Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 16, 2025
When we remind ourselves, further, that secularism, equally with supernaturalism, tends to identify "Nature" with lower nature in other words, with the material side of the Universe and the carnal side of Man's being, we shall realise how easy it is for the secular life, once it has lost, through its divorce from religion, the tonic stimulus of a central aim, to sink, without directly intending to do so, into the mire of materialism, a materialism of conduct as well as of thought.
The erroneous impression which under a belief in the unknown has come to prevail, namely, that the moral law is the result of religion; or, in other words, that the human conscience is in some manner dependent on supernaturalism for its origin and maintenance, is, with a better and clearer understanding of the past history of the development of the human race, being gradually dispelled.
These three classes of epidemics may be found in connection with subjects other than religious, but I am at present concerned with them only in that relation, and to point out that, in spite of their undesirable or admittedly pathologic character, they have yet served to keep supernaturalism alive and active.
A cold and quivering impatience continued to crawl up Turnbull's spine; he had never felt so near to superstition and supernaturalism, and it was not a pretty sort of superstition either. "There is another man more fearful and hateful," went on MacIan, in his low monotone voice, "and they have buried him even deeper.
He is not interested in trivialities trivialities of ritual, of creed, of ceremony. We have imagined a vain thing a God of our own species; merely adding to the conception, to gild and consecrate, a futile fuzbuz of supernaturalism. My friends, the God I imagine is something more than a formula on Sundays and an oath during the week."
The Palestinian tale, although he confessed it was much more to his mind than Paul, was still RUDE. It was once more the rudeness which was repellent, and which almost outweighed the pathos of many of the episodes and the undeniable grandeur of the trial and death. Moreover, it was full of superstition and supernaturalism, which he could not abide.
As Judah Halevi is unwilling to yield to the philosophers and explain away the supernaturalism of prophecy, maintaining rather on the contrary that the supernatural character of the prophetic vision is an evidence of the superior nature of Israel as well as of their land and their language, so he insists on the inherent value of the ceremonial law, including sacrifices.
Religion as loyalty to human values will lose no whit of this tragic sense, and yet the palsying background of supernaturalism will disappear. Some measure of tragedy will remain; but its morbidity will have been separated out and courageously rejected. Social groups will fall to with a will to live largely and widely.
Chalmers Mitchell presently comes to this most definite and interesting statement: "Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the scalpel and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert as a biological fact that the moral law is as real and as external to man as the starry vault.
Its science and history must be regarded as merely human; nay, its very morality savors of the barbarism of the Jews. Only its best ethical teaching, and its upward aspirations, are to be regarded as the workings or God in the Jewish mind. Nor is this all. There is a revolt against the supernaturalism of the New Testament. Christians like Dr.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking