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Joseph McCabe Quotes

Joseph Martin McCabe was an English writer and speaker on freethought, after having been a Roman Catholic priest earlier in his life. Although he is now largely forgotten, he was "one of the great mouthpieces of freethought in England". A staunch critic of the Catholic Church, McCabe joined groups such as the Rationalist Association and the National Secular Society. Although he criticised Christianity from a rationalist perspective, he was involved in the South Place Ethical Society which grew out of dissenting Protestantism and was a precursor of modern secular humanism. Wikipedia  

✵ 12. November 1867 – 10. January 1955
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Joseph McCabe: 9 quotes0 likes

Famous Joseph McCabe Quotes

“The absence of theistic belief…”

Joseph McCabe

Defining the word "atheism", in A Rationalist Encyclopedia (1950).

“Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.”

Joseph McCabe

The Human Origin of Morals http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/mccabe02.htm (1926), p. 59.

“A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts — a "bundle of facts." Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the "law" because they act in that way.”

Joseph McCabe

The Existence of God (1913).

“Today we know not only that there is a terrible amount of disorder in the heavens — great catastrophes or conflagrations occur frequently — but evolution gives us a perfectly natural explanation of such order as there is. No distinguished astronomer now traces "the finger of God" in the heavens; and astronomers ought to know best.”

Joseph McCabe

The Story of Religious Controversy http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/joseph_mccabe/religious_controversy/ (1929), p. 86.

“The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth — Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu.”

Joseph McCabe

The Sources of the Morality of the Gospels (1914).

“The theist and the scientist are rival interpreters of nature, the one retreats as the other advances.”

Joseph McCabe

The Existence of God (1913), p. 84.

“If a single one of these gentlemen is correct, if a believer of any type is right, the essential truth for man, the real drama of life, in comparison with which the secular story of the race, is a puppet-show and the unfolding of the universe is a triviality, is the dialogue of the immortal soul and the eternal God. Yet it seems that there is nothing in the world so hard to discover as this. The theory refutes itself.”

Joseph McCabe

The Psychology of Religion (1927), p. 47.

“An idea or institution may arise for one reason and be maintained for quite a different reason.”

Joseph McCabe

The Psychology of Religion (1927), p. 48.

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