The Brain and the Bible; Or, the Conflict Between Mental Science and Theology (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XI. OUR SUBSTITUTE FOR CHRISTIANITY. IT is. customary for Christians to point with pride to the beautiful moral precepts of the Bible, and then to turn indignantly upon Infidels with the question, "What can you give us in the place of this book?" In reply, I would ask, when have we ever proposed to destroy it? Have we ever declared that the Bible should be burned, or that the human mind should be thrown into chaos as to the duties and responsibilities of life? On the contrary, we accept all pretended Revelations for all they are worth, as monuments of the world's early thought, and especially do we wish to preserve and cherish all the good they contain. But theologians have no right to define the Bible or Christianity as the origin and source of all the principles of virtue, and then to charge us with the desire to sweep it all away. The moral beauties of the Christian religion were not born of any creed, and belong to no one nation. They were all taught by people who lived before the Christian era, and were largely interwoven with nearly all of the ancient superstitions. On a priori grounds alone we should be justified in regarding this as highly probable, for we have overwhelming phrenological evidence to-day that the impulses to morality were developed by the experiences of the primitive races, and hence that they must have been registered in the brain thousands of years before even the earliest agglutination of Judaism. The skulls of antiquity which have been exhumed afford proofs of this, which, like the records of the rocks, can no longer admit of the slightest doubt. For example, many of the old Egyptian, Greek, and Roman crania, indicate a very high order of moral development, and if those nations had had the benefits of modern science, th...