¶ Religion (1)
Index Entry
Religion:
"…Another young lady came to me and said was I going to talk some more about these religious ideas. I really had talked a whole lot about it to you but… I had never really used the word religion. I knew what she was talking about because she spoke about some kind of faith, some confidence in an integrity and a meaning in our experience of life… The word really is ‘religio.’ They had come out of a set of rules of dogma, interpretations at second-, third, and fourth-handings, sometimes very remote, a thousandfold secondariness of experiences of others and thought which have occurred spontaneously to original explorers.
“I myself am quite confident that the more we know about who specifically inspired religions-- Christ, Mohamed, Buddha, and Confucius-- these may be generalized characters, but there was one or several men who at various times in history tended to have the kinds of experiences that are accounted for word by word, mouth by mouth, word of mouth. These experiences are experiences of individuals who have extreme confidence in the integrity of the invention man and the invention Universe, who in every instance find this integrity to have great power, to be a priori to human intellect.”
