Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
Interpretation
The quote critiques religion as a way to ignore clear truths in life.
H. L. Mencken suggests that religion often serves as a hubristic attempt by individuals to reject or overlook evident truths and realities that should be acknowledged. This perspective challenges the validity of religious beliefs by framing them as self-important mechanisms that distract from fundamental understandings of existence and human experience.
In practice
In a discussion about belief systems and their impact on society.
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.
It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
When people get rich, they cut themselves off from the context that has earned them these riches - the context of the common men. They forget they are part of society.
Fortune, not wisdom, rules lives.
Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine
Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.
How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?
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