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.
Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole.
For mine own part, it was Greek to me.
The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal.
Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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