I do not deny that the word “God” has today a moral and religious meaning
which is derived from his supposed beneficence, but this idea is not the
one that I find at the bottom of the Christian faith. I object very
seriously to the attempt, which is being made by certain interested
parties, to represent the God of Christianity better than he is. This word
loses its terror when we realize that it stands for an unknown quantity.
It is the attempt to account for what we cannot understand; the effort to
explain the universe. The word “God” is a definition of human ignorance.
It represents what we do not know. This word does not stand for a person,
an object, or a thing. It is an idea that we can have no idea of, a
thought of what one cannot think. People who use the word “God” do not
know what they are talking about. The word fits nothing that has yet been
discovered. Theology is the science of what no one knows anything about.
It does not belong to the family of knowledge. When the hands of theology
are laid on a man’s head his brains are consecrated to do nothing. Every
time a minister is made, a man is lost. Nothing disgraces American
civilization more than the theology preached in Christian churches. It is
worse than childish; it is old-womanish. The dark ages cast their shadows
across the bright skies of the twentieth century, and the relics of that
benighted time, the priests, are still walking the streets, like ghosts of
bad deeds.
Every theology ends in a creed. A creed is the night-cap of religion. It
is a sign that the intellect is asleep. When faith is in, sense is out. A
man with a creed has bought the coffin for his mind. The rest of his life
will be a funeral service for the dead. A creed is the grave of thought.
When a person subscribes to certain articles of belief, he has no further
use for his brains. It does not require any mental exercise to believe.
Belief does not signify any process of intellectual assimilation or
digestion. When a man joins a church, he makes his last will and
testament. When reason abdicates in favor of credulity, crime becomes a
saint, and folly a martyr. Too much faith makes a Pocasset tragedy. The
foolishness of trying to make God intelligible to human understanding is
shown in the creeds of Christendom. The dogma of the trinity ought not to
pass to any further generation. It is not the “likeness of anything that
is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the
water under the earth.”