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June 18, 2005
The Folly of Another Person's Religion
If you do nothing else today, go to Pharyngula and read PZ Myers' brilliant analogy "Planet of the Hats." Among the many things that makes PZ's piece so great it that everyone would find a planet where inhabitants are "obsessed with hats" to the extent that they treat them in every respect the same way we treat our various religious beliefs, an absurd place to live.
I was reminded of a note by Mark Twain that appears from time to time at the top, right column on the front page of Abnormal Interests but was originally written on in a memorandum on a fly-leaf of Moncure D. Conway’s Sacred Anthology under a heading RELIGION.
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
Albert Bigelow Paine, in Mark Twain: a Biography , tells us about it.
In this section, Paine is trying to save Twain from complete skepticism about religion by painting his beliefs as being above creeds but the evidence fails him. The continuation of the above quote that Paine attributes to Twain reads,
I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion maybe. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life hence it is a valuable possession to him.
Twains beliefs were not above creeds. They were instead of creeds. And the same is true for most thoughtful people.
Posted by DuaneSmith at June 18, 2005 02:24 PM | Read more on Mark Twain |
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