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God Is God Because He Remembers
I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction. I remember, I remember because I was there with my father. I was still living with him there. We worked together. We returned to the […]
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An Ideal of Service to Our Fellow Man
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious—the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty. I cannot imagine a god who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, or who has a will of the kind we […]
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A Proper Education
I am by training a teacher of philosophy, by accident a college president, and by nature concerned with questions which have no final answers. My life thus far has been cast in surroundings which are physically agreeable and pleasant, but intellectually and spiritually disturbing. The net result of this life is not yet known, but […]
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Perfecting the Conscience of Man
As a lawyer, I have an eye trained to facts and a mind taught to draw inferences only when based on some tangible evidence. Therefore, to say what I believe in the realm of intangibles, such as God, faith, or the hereafter, would imply a great deal of arrogance on my part. I haven’t lived […]
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Have I Learned Anything Important Since I Was 16?
Over 50 years ago, at the age of 16, I wrote an essay published in the original This I Believe series. Since then I’ve advanced through much of the life cycle, including college, marriage to the same man for over 40 years, two daughters plus a scientific career, two lively grandsons and death of parents […]
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A Doubting, Questioning Mind
This essay aired as a This I Believe segment circa 1954. Elizabeth Earle was sixteen years old at the time. At the age of sixteen, many of my friends have already chosen a religion to follow (usually that of their parents), and are bound to it by many ties. I am still “freelancing” in religion, […]
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How Is It Possible to Believe in God?
I’ve always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said grandly to the elderly scholar, “How is it possible to believe in God?” The imperishable answer was, “I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure […]
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Politics and the English Language
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. […]
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No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years […]