Religion Means Thinking

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 242, 9 July 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

Religion Means Thinking

“The function of religion is not to lighten the intellectual or the moral burdens, but to enable us to carry them. The God In this theory is a Fascist He does not want us to think for ourselves, but only to ask Him for our orders, and give them blind obedience. I do not believe in such a God. I believe the God who gave us our faculties meant us to use them.

“It is not to mental bankrupts the God of Christianity reveals Himself. And the soft talk about abstaining from ‘criticism,’ which really means not merely from carping criticism which we always knew to be bad, and not merely from analytic discussion which we know cannot fully measure reality, but from sober thought and discriminating judgment without w’hich one cannot live in a wise life, is unworthy of our creation as rational beings. Whatever comes to us as from the Spirit of God must be submitted as best we can to moral tests.

“Otherwise we are simply subjects in a Fascist State in which moral development is arrested, and intellectual sincerity made impossible. I want a God who will help me to think, not a God who does my thinking for me. If we honestly think that acting upon an impulse will be for good, let us act upon it We shall thus be doing our best. We cannot be infallible for the simple reason that God made us fallible. In doing our best we may make mistakes, but an honest mind and a clean heart will carry us through all our mistakes Into a wiser and safer life. —Dr. Rhondda Williams, late of Union Church, Brighton, in his book “How I Found My Faith.”