“Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.”
The American Mercury (February 1926)
1920s
Context: By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? Such balderdash takes various forms, but it is at its worst when it is religious. Why should this be so? What is there in religion that completely flabbergasts the wits of those who believe in it? I see no logical necessity for that flabbergasting. Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil...
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H.L. Mencken 281
American journalist and writer 1880–1956Related quotes
“Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.”
Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123
Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 11 “Regarding Gravious” section VI (p. 364).
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 58.
“After all, what new insights has religion produced in the last century?”
Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 17
Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
“God is a hypothesis constructed by man to help him understand what existence is all about.”
The New Divinity (1964)
Context: God is a hypothesis constructed by man to help him understand what existence is all about.... To say that God is ultimate reality is just semantic cheating, as well as being so vague as to become effectively meaningless... Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable, has lost its explanatory value and is becoming an intellectual and moral burden to our thought. It no longer convinces or comforts, and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
“nothing comes of nothing after all.”
p 1
Women As Lovers (1994)
Bad faith at Ground Zero http://youtube.com/watch?v=oJQ4bwGPRuk (28 August 2010)]
2010