A bit of Mencken insight

[YankeyMCC]

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
- H. L. Mencken

[onager]

1. And he was an Equal-Opportunity basher!

I am one of the few Goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other Goyim.

Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish. If, at its highest, it is genuinely worth reading, then at its lowest it is on all fours with the Koran, "Science and Health" and the Book of Mormon.

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One of the strangest delusions of the Western mind is to the effect that a philosophy of profound wisdom is on tap in the East. I have read a great many expositions of it, some by native sages and the rest by Western enthusiasts, but I have found nothing in it save nonsense.

It is, fundamentally, a moony transcendentalism...It bears no sort of relation to the known facts, and is full of assumptions and hypotheses that every intelligent man must laugh at. In its practical effects it seems to be as lacking in sense and as inimical to human dignity as Methodism, or even Mormonism...

The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age.

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You can see this next one at work in R/T just about any time:

Metaphysics is a refuge for men who have a strong desire to appear learned and profound but have nothing worth hearing to say. Their speculations have helped mankind hardly more than those of the astrologers. What we regard as good in metaphysics is really psychology: the rest is only blah.

Ordinarily, it does not even produce good phrases, but is dull and witless. The accumulated body of philosophical speculation is hopelessly self-contradictory. It is not a system at all, but simply a quarreling congeries of systems.

The thing that makes philosophers respected is not actually their profundity, but simply their obscurity. They translate vague and dubious ideas into high-sounding words, and their dupes assume, as they assume themselves, that the resulting obfuscation is a contribution to knowledge...

Metaphysics is the child of theology, and shows all the family stigmata. Both are based upon the theory that there is some mysterious magic in the unintelligible. Believing in it is thus an act of faith, lying precisely within the definition of faith by Paul in Hebrews 11:1. This idea that there is something creditable about embracing nonsense is at the bottom of the vulgar idea that religion is a necessary part of the outfit of a decent man. It appears also on putatively higher levels, and is the hallmark of the whole race of so-called philosophers.

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This one, too:

The religious man, starting out with an outfit of irrational postulates and untenable hopes, tries to fit them into the facts of a harshly material world. In the process he must do violence to both. They can never march together; indeed they are intrinsically irreconcilable. A common way out of the dilemma is the resort to mysticism, which is simply an attempt to construct a non-Euclidean world in which anything that can be imagined is assumed to have happened.

[YankeyMCC]

2. Best line from that bunch I think is:

"This idea that there is something creditable about embracing nonsense is at the bottom of the vulgar idea that religion is a necessary part of the outfit of a decent man."

That is what is at the root of all the frustrating encounters I have with people over the idea of religion and the supernatural...so many just can't comprehend of a moral code not based in some sort of mystism, that it has to be based on something other than our selves. I don't mean relativism but coming up with our own meaning and moral codes without appeals to an invisible boss.

[varkam]

3. Loves me some Mencken.

He's in my sig-line, after all :D