For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
Interpretation
Mencken critiques how theologians oversimplify complex mysteries by trivializing them.
In this quote, H. L. Mencken highlights the tendency of theologians to reduce profound and unknowable spiritual concepts to easily dismissible ideas. He suggests that instead of embracing the complexity and mystery of the unknowable, they have chosen to frame these mysteries in a way that renders them unworthy of serious consideration. This reflects a broader commentary on human attempts to understand or explain the divine or the mysterious aspects of existence, often through reductionist perspectives.
In practice
In a debate about the essence of faith, one might use this quote to illustrate the limitations of conventional theological explanations.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.
Fundamentally, mankind was unimportant in the ecological system. Then, in one fell swoop, an evolutionary blink of an eye, the human race is transformed from something unimportant to the most important thing in the world.
you mean machines are like humans?" I shook my head. "No, not like humans. With machines the feeling is, well, more finite. It doesn't go any further. With humans it's different. The feeling is always changing. Like if you love somebody, the love is always shifting or wavering. It's always questioning or inflating or disappearing or denying or hurting. And the thing is, you can't do anything about it, you can't control it. With my Subaru, it's not so complicated.
The apparent multiplication of gods is bewildering at the first glance, but you soon discover that they are the same GOD. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible gods. In fact Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the most profound Methodist, and crudest idolater, are equally at home with it.
God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye've been left to fight alone.
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