RELIGION – TIME IS NOT

RELIGION

The statements in the following five quotations are true
notwithstanding anything to the contrary
on or referred to by this site.

There must be either a predestined Necessity and inviolable plan; or a gracious Provident God; or a chaos without design or director. If then there be an inevitable Necessity, why strive against it? If a Providence that is ready to be gracious, render thyself worthy of divine assistance. But if a chaos without guide, congratulate thyself that amid such a surging sea thou hast in thyself a guiding Reason.

Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180 CE), Meditations, Book 12, #14

You conclude, that religious doctrines and reasonings can have no influence on life, because they ought to have no influence; never considering, that men reason not in the same manner you do, but draw many consequences from the belief of a divine Existence, and suppose that the Deity will inflict punishments on vice, and bestow rewards on virtue, beyond what appears in the ordinary course of nature. Whether this reasoning of theirs be just or not, is no matter. Its influence on their life and conduct must still be the same. And, those, who attempt to disabuse them of such prejudices, may, for aught I know, be good reasoners, but I cannot allow them to be good citizens and politicians; since they free men from one restraint upon their passions, and make the infringement of the laws of society, in one respect, more easy and secure.

David Hume, (1711 – 1776), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published 1748

In fact, the reason why I keep strict silence now for many years with regard to theology is that while I cannot myself discover adequate rational basis for the Christian hope of happy immortality, it seems to be that the general loss of such a hope, from the minds of average human beings as now constituted, would be an evil of which I cannot pretend to measure the extent. I am not prepared to say that the dissolution of the existing social order would follow, but I think the danger of such dissolution would be seriously increased, and that the evil would certainly be very great.

Henry Sidgwick (1838 – 1900), letter to Roden Noel, June 28, 1881, in Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir, by Arthur Sidgwick and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, 1906, pg. 357.

Twenty times, in the course of my late Reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no Religion in it”!!! But in this exclamation I Should have been as fanatical as [my Parish Priest] Bryant or [my Latin School Master] Cleverly. Without Religion this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell.

John Adams (1735 – 1826), letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 19, 1817

Whether there is or is not a God is unknown.
Whether God does or does not exist is not a demonstrable fact.
God might exist; God might not exist; no one can prove either case.
The conflict between theists and atheists is based on a belief that is an illusion – the illusion that anyone on either side of that conflict has established whether God does or does not exist, when in fact no one can and no one ever has.

M. J. M. (1913)

WHAT SOME HAVE SAID:
Regarding religions, ethics and morals
that are based on theism and deism.

ETHICAL REALISM:
An essay which establishes that
a demonstrable, non-theistic basis of ethics and morals exists
as a matter of fact in the physical world.