Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 6, 2025
These two positions are held by all enlightened Theists, and are abundantly sufficient, if proved, to vindicate their doctrine against every assault; but we think it unwarrantable and dangerous to go further, and to ascribe, on the strength of mere gratuitous assumptions, all the activity, motion, and change which occur in the universe to created spirits or immaterial causes.
But as this is a favourite argument with some theists, I shall introduce another quotation from Mr. Mill, which is taken from a different work. "Volitions are not known to produce anything directly except nervous action, for the will influences even the muscles only through the nerves.
Unless the soul is immortal, God is incomprehensible, say the theists; resembling in this the political theorists who regard sovereign representation and perpetual tenure of office as essential conditions of monarchy.
Legge, while admitting that the Chinese originally worshipped the vault of heaven itself, maintains that they got past the early mode of thought which considers every natural object as animated, before the dawn of history, and became pure theists, believers in a supreme spiritual being. Confucius he considers to have held a lower religious position than his countrymen had already attained to.
The theists protested vehemently, and showed their superiority by calling their dogs "Immanuel Kant." In his "Critique of Practical Reason," however, he went on to restore the credit of religion through the moral sense, the "Categorical Imperative," and, as certain commentators have stated, after having excluded God from the cosmos, he attempted to find Him again in ethics.
And he then goes on to assert that the subject matter of theology lies beyond these limits. Now putting on one side this perversion of the meaning of Atheism, was it really worth while to coin a new word to affirm what no one denies? Theists do not deny the limitations of knowledge, on the contrary, they are always affirming it. Neither do all theists deny that "God" is unknowable.
If this earth is evolving for the better, the past is still vivid in all its cruelty. The old and familiar argument from design and beauty in nature is so inconsistent with the facts at hand, that most theists have abandoned this attitude, and the retreat from this position has been turned into a veritable rout by the steady advance of scientific knowledge.
Thus it will be clear that there can be no substantive grounds for separating the theists from the most superstitious; that it becomes impossible to fix the line of demarcation, which divides them from the most credulous of men; to shew the land-marks by which they can be discriminated from those who reason with the least conclusive persuasion.
"A people of theists necessarily become revelationists, that is to say, slaves of priests, who are but religious go-betweens, and physicians of damned souls. "If I were a scoundrel, I should make a point of exclaiming against atheism, for a religious mask is very convenient to a traitor. "The intolerance of truth will one day proscribe the very name of temple 'fanum, the etymology of fanaticism.
And it is due to the ignorance and the bigotry of the theists that the spread of sex knowledge is hampered so that a sane conception of sex and the prevention of venereal disease does not eradicate these diseases.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking