Excerpt #78 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
In his book, Consilience, E.O. Wilson, raised Southern Baptist, wrote that during his college years he began to doubt his religion.
He “found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago.”
Moreover, he notes, “Baptist theology made no provision for evolution. The Biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all? Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? …I drifted away from the church, not definitively agnostic or atheist, just Baptist no more.” (Professor E.O. Wilson of Harvard is the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books).
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. – Eric Hoffer (1902 – 1983)
“The Atheist does not say ‘there is not god’, but he says ‘I do not know what you mean by god; I am without the idea of god; the word god is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny god, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception and the conception of which by its affirmer is so imperfect that he is unable to define it to me.” – Charles Bradlaugh, National Review, November 25, 1883
Franklin Graham, the Christian evangelist and son of Billy Graham, at a Pentagon Good Friday service said, “There’s no other way to God except through Christ . . . Jesus Christ is alive because he is risen, and friends, he’s coming back, and I believe he’s coming back soon.”
One wonders how Mr. Graham knows such things.
Predictions that Jesus is “coming back” have been common for thousands of years.
One wonders if Mr. Graham is aware of this history of prediction.
MEASURE THE MESSENGERS.