Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
His objections were on a moral level with the best side of the religion that they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its lowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross and repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church.
Perhaps, one evening, your wife will reproach you for being sullen and not speaking to her; perhaps she will say that you are ridiculous, when you have just made a pun; but this is one of the slight annoyances incident to our system; and, moreover, what does it matter to you that the education of women in France is the most pleasant of absurdities, and that your marital obscurantism has brought a doll to your arms?
It follows that just as every lie is of the devil, so all truth, of whatever kind, is of GOD. The Lord is a God of Knowledge, and every form of intellectual timidity and obscurantism is contrary to godliness.
Hand and heart on it, Baron. I could look with perfectly cold blood on this knight of obscurantism writhing on the rack.” Herr von Auffenberg heard this temperamental statement with noticeably tenuous reassurance. He smiled just a little, and then said: “Wait a minute, my friend, don’t be quite so savage.” He reached for his smelling salts, held them to his nose, and closed his eyes.
All this has been of enormous advantage for the Christian Church. But on the other hand the infallibility ascribed to the Bible has been an easy weapon for obscurantism, and a drag on intellectual progress. It has prevented the Church from adopting the discoveries of science and criticism in such a way as to make them applicable to religious life.
To him, good old man that he was, all these things were just matters of priestcraft and obscurantism fables invented by the ecclesiastical mind as a means of getting fat livings and comfortable deaneries out of the public pocket. And, indeed, Arthur was well accustomed at Oxford to keeping his own opinions to himself on such subjects.
China, hitherto derided as a decaying land, had been born anew; and in single massive gesture had proclaimed that she, too, would belong to the elect and be governed accordingly. What was the foreign response the official response? In every transaction into which it was possible to import them, reaction and obscurantism were not only commonly employed but heartily recommended.
Modern Moslem liberalism, as we have seen, received its first encouragement from the discovery of the old Motazelite literature of nearly a thousand years before. To be sure, Islam had never been quite destitute of liberal minds. Even in its darkest days a few voices had been raised against the prevailing obscurantism.
But it is an excellent example of what effect religious obscurantism may exert in backward sections of our country. Dr. Max Carl Otto, considering the implications of evolution, calls attention to the following: "Take the evolution of living forms.
Here took place the innumerable autos-da-fe of the Toulousain Inquisition, and here, so late as 1618, the celebrated physician and scientist Vanini was atrociously done to death by that truly infernal tribunal, and for what? For simply differing from the obscurantism of his age, and having opinions of his own.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking