Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/96

CHAPTER IV SOUNDNESS OF A FOUNDATION FOR A BELIEF IN A DEITY It is better to bury a delusion and forget it than to insult its memory by retaining the name when the thing has perished. Author:F. H. Bradley

''A thousand miraculous happenings have been honoured by the testimony of the ancients, which in later times under a more exacting and sceptical scrutiny can no longer be believed. Inherent in man's nature is his disposition to be gulled. ... Emotion is encouraged to supplant cool reason, fanaticism to supplant tolerance. Not by such means can our race be saved. '' Author:Llewelyn Powys interplanetary visitor is firmly convinced that all religion, no matter what its antiquity or its modernity may be, is an invention of our groping earthly minds. It occurs to him that it would be interesting and proper 'to lay aside all theology, all creed, all the superficial trappings placed by man about his conceptions of a deity, and consider only the basic God-idea. The literature on the subject revealed to him that even on this broad and basic principle not all religionists were agreed. He found a threefold classification:

(1) Those who held to the belief in an anthropomorphic personal God who was benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent.

(2) Those who saw in the constitution of our universe an impersonal Supreme Power, who had created