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回復 #6 研究 的帖子
Sited from
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/edison.htm
One area in which Edison was decidedly not a conservative was that of religion. He was a freethinker from the time he first read Paine's Age of Reason as a boy. Josephson makes the interesting observation that "nonconformity was more widely respected in America, and religious freedom more honored, fifty years ago than now." Josephson's biography was published in 1959. His observation, sadly, is as true thirty years later.
Even so, Edison stirred up a storm when, in a 1910 interview with journalist Edward Marshall, Edison rejected the idea of the supernatural, along with such ideas as the soul, immortality, and a personal God. "Nature," he said, "is not merciful and loving, but wholly merciless, indifferent." Edison was denounced by many. A prominent psychologist exploded that "people who do not believe in immortality are abnormal, if not pathological." There were, of course, religious liberals who did not feel threatened by Edison's bluntness, but their opinions did not make good press copy. Edison believed that religion should place emphasis on morals rather than theology, that churches should "become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables ... which keep them from the proper emphasis on that one great Truth, the Golden Rule." Wyn Wachhorst, a biographer, points out, "Edison rejected three fundamental tenets of Christianity: the divinity of Christ, a personal God, and immortality;" and Josephson remarks:
For a while the controversy threatened to be as heated as those provoked during the Victorian era in England by the skeptical writings of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, which were the favorite reading of Edison's youth.
Edison was a great admirer of Robert Green Ingersoll and offered the extravagant tribute of suggesting that Ingersoll had all the attributes of a perfect man. He also admired other contemporary freethinkers, such as Luther Burbank, and his good friend John Burroughs, the naturalist.
Edison did apparently believe in a "Supreme Intelligence," in which respect he was a typical 19th century deist. "I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt." Toward the end of his life, Edison toyed with a sort of quasi-Leibnizian conception of microscopic "life entities" (which Ford referred to as "enities"); this line of thought led nowhere, though it encouraged Ford and others to hope that the great inventor would discover scientific evidence for a belief in immortality. |
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