The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century (1906)

Seitenzahl:

374

Gewicht:

549 g

Erschienen bei:

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Kurzbeschreibung

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: following your own example. You accept the existence of a personal creator as an ultimate fact that we cannot go behind. I stop at the existence of the universe, which at any rate has the advantage that you and I are both agreed in admitting it, and in my opinion the further advantage that I am not obliged to credit it with inconsistent attributes.' Such an attitude is exceedingly irritating to orthodox controversialists, some of whom not many years since betrayed their feelings by the rather unworthy device of proposing to use the old word ' infidel' instead of ' agnostic.' Their attempt provoked a controversy which soon ran off on totally irrelevant issues, the original question being tacitly decided in favour of the new name. It may be surmised that motives of social urbanity rather than of logical propriety determined the result. Infidelity is associated not only with the theoretical substitution of reason for faith, but also and still more with the criminal breach of engagements, conjugal and pecuniary, for which agnostics profess no less respect than religious believers, and which believers, in proportion to their numbers, violate perhaps not less frequently than agnostics. There is indeed much the same objection to calling agnostics or any other class of rationalists infidels that there would be to calling their opponents gnostics or irrationalists. Such appellations are not only offensive, but misleading; and we can never be sure that their object is not to insinuate an odious charge under cover of a cowardly equivocation. And, apart from moral considerations, a theologian who is not absolutely blinded by fanaticism must see that, as agnosticism stands not for religious disbelief in general, but for a particular shade of unbelief, that shade had better, for the sake of ...

Mehr über...

Mehr von: 

Mehr von:  Alfred William Benn, Cambridge Scholars Publishing