Progress In Religion (2000)
Context: I am neither a saint nor a theologian. To me, good works are more important than theology. We all know that religion has been historically, and still is today, a cause of great evil as well as great good in human affairs. We have seen terrible wars and terrible persecutions conducted in the name of religion. We have also seen large numbers of people inspired by religion to lives of heroic virtue, bringing education and medical care to the poor, helping to abolish slavery and spread peace among nations. Religion amplifies the good and evil tendencies of individual souls.
“Paul was a great theologian as well as a great saint and a heroic missionary, but we are not bound to imprison our minds in his theories. Newton was a great scientist, but it is no disparagement of Newton to realize that even schoolboys today know more than he did about atoms. Thought moves on in every field of inquiry.”
Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.117
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Leslie Weatherhead 81
English theologian 1893–1976Related quotes
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
I. Bernard Cohen, Preface to Opticks by Sir Isaac Newton (1952)
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 51e
"Newton's Principia" in 300 Years of Gravitation. (1987) by S. W. Hawking and W. Israel, p. 4
As quoted in [Astronomer Vera Rubin—The Doyenne of Dark Matter, Discover Magazine, http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/breakdialogue] (1 June 2002)
Wells testimony, Kansas evolution hearings http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/kansas/kangaroo2.html#p681, 2005.
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Source: Self Reliance
Context: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.