H. L. Mencken Quotes About Theology

• The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

  H. L. Mencken

  Essence, Ideas, Religion

• The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Thinking, Spirit

• There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or He didn't. If he did, then Christianity becomes plausible; if He did not, then it is sheer nonsense. I defy any genuine scientists to say that he believes in the Resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian system.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Jesus, Believe

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.120, Knopf

• Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

  H. L. Mencken

  Knowing, Effort, Literature

• The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

  H. L. Mencken

  Religious, Horse, Ignorance

• The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event.

  H. L. Mencken

  Science, Essence, Ideas

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.249, Knopf

• As long as the Southern colleges have revivals on their campuses and students get converted to Methodism and join the YMCA and are accepted as gentlemen, it will be impossible to think of the South as civilized...The educated folk of the Old South took theology lightly, and religion to them was hardly more than a charming ritual, useful on solemn occassions.

  H. L. Mencken

  College, Thinking, Ymca

• The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes - that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects - this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once - and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Ignorance, Origin Of Life

• It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning , witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Race, Years

  H. L. Mencken (2003). “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.57, See Sharp Press

• By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.

  H. L. Mencken

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Science

• [Science] must be amoral by its very nature: The minute it begins separating facts into the two categories of good ones and bad ones it ceases to be science and becomes a mere nuisance, like theology.

  H. L. Mencken

  Two, Nuisance, Facts

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