The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">All things have not been made for man any more than for the lion or the eagle or the dolphin, but so that this world, as God’s work, may be made complete and perfect in all its parts.&nbsp; For this purpose, all things have been proportioned, not for one or another except incidentally, but for the universe as a whole.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There is no reason why you should suppose that there are only seven wandering stars, and that all the others are fixed; there are a few whose movements we apprehend, but, further removed from our sight, are countless divinities [heavenly bodies] that go their rounds, and very many of those that our eyes can reach proceed at such an imperceptible pace and veil their movements.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There are some people who endeavor to conceal their wrongdoing because of the laws and punishments you [Emperor Antoninus Pius] impose, knowing that since you are only men and women it is possible for wrongdoers to escape you; if they were to learn and were convinced that our thoughts as well as our acts cannot be hidden from God, they would by all means live decently, at least because of the impending penalties.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Yet allow me to speak, though I am but dust and ashes … I do not know whence I came into this life … I do not know where I came from.&nbsp; But this I know, that I was welcomed by the tender care your mercy provided for me … The comforts of human milk were waiting for me</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">When I behold this goodly frame, this world of heav’n and earth consisting, and compute, their magnitudes, this earth a spot, a grain, an atom, with the firmament compar’d and all her numbered stars, that seem to roll spaces incomprehensible … merely to officiate light round this opaque earth, this punctual spot, one day and night; in all their vast survey useless besides, reasoning I oft admire, </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"><strong>how Nature wise and frugal could commit such disproportions, with superfluous hand</strong></em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> …</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Thus, Ants who for a Grain employ their Cares,</em></p><p><em>Think all the Business of Earth is theirs.</em></p><p><em>Thus Honey-combs seem Palaces to Bees;</em></p><p><em>And mites imagine all the World’s a Cheese.</em></p><p><em>When Pride in such contemptuous Beings lies,</em></p><p><em>In Beetles, Britons, Bugs and Butterflys,</em></p><p><em>Shall we, like Reptiles, glory in Conceit?</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this [9/11] happen.”</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There is, perhaps, no more striking example of the credulity of man than the widespread belief in immortality.&nbsp; This idea includes not only the belief that death is not the end of what we call life, but that personal identity involving memory persists beyond the grave.&nbsp; So determined is the ordinary individual to hold fast to this belief that, as a rule, he refuses to read or to think upon the subject lest it cast doubt upon his cherished dream.&nbsp; Of those who may chance to look at this contribution [Darrow’s essay], many will do so with the determination not to be convinced, and will refuse to consider the manifold reasons that might weaken their faith.&nbsp; I know this is true, for I know the reluctance with which I long approached the subject and my firm determination not to give up any hope.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We believe first and foremost what makes us feel that we are fine fellows …:&nbsp; If he is an Englishman, he thinks of Shakespeare and Milton, or of Newton and Darwin … If he is a Frenchman, he congratulates himself on the fact that for centuries France has led the world in culture, fashions, and cookery.&nbsp; If he is a Russian, he reflects that he belongs to the only nation which is truly international … But these are not the only matters on which he has to congratulate himself.&nbsp; For is he not an individual of the species homo sapiens. &nbsp; Alone among the animals he has an immortal soul, and is rational … And was not everything created for man’s convenience?&nbsp; The sun was made to light the day, and the moon to light the night — through the moon, by some oversight, only shines during half the nocturnal hours … The importance of man, which is the one indispensible dogma of the theologians, receives no support from a scientific view of the future of the solar system.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">America as Avenging Angel is not an America I can recognize.&nbsp; Nor is it an America any of our founders could recognize.&nbsp; We may debate, and should, the degree to which religious belief should shape the laws and government of the United States.&nbsp; But there should be no debate in favor of the proposition that America has been divinely selected to govern the world according to the religious predispositions of a minority of its citizens. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I remember being late for a meeting, not able to find a parking place near the event.&nbsp; Believing that the creator of the universe was intimately concerned with my daily activities, I prayed, “Dear God, please help me find a place to park,” and a car backed out of a parking slot right near the door!&nbsp; “Thank you, Jesus,” I said, believing that this was a direct answer to my prayer.&nbsp; What I was forgetting were the thousands of similar prayers I had prayed before that moment that simply evaporated into the air.&nbsp; Not thinking critically, I assumed that the “successful” coincidences were proof that God answers prayer while the failures were proof that there was something wrong with me.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I [as a believer] assumed that the successful prayers were proof that God answers prayer while the failures were proof that there was something wrong with me.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">… I prefer the “cold bath” theory that nature can be truly “cruel” and “indifferent” in the utterly inappropriate terms of our ethical discourse – because nature does not exist for us, didn’t know we were coming (we are, after all, interlopers at the latest geological moment), and doesn’t give a damn about us (speaking metaphorically).&nbsp; I regard such a position as liberating, not depressing, because we then gain the capacity to conduct moral discourse — nothing more could be more important — in our own terms, free from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature’s factuality.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.&nbsp; It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Why is thought, being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter?&nbsp; It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves [that prevents our accepting it]. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.</em></p>