any part,
because I rarely say anything upon these questions except in public,
unless I am directly addressed.

There is a general feeling that the church has ruled the world long
enough. People are beginning to see that no amount of eloquence,
or faith, or erudition, or authority, can make the records of
barbarism satisfactory to the heart and brain of this century.
They have also found that a falsehood in Hebrew in no more credible
than in plain English. People at last are beginning to be satisfied
that cruel laws were never good laws, no matter whether inspired
or uninspired. The Christian religion, like every other religion
depending upon inspired writings, is wrecked upon the facts of
nature. So long as inspired writers confined themselves to the
supernatural world; so long as they talked about angels and Gods
and heavens and hells; so long as they described only things that
man has never seen, and never will see, they were safe, not from
contradiction, but from demonstration. But these writings had to
have a foundation, even for their falsehoods, and that foundation
was in Nature. The foundation had to be something about which
somebody knew something, or supposed they knew something. They
told something about this world that agreed with the then general
opinion. Had these inspired writers told the truth about Nature--
had they said that the world revolved on its axis, and made a
circuit about the sun--they could have gained no credence for their
statements about other worlds. They were forced to agree with
their contemporaries about this world, and there is where they made
the fundamental mistake. Having grown in knowledge, the world has
discovered that these inspired men knew nothing about this earth;
that the inspired books are filled with mistakes--not only mistakes
that we can contradict, but mistakes that we can demonstrate to be
mistakes. Had they told the truth in their day, about this earth,
they would not have been believed about other worlds, because their
contemporaries would have used their own knowledge about this world
to test the knowledge of these inspired men. We pursue the same
course; and what we know about this world we use as the standard,
and by that standard we have found that the inspired men knew
nothing about Nature as it is. Finding that they were mistaken
about this world, we have no confidence in what they have said
about another. Every religion has had its philosophy a