Elbert Hubbard
From Philosopedia
Hubbard, Elbert (1856—1915)
A popular American author and publisher, Hubbard edited Philistine, a magazine which encouraged rugged individualism. Hubbard penned many barbs about organized religion, including the following:
- The clergy take theirs now - you get yours after you are dead.
- Who are those who will eventually be damned? Oh, the others, the others, the others.
- Heaven: The Coney Island of the Christian imagination.
- God: The John Doe of philosophy and religion.
- Miracle: An event described by those to whom it was told by men who did not see it.
- Christianity supplies a Hell for the people who disagree with you, and a Heaven for your friends.
- A good man in an exclusive Heaven would be in Hell.
- Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.
- A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious, but who understands the nonexistent.
- Theology is Classified Superstition.
- Theology is voodooism; in matters of importance it is in the class with alchemy, astrology, palmistry, augury, and allopath medicine.
- To talk about a Superior Being is a dip in superstition, and is just as bad as to let in an Inerior Being or a Devil.
- When you once attribute effects to the will of a personal God, you have let in a lot of little gods and evils--then sprites, fairies, dryads, naiads, witches, ghosts and goblins, for your imagination is reeling, riotous, drunk, afloat on the flotsam of superstition. What you know then doesn't count. You just believe, and the more you believe the more do you plume yourself that fear and faith are superior to science and seeing.
Hubbard wrote The Philosophy of Elbert Hubbard (1916). He and his wife were drowned on the Lusitania, which was sunk in 1915 by a German submarine in the Irish Sea.
