianity succeeds it, as, for example, the church of the Brothers of the Holy Ghost, or that of Christian Theism.
I believe this to have been a corruption of original theism; many think it to have been a stage of upward growth in the religious sense of primitive man. In all the ancient nations the sun-god was a prominent deity, as the giver of heat and light, and hence of fertility to the earth.
The history of the Jews is the record of a continued struggle between pure Theism, supported by the most terrible sanctions, and the strangely fascinating desire of having some visible and tangible object of adoration.
Had it been my lot to have lived in the last generation, I doubt not that I should have regarded the foregoing considerations as final: I should have concluded that there was an overwhelming balance of rational probability in favour of Theism; and I think I should also have insisted that this balance of rational probability would require to continue as it was till the end of time.
In Ute theism, the ancient To-gó-äv, the first rattlesnake is the grandfather, and all the animal-gods are assigned to their relationships. Grandfather To-gó-äv, the wise, was the chief of the council, but Cĭn-aú-äv, the ancient wolf, was the chief of the clan.
It is not merely animals that are designed; they are selected as no more than striking individual examples of a general truth. Everything, if theism be true, must be ultimately due to manufacture. But the whole significance of the Paleyan argument from design is that behind the manufactured article which we recognise as such, there are other articles or other things that are not manufactured.
Religion, in this stage of theism, is sorcery. Incantation, dancing, fasting, bodily torture, and ecstasism are practiced. Every tribe has its potion or vegetable drug, by which the ecstatic state is produced, and their venerable medicine-men see visions and dream dreams. No enterprise is undertaken without consulting the gods, and no evil impends but they seek to propitiate the gods.
Word Of The Day