Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 8, 2025
Poor! yes; but it is genuine; and this at least must be said for Puritanism, that of all the theologies and philosophies it is the most honest in its recognition of the facts; the most real, if we penetrate to the heart of it, in the remedy which it offers.
We furthermore propose to show the changes to which the creed and scriptures were subjected during the Middle Ages, and at the Reformation in the sixteenth century, through which they assumed the phases as now taught in the theologies, respectively of Catholicism and Orthodox Protestantism.
The money that has been spent in building up blasphemous theologies would have rid the whole world of poverty, and ignorance, if it had been beneficently employed with the kind intention of doing the peoples of the earth good, in every way, instead of trying to fix upon them damnation now, and also arrange for it in their life hereafter.
We have lost the old absolute philosophies and dogmatic theologies and that is good and right, for they were outworn. But we are never going to lose the central experience that produced them, and our task is to find a new philosophy to express these inner things for which the words "supernatural," "absolute," are no longer intelligible.
When he argues that philosophies and theologies are the fizgigs of the brain, its Fifines the false which lead us onward to Elvire the true, he expresses an idea which Browning has repeatedly expressed in Ferishtah's Fancies and which, certainly, was an idea he had made his own.
But the belief in special miracles recurs again and again in Judaism, and though discarded by most reformed theologies, must be admitted as a prevailing concept of the older religion. But the belief was rather in general than in special Providence. There was a communal solidarity which made most of the Jewish prayers communal more than personal.
There is in regard to them a most wonderful fact: In nearly all the theologies, mythologic and religious, the devils have been much more humane and merciful than the gods. No devil ever gave one of his generals an order to kill children and to rip open the bodies of pregnant women. Such barbarities were always ordered by the good gods. The pestilences were sent by the most merciful gods.
This was an application of the process which the Jewish and Christian theologies would follow during centuries, and which was to produce a whole series of divine assessors, the Metathronos, the Synadelphe or Sandalphon, and all the personifications of the Cabbala.
He had been taught strange things, he said, from old theologies, when he was a child, and had thought his way out of many of his early superstitions. There was no sooner a vacancy on our side of the table, than the Master proposed a change of seats which would bring the Young Astronomer into our immediate neighborhood.
For suppose theology established the existence of an evil deity and some theologies, even Christian ones, have come very near this, is the religious affection to be transferred from the ethical ideal to any such omnipotent demon? I trow not. Better a thousand times that the human race should perish under his thunderbolts than it should say, "Evil, be thou my good."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking