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.
The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
Our misery comes, not from work, but by our getting attached to something. Take for instance, money: money is a great thing to have, earn it, says Krishna; struggle hard to get money, but don't get attached to it. So with children, with wife, husband, relatives, fame, everything; you have no need to shun them, only don't get attached. There is only one attachment and that belongs to the Lord, and to none other.
What would life be like if everybody insisted you must have actually built such-and-such a thing by yourself? I'd be an old man and have nothing to show for the aging.
If God did not exist, He would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.
A light here required a shadow there.
Nothing in our lives is a mere insignificant detail to God.
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