A Students Philosophy Of Religion PDF Download

Excerpt from A Student's Philosophy of Religion The purpose of this book is to furnish college undergraduates and general readers with the necessary data - facts and arguments - on which they will be able to work out their own philosophy of religion. The book is an outgrowth of lecture courses given at Cornell University from 1913 to 1916. While the majority of the students electing these courses represented the various Protestant denominations, there were a number of Roman Catholics and Jews in each class, and a fair sprinkling of men and women who at any rate believed themselves to be atheists and agnostics. The constituency of the classes led us to be objective and impersonal, to respect one another's opinions and sentiments, and to realize that there are several sides to most religious and philosophical questions. We concentrated our attention upon the philosophical and psychological study of features common to all the three religious confessions represented; by so doing, we believed that we were concerning ourselves with those features of religion that probably are most significant. My endeavor never was to influence any one to change his religious affliliations. Whenever a student consulted me privately I advised him to continue in the religious faith and associations in which he had been brought up, - unless he had formed deep and rationally grounded convictions that rendered this impossible, which was very rarely the case. Students frequently urged me to publish the lectures, and I promised to do so. The interruptions of the war, and the necessary concentration of time upon my courses in another institution, in which I do not teach the philosophy and psychology of religion, have prevented an earlier fulfilment of this promise. My experience has been, that when an undergraduate elects a course in the philosophy department bearing on religion it is usually for one or more of the following reasons. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.