Word: religion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Edison's heritage was that of Protestant Western Reserve. He professed no religion, avowed himself a Free Thinker. A sardonic writer once pictured Edison at the Gates of Heaven. Said the Scientist to St. Peter: "I gave the world . . . good light, cheap light. Is it my fault they used it to ... make a cheap bazaar out of every street? ... I gave them the phonograph, so that every man, woman and child might know the glory of great music. . . . Yet today I am afraid there is less music in the heart and mind of the common man. ... I gave them...
...little thin. Now he admits his recent books were "mainly pot-boilers"; but says of The Scientific Outlook: "For my part, though I says it as shouldn't, I think it is a very good book." Its purpose: "To show up all the scientists who talk about religion, all those who make superstition a substitute for science." Russell obviously enjoyed writing it; it makes good reading...
Russell thinks scientific faith, which tended to replace religion in the 18th and 19th Centuries and has now been undermined by "the new physics," is tottering into superstition. "The new philosophy of physics is humble and stammering, where the old philosophy was proud and dictatorial." To Popularizing Physicists Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (The Nature of the Physical World) and Sir James Hopwood Jeans (The Universe Around Us) Russell lays the blame in large part, in no uncertain terms. An almost angry skeptic on the subject of reasoning by deduction, Russell asserts: "Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms...
...Among the human values thus created science ranks with art and religion. In its selfless pursuit of truth, in its vision of order and beauty, it partakes of the quality of both. More and more it is beginning to make a profound esthetic and religious appeal to thinking people. In deed, it may fairly be said that science is perhaps the clearest revelation of God to our age. Science is at last coming into its own as one of the supreme goods of the human race...
...this side idolatry. Adams tells soberly of one Kentucky camp-meeting in 1801 attended by more than 25,000, preached at for a week by 17 preachers, graced at one moment by 3,000 prostrate swooners, 500 "jerkers" and "barkers."' "Two of the strongest influences in our life, religion and the frontier, made in our formative periods for a limited and intolerant spiritual life. . . . Because the frontiersmen had developed the right combination of qualities to conquer the wilderness, they began to believe quite naturally that they knew best, so to say, how to conquer the world, to solve...