Christianism: A Supernaturalistic Other-Worldly Gospel for the Passing Age of Class Inequality and Economic Slavery
Come Over and Help Us — Abandon Reformatory for Revolutionary Socialism
My Dear Brother:
Your letter (April 1st, 1920) enclosing an essay, entitled, Is There a God, came duly to hand and I thank you warmly for it. The essay is a masterpiece and I hope you can let me keep this copy, or make another for myself, for reference when I am writing or conversing on its lines, as is frequently the case.
I
In the dispute between yourself and friend of which you speak, you are altogether right and he is entirely wrong. In the last analysis it is a disputation as to whether or not the Jewish-Christian bible contains an infallible revelation from an omniscient being, a triune god, Father, Son and Spirit. It does not.
As an objectivity there is no such divinity. He is a subjectivity existing in the imagination of orthodox Christians. You do not agree with me in this, but every day of thought and study deepens the conviction that it is true. None among the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion are objectivities. The lesser ones are generally ghosts of dead men, and the greater ones are as generally versions of the sun-myth.
The one god of the Jews and the triune god of the Christians, if taken seriously, are superstitions; and the bible revelations of their willings and records of their doings, if taken literally, are lies.
Both the Old and New Testaments are utterly worthless as history. The twelve patriarchs of the Jewish God, Jehovah, are not historical personages, but myths, and this is true of the twelve apostles of the Christian God, Jesus.
Yes, the Old Testament is the Jewish version of the immemorial and universal sun-myth, rewritten several times for the purpose, not of telling any truth, but of imposing the fiction that Jehovah and his people constitute the greatest procession that ever came down the pike of supernaturalism. The New Testament is the Christian version of the same myth, only with the view of showing that Jehovah and the Jews were not, but Jesus and Christians are, this procession.
In itself, the sun-myth, as symbolism, is not only poetically beautiful, but also scientifically true; yet, as literalism, it is in the case of the ignorant, superstition, and in the case of the educated, self-deception.
The sun is, in a very literal and real sense, the creator-god in whom this world lives, moves and has its being; and he is the saviour-god who was born of a virgin nebula, and every winter descends into hell and rises from the dead (the southern solstice) by a new birth and ascends into heaven to be seated at the right hand of the father (the sky) at the northern solstice, and finally he is the illuminator god who lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
And the apostles who preached the gospel of the redemption of the world are the twelve signs of the zodiac through which the sun apparently passes in its annual ascension to the summer solstice and descension to the winter solstice.
Nor is this all: “the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world” is the sign of the zodiac, Aries (sheep, ram) through which the sun passes towards the end of March, when all the saviour-gods annually died and rose again. The rising symbolizes the return of the sun towards the northern solstice from the southern one, upon which return seed-time and harvest are dependent, without which the world would perish, not indeed by sin but by starvation.
Jehovah is the sun-myth rewritten to fit in with the ideals and hopes of the owning, master class of the Jews.
Jesus is the sun-myth rewritten to fit in with the ideals and hopes of the owning master class of the Christians.
The Christian god, Jesus, is an improvement upon the Jewish god, Jehovah, because of the division of labor. The task of the owning master class is a twofold one, the robbing of the weak owners by the strong ones in wars, and the robbing of the slaves by the masters which under the capitalist system is done in surplus profits.
Jehovah serves Christians as the god of war. In his name they wage wars, either as groups within a nation having different commercial interests, as in the case of the Civil War of the United States, or as nations against nations with different commercial interests, as in the case of the Revolutionary war of the Colonies with England, or the World War of the Allied countries with the Central ones.
Jesus serves Christians as the god of slavery. When they have successfully waged a war of conquest, as the Pilgrim Fathers did against the Indians of America, or when they have appropriated all the means and machines of production, as the capitalists have everywhere, they reconcile the propertyless to a terrestrial hell of toil, want, sorrow and slavery by preaching the Jesuine gospel of hope for a celestial heaven of eternal rest, joy, plenty and freedom.
“Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum.”
In remaking the Jewish god to suit their purposes of robbing and enslaving, the Christian owning master class provided for a further division of his work by creating the Holy Ghost, who devotes himself to the giving of new revelations of the will of Jehovah and interpreting the earlier ones as they are recorded in the bible.
It is generally supposed that the masters are the strong people of the world, but they are not. Labor is really the giant, the Samson, and it would be impossible for the pigmy, capital, to rob him, but for his lack of knowledge. The Holy Ghost sees to it that the slave class is kept in ignorance.
The English-German, or if you prefer, the German-English war has been an eye-opener to the giant, labor, and capital is ruined unless he can get him to sleep again.
Capital knows that Marx was right in characterizing the orthodox interpretations of religion, including the Christian one, and especially it, as a sleeping potion.
The churches were the dormitories in which the slaves slept through the night of the dark ages of traditionalism, but the light of the age of scientism is breaking upon the world and most of the slaves have left the churches and are now beyond the reach of their care-takers, the preachers.
When I wrote the Level Plan for Church Union, I believed that the coming together of the churches would prove to be a blessing to the world, but I am now persuaded that it would be a curse, because the league of churches would co-operate with the league of nations in its robbing and enslaving schemes, the churches doing the lying and the nations the coercing.
We are living in the age of scientism and, in the case of its true sons and daughters, only scientifically demonstrated facts count in any argumentation.
From the scientific point of view it is seen that there is but one universal Kingdom of Life, Nature. This kingdom may be divided into three, perhaps four, states constituting the United States of Life: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human.
Beginning with the highest, each of these states, except the lowest, is dependent upon the next lower. The only independent autonomous state in the kingdom is the mineral. This is the greatest both as to its extent and importance. It is the common source of every supply of all the states of life, and the seat of each of their governments.
All theologians and some metaphysicians postulate a fifth state of life, the divine, placing it above the rest as their source.
Comte, who preceded Marx as a social philosopher, and who is the founder of modern socialism of the reformatory type, as Marx is of the revolutionary one, had this to say about the theologians, metaphysicians and scientists, and he was right:
From the study of the development of human intelligence, in all directions, and through all times, the discovery arises of a great fundamental law, to which it is necessarily subject, and which has a solid foundation of proof, both in the facts of our organization and in our historical experience. This law is this: that each of our leading conceptions—each branch of our knowledge—passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the theological, or fictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; and the scientific, or positive. In other words, the human mind, by its nature, employs in its progress three methods of philosophizing, the character of which is essentially different and radically opposed: viz., the theological method, the metaphysical and the positive. Hence arise three philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, each of which excludes the others. The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; the third is its fixed and definite state. The second is merely a state of transition.
In order for a man who has reached the scientific stage in his intellectual development to make anything out of the reasonings of those who are still in the stage of theological childhood or in that of metaphysical adolescence, it is necessary for him to use their insubstantialities as symbols of his substantialities.
The only difference that I can see between a theologian and a metaphysician is that, whereas the former personifies a generality which is the creation of his imagination, calling it a god, the latter objectifies a particularity which is the creation of his imagination calling it an entity; but all such personifications and objectifications (gods, things-in-themselves, vital entities, souls) are alike fictitious, because the childish theologians and metaphysicians proceed on the basis of philosophically assumed realities, not on scientifically established facts which pave the way on which an adult proceeds.
Comte analyzes the difference between the intellectuality of theological children, metaphysical youths and scientific adults as follows:
In the theological state, the human mind, seeking the essential nature of beings, the first and final causes (the origin and purpose) of all effects—in short, absolute knowledge—supposes all phenomena to be produced by the immediate action of supernatural beings.
In the metaphysical state, which is only a modification of the first, the mind supposes, instead of supernatural beings, abstract forces, veritable entities (that is, personified abstractions) inherent in all beings, and capable of producing all phenomena. What is called the explanation of phenomena is, in this stage, a mere reference of each to its proper entity.
In the final, the positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws—that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge. What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts the number of which continually diminishes with the progress of science.
There is no science which, having attained the positive stage, does not bear the marks of having passed through the others. Some time since it was (whatever it might be now) composed, as we can now perceive, of metaphysical abstractions: and, further back in the course of time, it took its form from theological conceptions. Our most advanced sciences still bear very evident marks of the two earlier periods through which they passed.
The progress of the individual mind is not only an illustration, but an indirect evidence of that of the general mind. The point of departure of the individual and the race being the same, the phases of the mind of men correspond to the epochs of the mind of the race. How each of us is aware, if he looks back upon his own history, that he was a theologian in his childhood, a metaphysician in his youth and a natural philosopher in his manhood. All men who are up to their age can verify this for themselves.
According to the scientific classification, there are only three kingdoms or states of life, the mineral, the vegetable and the animal.
The life of the vegetable kingdom has arisen out of the life of the mineral kingdom and is sustained by it.
The distinguished scientist, Professor Lowell, says, “there is now no more reason to doubt that plants grew out of chemical affinity than to doubt that stones did,” and nearly all outstanding zoologists would say as much of animals.
Sir J. Burdon Sanderson, one of the most eminent among biologists, insists that “in physiology the word life is understood to mean the chemical and physical activities of the parts of which the organism consists.” The renowned Sir Ray Lankester strenuously holds that “zoology is the science which seeks to arrange and discuss the phenomena of animal life and form, as the outcome of the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry,” and goes so far as to say that he knows of no leading biologist who is of a different opinion. The prince of biologists, the late Professor Haeckel, occupied this position and impregnably fortified it in several great books, especially in his “Riddle of the Universe.”
There is no force that is not life, nor life which is not force; and there is no life or force, about which we know anything, without a body or chemical laboratory.
So far as is known, there is only one life—force. The difference between lives is a question of the organism, the laboratory, which gives embodiment to force.
The life that enables the wheels of a locomotive to go, the sap of a tree to flow, the heart of an animal to beat and the brain of a man to think is the same chemical potentiality differently organized.
During all historical time and over all the earth, under one name or another, the whole world has kept days of rejoicing for life, especially Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year and Easter.
Nothing is so wonderful as life and perhaps the greatest of its wonders is that all of it is of the same kind.
Everything and every being is alive with the same life. The Thanksgiving day sheaf of wheat, the Christmas day Son of Man and the Easter day Son of God (if there are conscious, personal gods and they have sons) are alive and their life is the same, the difference being wholly in the form and degree, not at all in kind.
A proof of the oneness and sameness of all life, notwithstanding its widely different forms and degrees, is the fact that a bar of iron, a stick of wood, a piece of flesh and a section of brain respond alike to the same electrical stimulus, and all may be poisoned or otherwise killed so that they will make no response to it. Perhaps even a more conclusive evidence is that the eggs (every form of both vegetable and animal life develops from an egg) of some animals rather high in the one tree of mundane life, which has a common root and a stump, but two stems, the vegetable and the animal, can be mechanically fertilized by chemical processes.
Even Sir Oliver Lodge, the most conspicuous among the comparatively few men of science who hold to the theory that life comes to the earth as vital entities of celestial origin and destination, makes this fatal admission: “There is plenty of physics and chemistry and mechanics about every vital action.” On the theory of traditional Christianity there was no physics, chemistry or mechanics connected with the vital actions which originally brought the universe and all that therein was, including the earth with its vegetable, animal and human kingdoms, into existence.
Every representative of each form of life in these kingdoms (in the vegetable: a grass blade, a wheat stalk, an oak tree; or in the animal: an insect, a horse, a man) is a chemical laboratory for the production, sustentation, advancement and procreation of a particular type of one universal life. These laboratories have all the potentialities of their respective lives within themselves,—no laboratory, no chemistry; no chemistry, no life.
What life is, both as to its manifestation and character, is determined by the form of organization through which force, all there is of life, becomes a particular and differentiated vital phenomenon. This is as true of states and churches as it is of trees and men, for a church or a state is a vital phenomenon as really so as a tree or a man.
The trouble with every reformatory socialism of modern times is that it undertakes the impossibility of changing the fruit of the capitalistic state into that of the communistic one, without changing the political organism; but to do that is as impossible as to gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. Hence an uprooting and replanting are necessary (a revolution not a reformation) which will give the world a new tree of state.
Capitalism no longer grows the fruits (foods, clothes and houses) which are necessary to the sustenance of the world. Hence it encumbers the ground and must be dug up by the roots in order that a tree which is so organized that it will bear these necessities may be planted in its place.
The people of Russia have accomplished this uprooting and replanting (this revolution) in the case of their state, and those of every nation are destined to do the same in one way or another, each according to its historical and economic development, some perhaps with violence, most, I hope, peaceably. The Russian Bolsheviki occupy the highest peak in man’s history; and while they stand, the world will be safe for industrial democracy. This democracy is the tree of life whose fruits are for the sustenance of the nations and whose very leaves are for their healing.
The only lives of which we need know aught are those that we shall live in our bodies by chemical processes and in the race by conscious or unconscious influences; for, if there is another, it will take care of itself, if we take care of these.
Since, therefore, all life is on a level and since morality, religion and Christianity are but manifestations of it, do you not see how profoundly and incontrovertibly true is my levelism?
According to this levelism all interpretations of Christianity (protestant and catholic—congregational, presbyterian, episcopalian and papal) and all the interpretations of religion (Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan, Buddhistic and the rest) are essentially on the same footing, the difference between them being wholly a question of natural excellencies, not at all of supernatural uniqueness.
The science of biology establishes my levelism by proving that animal and human life are on a level as to their origin, character and destiny.
The science of sociology establishes my levelism by proving that animal and human institutions are on a level, and that therefore, there is nothing more supernatural about a human state or church than about an ant hill or a bee hive.
The science of literary criticism establishes my levelism by proving that the bibles of the several interpretations of religion are on a level as to their entirely human origin and authority.
The science of the comparative interpretations of religion establishes my levelism by proving that all the conscious, personal creator-gods, destroyer-gods, saviour-gods and illuminator-gods, with all their angels, heavens and hells, are so many myths—creations of the human imagination, subjective fictions, not objective realities.
Until comparatively recent times, through all the theological history of mankind, the sun was almost universally regarded as a god. Manifestly without it there could be no life on earth, and its annually recurring motions are such as to give the impression of birth and death—of birth by ascension into the heaven of the summer solstice—of death by descension into the hell or grave of the winter solstice. Not only is the sun the giver and sustainer of life, but it is also the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
Modern science justifies this ancient conception as to the dependence of the earth, and all that thereon is, upon the sun for its being. By a slight adaptation men of science and scientific philosophers could use the very words of the apostle John at the opening of his version of the Christian gospel, where he says of Jesus, what they say of the sun:
All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him is life; and the life is the light of men.
The birth, death, descension, resurrection and ascension of all the Saviour-gods, not excepting Jesus, are versions of the sun-myth.
Yet the naturalness, the universalness, the beautifulness and withal the profound truthfulness of this myth are such as to render it almost as undesirable as it is next to impossible to relegate it to the realm of superstition, to which it should undoubtedly be assigned if a literal interpretation is a necessity.
The more science advances, the more of precious poetry and pathos, and of deep verity, too, is seen in the Saviour-gods, who are essentially the same mythical personifications of the glorious sun and of the happy events of its annual career, because from it the earth with its brother and sister planets had their origin, and because from it the earth, not to speak of the other planets, has the heat, light and force which make its life a possibility.
There is no reason for believing that any one among the gods of the four old supernaturalistic interpretations of religion (Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Buddha) or that either of the gods of the two new interpretations by the renowned physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the distinguished sociologist, Mr. H. G. Wells, has had more to do in creating, sustaining and governing this world than another, that is to say, there is no ground for believing that the personal, conscious gods in the skies either individually or collectively have had anything at all to do with it.
Science, as it is understood by the great majority of its exponents, teaches that the earth (with all things, physical and psychical, which contribute to make its world what it has been, is, and is to be) was originally in the sun, and would quickly disappear into its original, unorganized elements but for the sun.
This is as true of man as of all else. He with his brain and its thought, with his hand and its skill; with his homes, farms, cities, mines, shops, stores, trains, ships, schools, hospitals and churches; with his hate, bestiality and barbarism, and with his love, humaneness and civilization, was in the sun, billions of years before his appearance on the earth.
Speaking of things appertaining to the world war: there in the sun, before it had thrown off the earth, were the kaiser on the throne, the president in the white house, the millions of soldiers, the uniforms, the rations, the forts, the cannons, guns, powder and shot, the trenches, the barbed wire, the dreadnoughts, the submarines, the aeroplanes, the wireless telegraph stations, the wounded, their sufferings and groans, the doctors and nurses, the corpses, the cripples, the broken hearts; yes, and all the things connected with that terrible war; the bereaved mothers, the widowed wives, the outraged girls, the ruined country, the wrecked cities, were in the sun from its beginning, indeed while it was yet a nebula, many thousands of millions of years previous to the birth of the earth.
If we except intruders into our solar system, such as comets and their comparatively inconsiderable effects, we may say that every physical or psychical reality which at any time has entered into the history of this planet and that of its brothers and sisters was in that vast flowing, swirling, revolving globe of gases which is known to have been at one time at least five billion miles in diameter, or fifteen billions in circumference.
Of course no phenomenon, such as Jesus hanging on the cross, if He lived and was crucified, was in the sun as an actuality, but only as a potentiality. Nevertheless He, with His doctrine and His suffering, was there, else He would never have been anywhere, not in the realm of history, not even in the realm of imagination.
The universe is ever all that it can be, and every potentiality which contributes to make it so is within itself. What is true in this respect of the universe as a whole is equally so of every part of it, including man, and especially him, because he is exceptionally capable of controlling his own destiny, being able not only to preserve life by a discovery of and conformity to the laws upon which it is dependent, but also to enlarge and enrich its content by making these laws co-operative servants.
The time cannot be far off when it will be seen by all educated, thoughtful men and women that if the traditional, supernaturalistic interpretation of Christianity is the only possible one, its message is not a gospel, because its teaching touching three fundamentals is, in each case, contrary to that of three relevant sciences:
1. The sciences of astronomy, geology and biology teach that the representation of traditional supernaturalistic interpretation of Christianity to the effect that the universe, including the earth with its physical and psychical life, was supernaturally created out of nothing by a conscious, personal god is not true and therefore can be no part of any gospel; for, according to the teaching of these three sciences, the truth is: the universe with all that therein is, not excepting mankind and civilization, was naturally evolved out of a self-existing matter by a self-existing force co-operating in accordance with the necessity of their nature.
2. The sciences of biology, physiology and embryology teach that the representation of the traditional, supernaturalistic interpretation of Christianity to the effect that man and woman are unique beings, who have supernaturally derived their physical form, vital and psychical potentialities directly from a conscious, personal creator with whom are their natural affiliations, is not true, and therefore can be no part of any gospel; for, according to the teaching of these three sciences, the truth is: man and woman as to their whole beings (body and mind, life and soul) were naturally evolved from pre-existing animal life, not supernaturally created respectively out of the dust and a rib, so that they owe their existence to and natural affinities with a terrestrial and bestial parentage, not a celestial and divine one.
3. The sciences of anthropology, sociology and comparative interpretations of religion teach that the representation of the traditional, supernaturalistic interpretation of Christianity to the effect that man and woman were supernaturally created in the image and likeness of a conscious, personal god, sinless and deathless beings with ideal environments, but that they fell from this happy estate, through a serpentine incarnation of a supernatural devil, and are being restored to it, through a human incarnation of a supernatural saviour, is not true, and therefore can be no part of any gospel; for, according to the teaching of these three sciences, the truth is: during many ages man and woman, in both appearance and predilection, were much more animal than divine and that gradually, without any supernatural assistance, they have worked themselves out of a state of bestial barbarism into one of human civilization.
It follows therefore that the representations of both the Old and New Testaments, concerning the origin and history of man are largely fictitious impositions, not historical compositions, so much so, that no confidence can safely be reposed in any of them.
There is no rational doubt about the fictitious character of the divine Jesus. Some think that the human Jesus may have been an historical personage; but, none among outstanding scholars believes that we have a connected account of his life and work, and most of them insist that we do not certainly know any saying or doing of his.
No religious doctrine or institution of which we have an account in the New Testament is peculiar to Christianity and this is equally true of moral precepts.
The gods of all the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion are so many creations of the dominant or master class, and their revelations were put into their mouths by the makers for the purpose of keeping the slave class ignorant and contented.
Orthodox Christians earnestly contend that this naturalistic doctrine makes for immorality. Heretical socialists rationally answer that the life which men, women and children live with reference to their terrestrial influence, rather than to celestial rewards or punishments, is the only one which is lived to any moral purpose.
According to socialism, morality, religion and Christianity are but synonyms of one and the same reality, which consists wholly in the desire and effort of a man to learn the laws or doings of nature, and to conform his thoughts and words to them, in order to make his present life on earth, and that of others, as long and happy as possible, and not at all in a desire and effort to learn what the will of a conscious, personal god is and to conform to it, in order to avoid a hell and gain a heaven for a future life in the sky.
O threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain—This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.
If you object that this is a representation of a sceptical poet, I reply that it is in alignment with a representation of a scriptural preacher:
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts;
Even one thing befalleth them;
As the one dieth, so dieth the other;
Yea, they have all one breath;
So that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast;
For all is vanity.
All go unto one place;
All are of the dust,
And all turn to dust again.
Darwin showed that each man in his physical development from the embryonic cell to birth passes through, by short cuts, the different forms of life from say, the worm, fish and lemur with all that went before, intervened between and followed after, and Romanes showed that this is as true of the mind as of the body; that, in fact, all the representatives of the animal kingdom are physically and psychically related, and therefore on the same level as to their origin and destiny.
In his illuminating book entitled, “The Universal Kinship,” Professor Moore says:
The embryonic development of a human being is no different from the embryonic development of any other animal. Every human being at the beginning of his organic existence is a protozoan, about 1-125 inch in diameter; at another stage of development he is a tiny sac-shaped mass of cells without blood or nerves, the gastrula; at another stage he is a worm, with a pulsating tube instead of a heart, and without a head, neck, spinal column, or limbs; at another stage he has as a backbone, a rod of cartilage extending along the back, and a faint nerve cord, as in the amphioxus, the lowest of the vertebrates; at another stage he is a fish with a two-chambered heart, mesonephric kidneys, and gill-slits, with gill arteries leading to them, just as in fishes; at another stage he is a reptile with a three-chambered heart, and voiding his excreta through a cloaca like other reptiles; and finally, when he enters upon post-natal sins and actualities, he is a sprawling, squalling, unreasoning quadruped. The human larva from the fifth to the seventh month of development is covered with a thick growth of hair and has a true caudal (tail) appendage, like the monkey. At this stage the embryo has in all thirty-eight vertebrae, nine of which are caudal, and the great toe extends at right angles to the other toes, and is not longer than the other toes, but shorter, as in the ape.
Surely no argument is needed to convince you that Darwinism corroborates the representation of our ancient heretical poet and scriptural preacher concerning a life beyond the grave rather than the representations of modern orthodox theologians.
Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who
Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel, too.
—Omar.
II
In history slavery stands out as a huge mountain range traversing the whole of a continent. During long ages it was supposed that these phenomena of the human and physical worlds were due to the will of a god (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah or Buddha) but the vanguard of humanity has now reached a viewpoint from which it sees that both are alike due to a law, that a law is what nature does, not what a god has willed, and that a system of slavery and a range of mountains are due to the same law.
The matter-force law is everywhere the same, and it is as omnipotent and immutable in a social order as in a solar system.
“The very law that moulds a tear,
And bids it trickle from its source,
That law preserves the earth a sphere,
And guides the planets in their course.”
Most of the time, and especially just now, our world is very full of tears, almost as much so as space is full of spheres, but there would not be half so many tears at any time, if the laws of states were so many correct interpretations of the laws of nature.
In every age, nearly all the hot tears which deluge the world flow, like streams of springs, from their deep sources as the result of unnecessary suffering by grinding poverty, by hopeless slavery, by avoidable diseases and by premature deaths; and by far the most of these and of all sufferings may be traced to man-made laws which not only have no correspondence with those of nature but are contrary to them—laws of which both the civil codes and religious bibles are too full.
You will agree with me that society should punish none of its members by the slightest fine or shortest imprisonment, not to speak of death, except on the basis of justice. So far, and it is a long way, we certainly walk together. We part company, if at all, on the question as to the basis of justice, but come together again in the conclusion that it is right, not might.
What, then, is this right? If you answer: the law of the state as it is interpreted by a competent court, I reply: no legal enactment, and so, of course, no interpretation of one, can really constitute a right, unless it is an embodiment of a truth containing an indispensable stone in the foundation which is necessary to the superstructure of the ideal civilization, under the roof of which every man, woman and child shall possess the greatest of possible opportunities to make life for self as long and happy as it can be, and to help others in an ever widening circle to do this for themselves.
Laws are not made. All social laws (domestic, civil, commercial, yes, even the moral and religious ones) are matter-force realities, as much so as is any other among all the physical or psychical realities entering into the constitution of the universe; which realities are but the expressions of the processes necessarily resulting from the necessary co-existence and co-operation of this matter and force; therefore, laws are so many eternal necessities and, this being the case, it is not possible that men in states or churches should make them, no, not even gods in heavens.
Man would, then, have progressed much further with the superstructure of an ideal civilization, if only in his efforts to rightly regulate his life, he had happily searched out the laws of nature as they are revealed through its phenomena and interpreted by experience and reason, instead of looking for direction to the laws of the gods (Jehovah, Allah, Buddha or even Jesus) as they are revealed through prophets and interpreted by kings or presidents, by priests or preachers and by other “powers that be of God” in states and churches—institutions which exist in the interest of the capitalist class and against that of the labor class. The world owes by far the greater part of its most poignant sufferings to this fatal mistake of looking to gods in heavens and their representatives on earth for direction instead of to nature and reason.
Life in the physical realm is dependent upon living in harmony with the matter-force law. The representative of any form of life (mineral, vegetable, animal, human) which either through ignorance, accident or willfulness does not conform to it, is destroyed or at least injured.
Life in the moral part of the psychical realm consists in a disposition and effort to learn the matter-force law, and to fulfill in thought, word and deed the individual obligations to self and the social obligations to others imposed by it when it has been humanely interpreted by a man for himself.
Religion and Christianity are but wider extensions of one and the same great all-inclusive virtue, morality, without which human life would not be worth living, indeed not even a possibility, for without morality a man is a beast, not a human.
Morality is the greatest thing in the world. Yet, paradoxical as the representation may seem, there is one greater thing, freedom—the liberty to think, speak and act in accordance with one’s own convictions as to what is the law and as to what are its requirements. Without this liberty there could be no morality, and therefore, freedom is greater than the greatest thing in the world, morality.
But liberty, the greatest and most indispensable necessity to morality, religion and Christianity, indeed, to the existence of a human being, is manifestly impossible on the theory that a man must be guided by the will of a conscious, personal God in the sky as it is interpreted by the kings and priests, presidents and preachers on earth.
You will note that I am not contending for the liberty to live without reference to an external authority. If this were my contention you would rightly insist (as some among my friends do) that I am an atheist in religion and an anarchist in politics; but I am neither, for I recognize the fact that I must live with reference to the existence of an external authority, matter-force law, and there is no other, upon which anything good in religion or politics is dependent.
No one is an atheist in religion, an anarchist in politics or anything bad, who, in the physical realm of life, tries to live with reference to the law of nature, and who, in the moral realm of life, tries to live with reference to a truth which is that law humanely interpreted by himself in accordance with his own experience, observation, investigation and reason. In the nature of things, the interpretation cannot be by some one else, because one man cannot live the moral life on another’s ideals any more than he can live the physical life on another’s meals.
Since this is the case, it follows that the whole conception of a law which is willed by a god and revealed or formulated by his representatives (prophets, kings, priests, legislators) to which a man must have reference, if he would live the moral life, is, at best, a harmless fiction and at worst a hurtful superstition.
There is no one (man or god) with whom people can stand in the moral realm except themselves alone, and if they are not within this realm they are not men and women.
Manhood is dependent upon standing alone with matter-force nature and with human reason, and it is manhood which really counts everywhere in the social realm, for without manhood one is nothing anywhere in that realm.
Nature is my God. The gods of the several supernaturalistic interpretations of religion (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha) are so many symbols of this divinity. The words of this God are the facts of nature. My religion and politics, worship and patriotism consist in a desire and effort to discover these facts and to interpret and live them humanely.
My God, Nature, is a triune divinity—matter being the Father, force the Son, and law the Spirit.
Nature is the sum of the matter-force-law phenomena of which the universe is constituted. Man with his barbarism and civilization is but one among such phenomena, on a level with the rest, as to his beginning and ending, and as to the dependence of his life and its fullness upon conformity to the matter-force law, without necessary or, indeed, possible reference to any divine-human system of laws as set forth by a catholic or protestant church or by an imperialistic or democratic state.
Unless states and churches persuade, encourage and help man to more fully discover, more correctly interpret and more perfectly live the matter-force law they are worthless; and indeed worse, if in the long run and on the whole they hinder him; and undoubtedly they have done this in the case of the slave class—a class which, ever since the rise of private property in the means of producing the necessities of life, has comprehended the vast majority of the human race.
Whether then man is barbarous or civilized is really and truly, wholly and entirely a question of the knowledge of and conformity to the matter-force law, that is, of whether or not the articles of his religious creed and political code are so many ideal embodiments and practical interpretations of facts or realities as they are revealed by the doings of my god, Nature.
There is no other creed, belief in the articles of which, and there is no other code, obedience to the articles of which, will advance mankind, individually or collectively, so much as one step in the long, rugged and steep way towards the goal of a perfect civilization—a civilization which will secure to every man, woman and child the greatest of possible opportunities to make the most of life that is within the range of possibilities.
My god, Nature (the triune divinity, matter-force-motion) the doings of which god are so many words of the only gospel upon which the salvation of the world is to any degree dependent, is an impersonal, unconscious, non-moral being.
For me, this god, Nature, rises into personality, consciousness and morality in myself, and in no other does nature do this for me, though what is true of me is of course equally so of every representative of mankind.
Jesus (either as an historical or dramatic personage, and it does not matter which he was) said, “I and my Father (god) are one,” and in saying this he gave expression in one form to the most revolutionary and salutary of all truths. The other form of the same truth as taught by Darwin and Marx is: man has all the potentialities of his own life within himself. Every representative of the human race can and should say with Jesus, “I and my Father, God, are one.”
Stop man! where dost thou run?
Heav’n lies within thy heart,
If thou seek’st God elsewhere
Misled, in truth, thou art.
—Angelus Silensius.
This truth constitutes the most ennobling and inspiring part of man’s knowledge, and it was naturally discovered by him, not supernaturally revealed to him. It is the foundation of socialism and the justification of optimism.
The universe moves, with all that therein is. The vanguard of mankind is moving to a viewpoint from which rapidly increasing numbers will see that a revolution which is necessary on the part of a slave to free himself from a master is not only justified but required by the great, first law of the biological realm, the law of self-preservation—a nature-made law on behalf of freedom. This nature-made law will ultimately nullify all class laws, every law which is in favor of the enslaving capitalist class and against the enslaved labor class.
Every state with its executive, legislative, judiciary, military and educative systems is founded on capitalism. Since this is the case and since human nature is what it is, all political institutions, the American with the rest, are of the capitalist, by the capitalist, for the capitalist, and each to the end that the capitalist may keep the laborer in poverty and slavery.
Every modern church with its ministry, bible, creed, heaven and hell is founded on capitalism. Since this is the case, and since human nature is what it is, all religious institutions, the Christian with the rest, are of the capitalist, by the capitalist, for the capitalist and each to the end that the capitalist may keep the laborer in ignorance and slavery.
Whether Jesus was an historical or a dramatic person, the morality involved in his trial, condemnation and execution is the same. Assuming the historicity, he was put to death by Pilate because a class of the people said: We have a law and by it, according to its official interpretation, he should die. The Governor, finding that the legal enactment and the judicial decision were in accordance with the representation of the Jews, turned Jesus over to the executioners for crucifixion, and the world condemns him because he knew that the law was the embodiment of a fiction instead of a truth, because he interpreted it in the interest of a sect instead of a people, and because he basely acted with reference to his own political interests without regard to justice for an heroic but helpless champion of slaves in their struggle against the masters.
Philosophic anarchy differs by the space of the whole heavens from practical anarchy, and it is the latter that I always have in mind. The great essential of philosophic anarchy is individualistic freedom. The great essential of practical anarchy is imperialistic slavery.
Capitalism is the outstanding, overshadowing imperialist, the father of all the kaisers by which the world has been cursed, not only of the terrestrial ones such as Wilhelm II, Nicholas II, Woodrow I, but also of the celestial ones such as Jehovah, Allah, Buddha.
The occupants of regal thrones have no more responsibility for the existence of imperialism than those of presidential chairs, nor they any more than I, and I have none. The truth is that the responsibility for this blight of all the ages is now at last, if indeed it has not always been, wholly with the representatives of the working class. They have the great majority in numbers and all of the revolutionary incentives and power; therefore they, and only they can do away with imperialism, and they can rid themselves of it whenever they choose. Prince Kropotkin, the philosophic anarchist, a great soul, would agree to this representation, for he says:
The working men of the civilized world and their friends in the other classes ought to induce their Governments entirely to abandon the idea of armed intervention in the affairs of Russia—whether open or disguised, whether military or in the shape of subventions to different nations.
Russia is now living through a revolution of the same depth and the same importance as the British nation underwent in 1639-1648 and France in 1789-1794; and every nation should refuse to play the shameful part that Great Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia played during the French Revolution.
Since death ends all of consciousness, the most inhuman of all inhumanities and the most immoral of all immoralities is the shortening of human life; and next to it is the diminishing of its happiness.
War shortens many lives and fills more with misery; hence its essential inhumanity and immorality.
A large part of the world has just passed through the furnace of war—a war between the German and English nations with their respective national allies. All international wars are contests for supremacy in the markets of the world, or at least for advantage in some among them. This one was no exception.
The furnace of this war was seven times larger and seven times hotter than any other has been. According to the latest estimates (September, 1920) its fierce flames directly and indirectly killed thirty million young men and wrecked totally twice and partially thrice as many more.
Yet the fire by which the world upon the whole and in the long run suffers most is not the intermittent, flaming one of the hell of international war, which is always kindled and sustained by the capitalists of the belligerent nations for the purpose solely of securing commercial advantages over each other; but the greater suffering is by the permanent, smoking fire of the hell of the inter-class war which is always kindled and sustained by the capitalist class in each nation for the purpose solely of robbing the labor class of the fruit of their toil.
These national and class wars (hells, flaming and smouldering) are due to the same matter-force law, the law of self-preservation, and, paradoxical as it may seem, this law is equally operative on both sides in each war.
Both hells exist as the result of the working out of the same law of animal preservation by competition—the law of capitalism, and both hells will be done away with as the result of the working out of the same law of human preservation by co-operation—the law of socialism.
One proof of the rightness of the co-operative system is the fact that it necessarily operates for the whole people and not for a class, whereas the competitive system as necessarily operates for a class and not for the whole people.
Still another proof, and it is in itself almost if not quite conclusive, of the rightness of the co-operative system is the fact that its competitive rival breaks down in every great emergency. It broke down completely in all the belligerent countries (in none more than the United States) immediately upon their entrance into the world war. Our government was obliged to assume control of the railroads, coal mines and food products.
If a class government, such as ours is, can provide during a war by the co-operative system, and only by it, for the wants of a country, and better, too, than during the time of peace, what may we expect in the way of plenty, comfort and leisure, when under the classless administration there shall be no more war with its wholesale waste, and when there shall be one vast army of producers?
All the days which the fifty millions of soldiers spent in idleness will then be so many holidays for toilers who are in need of them for rest and self-improvement; and every dollar which is now wasted will then be two dollars saved, so that the pecuniary prosperity of war times will be increased, rather than diminished, and made continuous. Under a classless administration the world would soon become comparatively rich and happy.H
Representatives of the capitalist class are trying to create the impression that the co-operative system which our government temporarily established as a military necessity is socialism, and that the labor class should seek no more than its restoration and continuance: but this system is the same old wolf in sheep’s clothing.
The rickety house in which we are living is a competitive structure and it cannot be made into a co-operative one, at least not upon its present foundation, the sand of capitalistic classism. Industrialism must take it down and rebuild it upon the rock of classless labor. Neither this demolition nor this reconstruction constitutes any part of the government program. Its socialism is a mirage, not a reality, and the matter-force law renders it necessarily so.
Marxian socialism is simplicity itself. It requires only three conditions, each of which is perfectly intelligible; but no one of them ever has existed or could exist under any capitalist government, because all such governments, not excepting our own, especially not it, are organized in the interest of parasitic profiteers, not productive laborers. The three indispensable yet simple prerequisites to this real socialism or communism are:
First, that the people within a municipality, either town or city, own and control the utilities within the area occupied by that municipality, which have to do with the immediate comfort of the people who live there.
Second, that the people in each state own and control the utilities that come in contact with the people on a state-wide scale.
Third, that the people within the nation own collectively and control democratically the utilities which affect us on a national scale.
Should we desire to go into more detail, we might say that the things necessary to the individual be owned and controlled by the individual, that the home be controlled by the family, and so on. To go into the question on an international scale we might also add that utilities mutually necessary to all the nations be owned by the nations, as the Panama Canal, for instance.
—Higgins.
Prince Kropotkin, though not a bolshevik, says approvingly of the Russian revolution that it is trying to build up a society where the whole produce of the joint efforts of labor by technical skill and scientific knowledge should go entirely to the commonwealth; and he declares that for the unavoidable reconstruction of society, by pacific or any other revolutionary means, there must be a union of all the trade unions of the world to free the production of the world from its present enslavement to capitalism.
Higgins and Kropotkin have here put co-operative socialism or communism in a nutshell both as to its aim and program.
The law of self-preservation is ever the same, but whether its salvation is for a part of the people by competition—capitalist salvation, or for the whole people by co-operation—socialist salvation, depends upon whether it rides or is ridden.
So long as the law of self-preservation was supposed to be the will of a conscious, personal god whose earthly representatives were kings and priests or presidents and preachers, the law did the riding within the large domain of animal competition—the domain of capitalism. War is the normal, indeed necessary evil of this domain, and hence the world must have wars so long as it remains within it, and it will remain there so long as it has celestial divinities with terrestrial representatives in states and churches for its governors.
Now that the law is known to be a matter-force necessity, not a divine decree, the time may rationally be hoped for when the people will do the riding within the small domain of human co-operation—the domain of socialism. Peace is the normal, indeed necessary, state of this domain, and hence the world must cease to have war when it enters it, and is governed by itself instead of by a god and the powers of state and church alleged to have been ordained by him.
Capital punishment should not be administered, if at all, except to a murderer whose guilt has been established to the satisfaction of the great majority of the people in the community to which he belongs, and never in the case of a suspected murderer of whom this is not true.
If William II were really the devil behind the European war by which many millions of the young men of the world have lost their lives, and if Thomas Mooney were really the devil behind the San Francisco explosion by which ten citizens of California lost their lives, their punishment by death might be urged with much show of reason as a social necessity. But if both were hung on the same gallows the world would go on suffering by the ever recurring and closely related misfortunes of war and riot as if nothing had happened. The real devil behind all wars and riots is the capitalist system. There will never be an end of wars and riots until this devil is overthrown.
The so-called Kaiser-war and the so-called Mooney riot are on the same footing, both having the character of an insurrection and both having the aim of self-preservation. The insurrection of the Kaiser was a riot on behalf of the capitalist class of Germany and for the purpose of protecting it against the capitalist class of England. The insurrection of Mooney (assuming his guilt, merely for illustration) was a riot on behalf of the labor class of California and for the purpose of protecting it against the capitalist class of that state.
Incidentally, both riots have secondary aims of world-wide extent. The Kaiser had two of these: to overthrow the commercial supremacy of England that Germany might have it, and to overthrow industrial republicanism (socialism) everywhere. Mooney had this: the overthrow of commercial imperialism (capitalism) everywhere.
As rioters, there is this in common between Kaiser William and Thomas Mooney, that though moving in opposite directions, they are nevertheless carried by the same matter-force law which manifests itself in the same riotous system, capitalism—a system which, under one form or another, has ever produced international wars and class revolutions; and, so long as it is allowed to exist, never will cease the production of them.
Hence the interests of the world require not that these rioters, Kaiser William and Thomas Mooney, should be hung, but that the capitalist system, which by the operation of the law of self-preservation by animal competitions, produced both of the riots with which they are respectively credited, should be overthrown by the labor system, which, by the operation of the same law of self-preservation by human co-operation, will put an end to all bloody conflicts.
But taking the popular view concerning the responsibility for this commercial war and labor riot and assuming that they should be charged respectively to Kaiser William and Thomas Mooney, why should the promoter of the little riot die, or worse, suffer imprisonment during life, and the promoter of the big war live?
Yet, if the Kaiser were captured even by England there is no probability that he would be turned over to a court constituted of representatives of the allied nations, tried, found guilty and put to death. Why not? Because, like all wars, his war, no matter which side won the victory, has been upon the whole, or will be in the long run, in the interest of the capitalists of every nation on both sides, at least of the great ones.
If Kaiser William would not be sent to the gallows by such a court why should the court which tried Thomas Mooney be allowed to send him to it; and, especially why, since California is part of a republic, and the Kaiser’s war was on behalf of imperialism and a small minority, while Mooney’s riot was on behalf of republicanism and the overwhelming majority?
Just now the human part of the world is especially afflicted by unnecessary and therefore unjustifiable deaths. The Governor of California has the opportunity to prevent one such death. I say to him, do it. In the name of Justice and in the name of Humanity, I with millions of others solemnly call upon him to save Mooney, the revolutionist, as Pilate, the Governor of Judea, according to the verdict of all right-thinking men and women, should have saved Jesus, the revolutionist.
III
You say in effect that we must postulate a divine consciousness to account for human consciousness; but, on your theory, how could human consciousness come out of a divine consciousness; and, anyhow, contrary to your implication, we know of no consciousness which has come, except by inheritance, from another consciousness, but only of consciousnesses which have come from unconsciousnesses.
Your contention, in this connection, is to the effect that nothing can come out of nothing, and this is the core of a book, “A Short Apology for Being a Christian in the Twentieth Century,” by the learned ex-president of Trinity College, Hartford, Dr. Williamson Smith, with whom you have had, I think, some correspondence.
This Apology was written against a letter of mine to the House of Bishops, entitled, “A Natural Gospel for a Scientific Age,” which has never seen the light, partly because the ex-President convinced me that if I must give up the orthodox conception of God, I could not hold to the one which I had worked out in the letter.
If you have not seen the ex-President’s book, you will, I am sure, enjoy it more than I did, but I doubt whether you will profit as much by it, for it verges towards your lines and away from mine; and so it set me to studying as it will not you, with the result of rejecting the new conception of God which I had worked out for myself, but with it I threw over the old one and ceased to believe in the existence of a conscious, personal divinity. Of course, my faith in the existence of a spiritual world and hope for a future life in it went with the god.
Dr. Williamson Smith and you are entirely correct in the contention that something cannot come out of nothing: but I no longer pretend that it can and I now see that the stones which have been thrown at me by you both and others have come from glass houses; for this is really the pretension of orthodox theologians. They affirm that the universe was created by God out of nothing, but produce no scrap of evidence for His existence, and even if they could prove that He exists, they would have to admit that He came out of nothing, or at least from something which did so.
It is indeed true that I am unable to tell what matter, force and motion came from, or if I agree with most physicists that they arose from ether, I cannot give its derivative; but, granting that I am as incapable of proving their existence as you are of proving the existence of the Christian trinity, nevertheless I have this immense advantage over you, that I can prove that everything both physical and psychical (including man and his civilization) entering into the constitution of the universe, lives, moves and has its being in my divine trinity—matter, force and motion: whereas you cannot prove that anything is indebted for what it is to your divine trinity—Father, Son and Spirit: therefore I insist that your trinity is a symbol of mine.
What is true of the Christian trinity is true of all the divinities of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion. The Jews live with no reference to the Christian God, or at least not with any to his second and third persons, and neither Christians nor Jews do so in the case of either the Mohammedan or Buddhistic divinity, and so on, all around the whole circle of gods.
But no representative of any god lives without constant reference to mine, of which yours and all the others are, as I think, symbols, if they are anything better than fetishes.
If you and ex-President Smith mean by your fundamental thesis, that a thing which is essentially different from that from which it came is an impossibility, you are certainly wrong, for the world is full of such things. In the tree of life there are millions of examples, since (using language in its general significance) everything above the amoeba must be regarded as essentially different from it, though all, including man, came out of it.
Going back as far as we safely can on solid ground, we come to the nebulae from which the solar systems of the universe have evolved, and surely a solar system is as essentially different from the nebula as a man is from an amoeba. Coming to our earth when its primeval, flaming, swirling gases had been condensed into inorganic matter, the protoplasm which is organic matter, arose from it, and so something which grows from within out, comes from something which grows from without in.
The large hoofed horse came from a small five-toed animal, not much larger than a rabbit. The piano and the gun are brother and sister, born of the bow and arrow, yet how different the children from the parent.
An infant is unconscious at birth and what it has of consciousness as a child and an adult is dependent upon the development of its body.
Moreover, as the human body is a development through animal bodies, we may logically conclude that human consciousness is ultimately dependent upon and inherited from animal consciousness rather than a divine one.
Jesus is represented as saying that God is a spirit; and the fathers of the English part of the Christian reformation said that there is but one living and true God without body, parts or passions. This is their explanation of his conception of God.
When the Jesuine definition of God and the Anglican explanation of it were framed, the Divine Spirit was supposed to be an objective personality.
Modern psychology teaches that no spirit, divine, human or otherwise, is a personality. According to this science, spirit and soul are synonyms for the subjective content of a conscious life, which content consists of feelings, aspirations, ideals, convictions and determinations.
Psychologists know of no spirit or soul without a body constituted of parts any more than physicists know of a force without matter constituted of molecules, atoms, electrons and ions.
Gods represent the religious ideals of people and are symbols of what they think they should be as religionists. They are symbolic, emblematic, parabolic, allegoric devices of the imagination, and contain nothing but the ideal, imaginary things which are put into them by people for themselves, and they do nothing except what the people perform through them in their names for themselves.
Matter and force constitute a machine, an automatic one, which produces things, everything which enters into the constitution of the cosmos, by evolutionary processes, or rather all such things, and there are no others, are the result of one universal and eternal process of evolution.
What is known as nature is the aggregation of the products of this machine by this process. The machine is unconscious and its workings are mechanical, yet some of its products rise into self-consciousness with the power of self-determination, but both the consciousness and the determination are limited. The infinite consciousness, personality and determination which are postulated of gods are contradictions.
Of all beings man possesses most of consciousness, personality and determination. What he has of these is not dependent upon gods, but all they have of them is dependent upon him. Divine beings are, as to their self-consciousness, personality and determination, human beings personified and placed in the sky. Man does everything for gods. They do nothing for him.
Such are the facts and arguments based upon them, which have forced me step by step over the long way from the position of supernaturalistic traditionalism in its Christian form, still occupied by you, to that of naturalistic scientism in its socialist form which I am now occupying, as tentatively as possible, pending further study in the light of additional facts, for which (some six years ago, when I was desperately battling to prevent the shipwreck of my faith in the god and heaven of orthodox Christianity) I appealed to about 800 outstanding theologians, among them yourself, representing all parts of christendom and every great church, including of course all our bishops among the theologians, and the Anglican communion among the churches.
You may remember how much of correspondence we had at that time, though neither you nor any one who kindly tried to reach me with the rope of the new scientific apologetics for which I appealed, can realize how eagerly I looked for the replies to my questions, nor the sickness of heart which I experienced when I saw that, in spite of every possible effort of my own and help of others, I was slowly but surely drifting towards what I then thought to be the fatal whirlpools and rocks, but what I now regard as a sheltered port—the golden gate of that delectable country, Marxian socialism, the only heaven that I am now hoping to behold.
You earnestly contend that I am wrong in representing that the majority of outstanding men of science and scientific philosophers do not believe in the existence of a conscious, personal divinity, who created, sustains and governs the universe, or in a conscious, personal life for man beyond the grave, and that none among such scientists and philosophers are orthodox Christians.
Prof. Leuba, the Bryn Mawr psychologist, is one among my authorities for these representations. In his “Belief in God and Immortality” (1916) he exhibits the results of a recent and thorough-going investigation in a chart from which it appears that, taking the greater and lesser representatives of the scientists together, they fall below 50 per cent as to their belief in God, and below 55 per cent in their belief in immortality.I
The showing for the scientists who are especially concerned with the origin and destiny of life, biologists and psychologists, is much less favorable to you; for, taking the greater and lesser together, only 31 per cent of the biologists believe in God and 35 per cent in immortality; and only 25 per cent of the psychologists believe in God, and 20 per cent in immortality.
But the worst by far, is yet to come; for, taking the greater biologists and psychologists, those who count most, of the former 18 per cent believe in God, and 25 per cent in immortality; and of the latter, the greatest of all authorities, only 13 per cent believe in God, and only 8 per cent in immortality.
The greater psychologists are comparatively consistent in that fewer among them believe in a conscious, personal life for humanity beyond the grave than in the conscious, personal life of divinity beyond the clouds. Human immortality is an absurdity without divine existence. The overwhelming majority of great psychologists (the greatest of all authorities, as to whether or not gods “without bodies, parts or passions” can consciously exist in the skies, and disembodied men, women and children in celestial paradises) see this and limit the career of man to earth. In their judgment his heaven and hell are here, and the gods who make and the devils who unmake civilizations are humans, not good or bad divinities.
This is the conclusion of a rapidly increasing number of educated people. A century ago only a few men of science and scientific philosophers had reached it, not twenty five per cent, but now the percentage is nearly ninety and it will soon be ninety-nine. The time is coming, and in the not distant future, when no educated man shall look to the god of any supernaturalistic interpretation of religion for light or strength, and when none shall hope for a heaven above the earth or fear a hell below it.
Heav’n but the Vision of fulfill’d Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerg’d from, shall so soon expire.
—Omar.
Joseph McCabe and Chapman Cohen are among the most brilliant of present day writers on scientific and philosophic subjects. They are not socialists, but both see that modern socialism and orthodox Christianism are utterly irreconcilable incompatibilities.
“How is it that on the Continent democratic bodies are so sceptical, or sceptical bodies so democratic? Precisely because they doubt (or reject altogether) the Christian heaven. They want to make this earth as happy as it can be, to make sure of happiness somewhere. Having taken their eyes from the sky, they have discovered remarkable possibilities in the earth. Having to give less time to God, they have more time to give to man. They think less about their heavenly home, and more about their earthly home. The earthly home has grown very much brighter for the change. The heavenly home is just where it was.
“The plain truth is, of course, that the sentiment which used to be absorbed in religion is now embodied in humanitarianism. Religion is slowly dying everywhere. Social idealism is growing everywhere. People who want to persuade us that social idealism depends on religion are puzzled by this. It is only because they are obstinately determined to connect everything with Christianity, in spite of its historical record. There is no puzzle. We have transferred our emotions from God to man, from heaven to earth.”
—Joseph McCabe.
“Socialists who have one eye on the ballot box may assure these people that Socialism is not Atheistic, but few will be convinced. The statement that Socialism has nothing to do with religion, or that many professedly religious people are Socialist, is quite futile. A thoughtful religionist would reply that the first point concedes the truth of all that has been said against Socialism, while the second evades the question at issue. No one is specially concerned with the mental idiosyncracies of individual Socialists; what is at issue is the question whether Socialism does or does not take an Atheistic view of life? He might add, too, that a Socialism which leaves out the belief in God and a future life, which does not, in even the remotest manner, imply these beliefs, which does not make their acceptance the condition of holding the meanest office in the State, and, at most, will merely allow religious beliefs to exist so long as they do not threaten the well-being of the State, is, to all intents and purposes, an Atheistical system.”
—Chapman Cohen.
In summing up the results of his investigations Prof. Leuba observes that:
In every class of persons investigated, the number of believers in God is less and in most classes very much less than the number of non-believers, and that the number of believers in immortality is somewhat larger than in a personal God; that among the more distinguished, unbelief is very much more frequent than among the less distinguished; and finally that not only the degree of ability, but also the kind of knowledge possessed, is significantly related to the rejection of these beliefs.
In another connection Prof. Leuba speaking of Christian dogmatism as a whole says:
Christianity, as a system of belief, has utterly broken down, and nothing definite, adequate, and convincing has taken its place. There is no generally acknowledged authority; each one believes as he can, and few seem disturbed at being unable to hold the tenets of the churches. This sense of freedom is the glorious side of an otherwise dangerous situation.
Your conception of the origin, sustenance and governance of the universe is burdened, as are all interpretations of religion which are hinged upon the existence of conscious, personal divinities, with two difficulties: (1) its physical impossibility, and (2) its moral impossibility.
1. Physical Impossibilities. The atomic and molecular movements required for the thinking of a single man would be beyond the capacity of all the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion together.
Some idea of the number of such motions which are taking place in every human brain, will be derived from the conservative representations of Hofmeister as exhibited in the following condensed form by McCabe in his book, “The Evolution of Mind:”
We have reason to believe that there are in each molecule of ordinary protoplasm at least 450 atoms of carbon, 720 atoms of hydrogen, 116 of nitrogen, 6 of sulphur, and 140 of oxygen. Nerve-plasm is still more complex.
Recent discoveries have only increased the wonder and potentiality of the cortex. Each atom has proved to be a remarkable constellation of electrons, a colossal reservoir of energy. The atom of hydrogen contains about 1,000 electrons, the atom of carbon 12,000, the atom of nitrogen 14,000, the atom of oxygen 16,000, and the atom of sulphur 32,000. These electrons circulate within the infinitesimal space of the atom at a speed of from 10,000 to 90,000 miles a second. It would take 340,000 barrels of powder to impart to a bullet the speed with which some of these particles dart out of their groups. A gramme of hydrogen—a very tiny portion of the simplest gas—contains energy enough to lift a million tons more than a hundred yards.
Of these astounding arsenals of energy, the atoms, we have, on the lowest computation, at least 600 million billion in the cortex of the human brain.
Scientists, says Professor Olerich, in his book, “A Modern Look at the Universe,” estimate that the chemical atom is so infinitesimally small that it requires a group of not less than a billion to make the group barely visible under the most powerful microscope, and a thousand such groups would have to be put together in order to make it just visible to the naked eye as a mere speck floating in the sunbeam.
The microscope reveals innumerable animalcules in the hundredth part of a drop of water. They all eat, digest, move and from all appearances of their frolics, they are endowed with sensation and ability of enjoyment. What then shall we say of the minuteness of the food they eat; of the blood that surges through their veins; of their nervous system that thrills and guides them? Their minutest organs must be composed of molecules, atoms, ions and electrons inconceivably smaller than are the organs themselves.
Is there any god in a celestial field who could care for the movements which occur in the molecules constituting a hundredth part of a drop of water, not to speak of those which occur in the bodies of its myriads of inhabitants? And what shall we say of all the inorganic and organic movements in a small cup of whole drops of water, let alone those of a great ocean of them?
But why go further into this subject? Is not the utter childishness of the orthodox representative of a supernaturalistic interpretation of religion, who credits his god with the governance of the motions occurring in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms of this globe, leaving out of account those of its solar system, and of other systems which constitute the universe, sufficiently manifest?
If you say that the motions which issue in the phenomena of the universe are regulated by a law which was once for all willed by the god of the Christian interpretation of religion, I ask why the law should be credited to the willing of this god rather than to that of the god of Jewish, Mohammedan or Buddhistic interpretation.
Newton took the first of the six initiatory steps in the long way which led to the conclusion that the universe is self-existing, self-sustaining and self-governing, by showing that all the movements of the solar systems were necessarily what they have been by reason of a matter-force law, gravitation. This discovery is the most momentous event in the whole history of mankind.
Laplace took the second step by showing that the cosmic nebulae contain within themselves all the potentialities necessary to the formation of solar systems.
Lavoisier took the third step by showing that the matter which enters into the constitution of the universe is an eternality.
Mayer took the fourth step by showing that the force which enters into the constitution of the universe is an eternality.
Darwin took the fifth step by showing that the protoplasm contains all the potentialities of every form of physical and degree of psychical life from the moneron to man; that all representatives of both the vegetable and animal kingdoms, including man, are related and so on a level as to their origin and destiny, and that the different species are the natural results of the necessary struggle with rivals and with adverse environments for existence.
Marx took the sixth step by showing that the essential difference between humans and beasts is primarily a question of the hand and secondarily of the machines by which its efficiency is immeasurably increased; that slavery has been and must continue to be the means of advancement towards the ideal civilization; that the kinds of human slavery were what they have been because machines have been what they were, and that the time is coming when the slaves will no longer be men, women and children, but machines which will be exploited for the good of the many, not the profit of the few—then, and not until then, rapid advance shall be made towards the goal where the whole world shall be one great co-operative family, every member of which shall have the greatest of possible opportunities to make the most of terrestrial life by having it as long and happy as possible.
2. Moral Impossibilities. The moral impossibility of the assumptions of these apologies is seen by all who have eyes for seeing things as they are in the fact that if God is credited with the good He must also be debited with the evil. If for example, He endowed the human body with its useful and necessary parts. He also endowed it with its harmful and unnecessary parts.
Experts in the field of anatomy tell us that there are in our bodies at least 180 useless parts, some among which are the occasion of much suffering and many premature deaths, the vermiform appendix alone causing many thousands of such cases annually.
Do you not see that these useless structures, all of which are inherited from the lower animals, are so many evidences of the truth of Darwinism and the untruthfulness of Mosaism? Eleven of these wholly useless and more or less harmful inheritances have been of no use to any of our ancestors from the fish up and four are inherited from our reptilian and amphibian forefathers, but according to Moses we have no such progenitors.
Admitting the fact of the existence of evil there is no escaping from the logical conclusions of dear, old sensible Epicurus:
Either God is willing to remove evil from this world and cannot, or he can and is not willing, or finally he can and is willing. If he is willing and cannot, it is impotence, which is contrary to the nature of God. If he can and is unwilling, it is wickedness, and that is no less contrary to the nature of God. If he is not willing and cannot, there is both wickedness and impotence. If he is willing and can, which is the only one of these suppositions that can be applied to God, how happens it that there is evil on earth?
Oh, if only the world had been influenced by this logic instead of by the metaphysics of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion, it would have been so far on the way towards the ideal civilization as to have long since passed the point where it would have been possible to have the world war which has recently deluged the earth with blood and tears, or to make the Versailles treaty which is destined to issue in one war after another, ever filling the world fuller with the tyranny, poverty, slavery and misery which are the inevitable concomitants of all wars.
In my opinion the fascinating essayist, Mallock, has written the best of all apologies for theism. I cannot imagine a better one. He, however, makes no more attempt than Sir Oliver Lodge does to establish Christianity, or any other supernaturalistic interpretations of religion. Like Kant and yourself, Mallock takes his stand on the ground that a belief in a celestial God, and in the immortality which goes with it, is necessary to morality, the basic virtue upon which civilization rests. As Kant admits that the existence of God cannot be inferred from pure reason, so Mallock admits and even strongly contends that it cannot be established on scientific grounds. I quote a striking passage:
We must divest ourselves of all foregone conclusions, of all question-begging reverences, and look the facts of the universe steadily in the face.
If theists will but do this, what they will see will astonish them. They will see that if there is anything at the back of this vast process, with a consciousness and a purpose in any way resembling our own—a Being who knows what he wants and is doing his best to get it—he is, instead of a holy and all-wise God, a scatter-brained, semi-powerful, semi-impotent monster. They will recognize as clearly as they ever did the old familiar facts which seemed to them evidences of God’s wisdom, love and goodness; but they will find that these facts, when taken in connection with the others, only supply us with a standard in the nature of this being himself by which most of his acts are exhibited to us as those of a criminal madman. If he had been blind, he had not had sin; but if we maintain that he can see, then his sin remains. Habitually a bungler as he is, and callous when not actively cruel, we are forced to regard him, when he seems to exhibit benevolence, as not divinely benevolent, but merely weak and capricious, like a boy who fondles a kitten and the next moment sets a dog at it. And not only does his moral character fall from him bit by bit, but his dignity disappears also. The orderly processes of the stars and the larger phenomena of nature are suggestive of nothing so much as a wearisome court ceremonial surrounding a king who is unable to understand or to break away from it; whilst the thunder and whirlwind, which have from time immemorial been accepted as special revelations of his awful power and majesty, suggest, if they suggest anything of a personal character at all, merely some blackguardly larrikin kicking his heels in the clouds, not perhaps bent on mischief, but indifferent to the fact that he is causing it.
But we need not attempt to fill in the picture further. The truth is, as we consider the universe as a whole, it fails to suggest a conscious and purposive God at all; and it fails to do so not because the processes of evolution as such preclude the idea that God might have made use of them for a definite purpose, but because when we come to consider these processes in detail, and view them in the light of the only purposes they suggest, we find them to be such that a God who could deliberately have been guilty of them would be a God too absurd, too monstrous, too mad to be credible.
The god who had any part in bringing upon the world the English-German war, the Versailles peace, the Russian blockade, is for me a devil not a divinity. If you say that the Christian god had nothing to do with them, I reply that these are among the greatest of all curses wherewith mankind has been afflicted in modern times; and if he could not or would not prevent them, what ground is there for looking to him for help in any time of need?
How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end? It is the most utter falsehood, and a crime against the human race.... Human suffering is so great, so endless, so awful, that I can hardly write of it.... The whole and the worst, the worst pessimist can say is far beneath the least particle of the truth.... Anyone who will consider the affairs of the world at large... will see that they do not proceed in the manner they would do for our happiness if a man of humane breadth of view were placed at their head with unlimited power. A man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to happen in an infinitely superior manner. But that which is... credited to a non-existent intelligence (or cosmic “order,” it is just the same) should really be claimed and exercised by the human race. We must do for ourselves what superstition has hitherto supposed an intelligence to do for us.
—Richard Jeffries.
Would but some winged Angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern Recorder otherwise
Enregister, or quite obliterate!
Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Remold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
—Omar.
You frequently intimate that my doctrine concerning the origin and destiny of the universe with all that therein is, including man, is not that of the majority of men of science and scientific philosophers, but that yours is. It will therefore be of interest to you to know that I have submitted the most radical of my materialistic pieces to three men of science, all great authorities, one of whom replied, that he was in substantial agreement with me, but thought me to be 400 years ahead of our time; another, that he found nothing to criticize unless it might be my failure to give greater prominence to the fact that the gods of the redemptive interpretations, of religion were so many versions of the sun-myth, and the other, that the essay would pass any world congress of scientists by a large majority.
You think that I am wrong in quoting Newton and Darwin on my side, because they believed in the existence of a conscious, personal god. I am persuaded that such was not the case with Darwin at his death; but, however this may be, it is in neither of these cases, nor in that of any other scientist, a question of what he philosophically believed concerning a god, but of what he scientifically established as a fact.
Newton established the fact that the movements of the stars in their courses are naturally regulated by the law of gravitation, not supernaturally by the will of a god.
Darwin established the fact that all living species of animal and vegetable life exist as the natural results of evolutionary processes, not as the supernatural results of creative acts.
If Newton were to stand by his theological writings, he would fall in your estimation, for his work on the book of Daniel would be regarded by you as an absurdity. He considered Daniel to be the great revelation of a God, Jehovah, but you know it to be the purest fiction of a man, quite as much the work of the imagination of its author as Don Quixote is that of Cervantes.
Among the many theological authorities whom you quote against me, the greatest, in my estimation, is Dr. Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s, London, whose utterances I have been noting with great interest of late; partly, no doubt, because he seems to be giving up your orthodox side and coming over, slowly but surely, to my heterodox one. In a London paper which has just reached me, the Literary Guide, this is said of the Dean:
The theological opinions of Dean Inge, one of the official mouthpieces of the Church of England, and probably the most distinguished spokesman for the more liberally minded of the clergy, have now reached an interesting stage, both for those without the Church as well as for those within it. Although he does not feel called upon to state his own private conclusions on such debatable questions, he no longer regards the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Bodily Resurrection as essential prerequisites of Christianity and would consider fit for ordination any candidate who rejected them, provided such a person still acknowledged the divine nature of Jesus Christ—that is, he would not exclude him from the Church’s ministry.
If I understand Dean Inge as he is reported in the article of which this is the opening paragraph, he bases his faith in the divinity of Jesus upon the uniqueness of his character and teachings, not on the miraculousness of his birth and healings.
But Dean Inge has no authentic or reliable account of the life and teachings of Jesus; and so, as a theologian, like all theologians, he lives, moves and has his being in the realm of fiction, the difference between him and yourself being that he is in that part of it where the imagination sits enthroned, and you in the region where metaphysics is monarch of all it surveys.
An outstanding theologian who, as it seems to me, overshadows Dean Inge, commenting upon a piece of my writing which is quite as radical as any part of this letter goes even further than he.
“I have,” he says, “just read the Chapter of your Natural Gospel for a Scientific Age, which you have kindly sent me, with the greatest interest. Indeed I have come so heartily to share your point of view that I can find no points for criticism; I can only say how grateful I am to have had an opportunity of seeing your uncompromising and clear expression of the only kind of Modernism that has any promise for the future. I am beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable in our Christian movement because so many of our leaders here are attempting an impossible compromise with dogma. Men like Dr. Rashdall have no place in the movement for men who cannot accept their ‘fullblooded theism.’ In fact they are Harnackians with their one or two unalterably fixed dogmas.”
IV
If you ask why I continue to be a member of an orthodox church and its ministry, the answer is, there is no reason why I should not for (if they may be interpreted by myself, for myself, spiritually) I accept every article of the creed of catholic orthodoxy; but if the articles of this creed must be interpreted literally there is no one in our church (the Episcopal) or in any among the churches, who believes all of them. For example, who believes, that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing in six days, as he is represented to have done in his alleged revelation of which the creed is a condensation? All in this church, or at least all the ministers of it, who have obeyed its requirement respecting the devotion of themselves to study, as I have, know that the firmament or heaven of which the revelation speaks has no substantial existence, only an imaginary one. What was supposed to be it, is but the reflection of light upon the dust of the atmosphere. As for the earth it was not made out of nothing; and, indeed, it was not supernaturally made at all but naturally evolutionized out of matter and force, and even they were not created by a god, for they are co-existing eternalities; nor were their evolutionary processes directed by him, for they have eternally, automatically and necessarily co-operated in such processes to the production of every phenomenon which has contributed to make both the physical and psychical parts of the universe what they have been at any time, including the divine, diabolical and angelic fictions which men have made and placed above and below the earth.
If you ask whether I am still a professing Christian, I will answer: yes, yet the Brother Jesus of the New Testament, catholic creed and protestant confessions, is not for me an historical personage, but only a symbol of all that is for the good of the world, even as the Uncle Sam of American literature is not an historical personage but only a symbol of all which is for the good of the United States.
If you ask whether I am a praying Christian, I shall answer: yes, yet when I pray, as I do every day, my prayer is an appeal to a real divinity within my heart, the better self, of which self all the unreal divinities in the skies including the Christian trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, are but poetic symbols, and I no longer expect this God to answer otherwise than the symbol of parents, Santa Claus, answers the prayers of children, or the symbol of the United States, Uncle Sam, answers the prayers of Americans.
If you ask whether I am a communing Christian, I shall answer: yes, yet when I go to the Lord’s Supper, as I do every month, the strength which I receive is derived from the feeling that through it I place myself in communion with my human brethren on earth, not with a divine brother in the sky, particularly with the members of my church and the citizens of my town and its neighborhood, but generally with all men, women and children throughout the whole world, of which real brethren the brother god in the sky, Jesus, is but a poetic symbol; nor do I now regard the communion of this supper as being essentially different from that of any ordinary family-meal, lodge-banquet, or socialist-picnic, with each of which repasts the informal Lord’s Supper of the apostolic church had much more in common than it has with the formal celebrations of the sacrament in any among the sectarian churches.J
Many critics represent that, in view of the changes in my theological opinion, if I am an honest man, not a hypocrite, I will leave the ministry and communion of the Episcopal Church. But why should I go while any of my brother clergymen remain? I give a symbolic or allegorical interpretation to every article of the whole system of Christian supernaturalism and uniqueism; yet as symbols, allegories, parables, or myths, I do not reject any, and no member of our House of Bishops literally accepts all.
Who among influential preachers of any rank in any church believes: (1) that the world was made about six thousand years ago by a personal, Creator-God out of nothing; or that it was made at any time out of anything? (2) that such a God formed Adam out of dust and Eve out of a rib; that they left His hands as perfect physical and moral images of Himself, and fully civilized representatives of the human race; or that there was any first man and woman? (3) that He planted a Garden of Eden and placed them therein under ideal conditions, and that He walked in it and talked with them; or that there ever was any such garden? (4) that a personal destroyer-Devil, incarnated in a talking serpent, tempted them into disobedience; or that there ever was any such Devil? (5) that but for this Devil’s influence and their sin, labor and suffering, physical death and moral degradation would have been unknown on earth, and that it would have been the permanent abode of mankind, as indeed of all sentient creatures; or that any of the higher forms of life would have been possible without death? and (6) that to repair the evils accomplished by this Destroyer-Devil it was necessary for a personal Restorer-God to become incarnated in a man, in order that he might shed this blood as a sufficient sacrifice for the satisfaction of the offended Creator-God; also, in order that the resurrection of the bodies (bones, flesh, blood and animal organism) of all deceased men, women and children and the rehabitation of them by their respective souls could be accomplished, to the end that a few, on account of their faith, might be transferred to a permanent home in a heaven on a firmament above the earth, and the many, because of their lack of faith, to a permanent home in a hell below; or that there ever was any such incarnation for these purposes; or that there are any such firmament, heaven, and hell, or that there will be any such resurrection, ascension or descension?
If other bishops, priests and deacons can, as they must, bring in their symbolism or allegorism touching any or all of these six fundamentals, which constitute the basis of the supernaturalism of traditional Christianity, and yet not leave the church, why may not I bring in mine and remain?
Attention is called by several critics to Sir Oliver Lodge, as an example of an outstanding man of science who accepts supernaturalism. While I was desperately trying to retain my conception of a supernaturalistic God and of all the supernaturalism that goes with it (revelation of truth, answer to prayer, guidance by providence, resurrection of the dead and their ascension, eternal consciousness and happiness) I at one time centered a great deal of hope in him, and eagerly studied his works as indeed I did those of most apologists for supernaturalism among them the greatest, Flammarion, Balfour, Bergson and Hudson, but my careful study of his many writings convinced me that he does not hold any of the supernaturalistic doctrines which are distinctively Christian.
However, it is my doctrine concerning Jesus, rather than that of Christian traditionalism, that is in exact alignment with that of this renowned physicist. We agree that Jesus, if historical, was a Son of God and the Christ to men in no other sense, and therefore in no higher degree, than all representatives of the human race may be sons or daughters of God, if there are gods and christs, to the men, women and children with whom they come in contact.
Most critics think that I am wrong in representing that the great majority of the leading men of science are naturalistic, not supernaturalistic, but Sir Oliver Lodge represents that among such scientists it is generally believed that the universe is “self-explained, self-contained and self-maintained;” and speaking on his own behalf of its creation out of nothing he says: “The improbability or absurdity of such a conception, except in the symbolism of poetry, is extreme, and it is unthinkable by any educated person.”
All these gods were created, endowed and located by man, and then he had them make revelations, create churches, institute sacraments and appoint priesthoods for his redemption from devils whom he also created, endowed and located.
This is why people of the same country and time have such different gods and revelations. Jehovah is the god and the Old Testament the revelation of the kings and plutocrats who are responsible for wars; Jesus is the god and the New Testament is the revelation of the doctors and nurses who do what they can to alleviate the misery of them.
The gods, not excepting Jehovah and Jesus, are as mythical as Santa Claus and answer their suppliants not otherwise than he answers his, through human representatives. If the suffering, needy or afflicted do not get help and sympathy from men, women and children they get none from the gods and angels.
While on the one hand the great majority of scientists, scientific philosophers and educated people generally doubt that any god ever answered a prayer or exercised a providence, on the other, no one doubts that men, women and children answer millions of prayers daily and that every person’s career is wholly different from what it would have been but for human providence; that, indeed, life would be impossible without the providence which all people exercise in the hearing and answering of prayers.
Representatives of many of the interpretations of religion strewed every battle-field of the European war. The celestial saviours did not care for one of their devotees. The terrestrial saviours (doctors and nurses) did everything for the desperately wounded and saved millions who would have miserably perished but for them. These were the real christs and angels of whom the celestial ones are but symbols. The celestials always have passed by on the other side. The terrestrials are the Good Samaritans when there are any.
Sceptics infer from this negligence that the gods and angels have no real objective existence. Believers contend that they really exist objectively and excuse the neglect on account of preoccupation. For example, the God of traditional Christianity is supposed to spend much time counting hairs on the heads of His people and watching sparrows fall to the ground. Sceptics are reverently but earnestly asking: Why does He not keep the sparrows from falling? Why does He not let the hairs remain unnumbered, until He has put a stop to wars and promoted good will among men to a degree which will render it impossible that the world should any longer be cursed by them?
If believers say that we have no knowledge of the ways of God, sceptics reply: Since all which is known about any objective reality is concerning the ways thereof, what the action is under given circumstances, how do you know that your God has anything to do with either sparrows or men, or even that He exists?
As to their philosophy concerning the origin, sustenance and governance of the universe, socialists of the school of Marx, are almost to a man materialists; but, as to their philosophy concerning life, they are as generally idealists. There is, I feel sure, as much idealism in my thinking and living now as there was in the days of my orthodoxy, but I will let you judge for yourself after reading the following confession of faith:
My early life was blighted as the result of the premature death of my father by the Civil War and the consequent breaking up of his family and my bondage to a German who made a slave of me, broke my health by overwork and exposure, and, worst of all, kept me in ignorance, so that when, at the age of twenty-one, I began my education, I was assigned to the fourth grade of a public school.
The prime of my life has been wasted in preaching as truths the dogmas of the Christian theology, the representations of which I now believe, with the overwhelming majority of educated people, to be at best so many symbols and at worst superstitions.
But though I do not now and probably never shall again believe in the existence of a conscious, personal god, a knowledge of and obedience to whose will is necessary to salvation, yet an injustice is done me by those who say I have abandoned god and religion.
Every one who desires and endeavors to fulfill the requirements of a law which is independent of his will and beyond his control has a god and a religion. I desire and endeavor this in the case of two such laws and so have two gods and two religions. Both of my divinities are trinities. One is in the physical realm and the other in the moral one.
In the physical realm my triune god is: matter, the father; force, the son, and motion, the spirit.
In the moral realm, my triune god is: fact, the father; truth, the son, and life, the spirit.
For me the triune divinity of Christianity is a symbol of these trinities and it is my desire and effort to discover and fulfill what they require of me, in order that I may make my own physical, psychical and moral life as long, happy and complete as possible and help others in doing this for themselves. This desire and effort is at once my morality and religion, my politics and patriotism, and they are spiritual realities.
On account of the first of these sets of spiritual virtues (morality and religion) I claim to be a Christian of the highest type, and that any accusation which is raised against me because of alleged disloyalty to any essential of Christianism is an injustice.
On account of the second of these sets of spiritual virtues (politics and patriotism) I claim to be an American of the highest type, and that any accusation which is raised against me because of alleged disloyalty to an essential of Americanism is an injustice.
From the viewpoint of the self-styled one hundred per cent Christians, I am a betrayer of Brother Jesus because I do not believe that he ever had any existence as a god and that, if he was at any time a man, the world does not now and never can know of one thing that he did or of one word that he said.
From the viewpoint of the self-styled one hundred per cent Americans, I am a traitor to Uncle Sam, because I did oppose his going into the English-German war, and because I do object to the partiality which he shows to his rich nephews and nieces.
Still Jesus and Uncle Sam are as dear to me as ever and indeed dearer, yet not as objective, conscious personalities, but as symbols, ideals or patterns.
However, though I love my Brother Jesus and Uncle Sam all the time, as a child does Santa Claus at Christmas time, I am no longer childish enough at any time to look to either of them to do anything for me, because I know that what is done for me must be done either by myself or by men, women and children, and that as objective, conscious personalities, my Brother Jesus and Uncle Sam have had no more to do with my life than the man-in-the-moon.
Your observation concerning the American government as being the standard to which all governments will ultimately conform challenges an earnest word of friendly dissent.
Our government is what all the governments of the world are (with the single exception of the Russian) a government in the interest of a small class, the representatives of which own the means and machines of production and distribution and who produce and distribute things for profit, each for himself.
The representatives of one class produce things socially, and those of another class appropriate them individually. This is capitalistic anarchy, the worst of possible anarchism, and it must have an end soon or the world will be lost.
Robbery is the essence of anarchy and Marx showed that every cent of profit made under the existing system of economics (and in the United States it amounts to several billions of dollars every year) is so much robbery of the many who make and operate the machines, because they are paid less in wages than the value of the products made and distributed by them.
We are hearing much in these days about the anarchy of those who are dissatisfied with the capitalistic governments, but the governments themselves and those in whose interests they exist are the real anarchists. The flesh and blood of anarchism are robbery and lying, and these are the meat and drink of capitalism.
The English-German war was the most flagrant act of anarchy in the whole history of mankind. The peace of Versailles and the blockade of Russia were outrageous acts of anarchy, and so also are the terrorism and tyranny of which every capitalistic country is so full, our own with the rest.
Morality is the very heart of civilization and of all that really makes for it; but morality is impossible on a capitalistic basis, for it is founded on the most immoral things in the world, robbery, lying, murder, ignorance, poverty and slavery.
If I am right in the conviction that the United States is more wholly given over to capitalism than any other nation, not excepting even England, it is the greatest robber, liar and murderer on earth. How then, can the United States become the standard for the governments of the nations?
If the government of Russia holds its own, it, rather than that of the United States, will become the standard to which all governments must measure up or else go down.
Yes, not the government of the United States but that of Russia is destined to become the standard of all peoples, for the aim of our government is money, more money, and then some, for the few, while the infinitely higher aim of theirs is life, more life, fuller life for every man, woman and child.
Within my generation the vanguard of humanity has passed from the age of traditionalism to that of scientism and this transition is the greatest and most salutary event in the whole history of humanity. It is impossible to exaggerate its importance. It marks the time when man began consciously to realize that he must look to himself rather than to any god for salvation.
From time immemorial man has realized that ignorance is his ruin and knowledge his salvation, but during the too many and too long ages of traditionalism he made the fatal mistake of supposing that he was dependent upon a supernatural revelation by an unconscious, personal god for the necessary knowledge. But now the leading people of the world, the shepherds of the sheep, are seeing with increasing clearness that man has naturally inherited his knowledge and must naturally acquire by his own experience, reason and investigation every addition to it.
The world is indeed passing through a long, dark night, but neither the longest nor the darkest, and since at last a great and rapidly increasing multitude happily realize that humanity must work out its own salvation through the living of its own knowledge by its own inherited and increased strength, not by a supernatural grace, we of this generation may rationally hope, as those of no other did or could, for the dawning of the longest and brightest of all days.
As an old year dies into a new one, and as flourishing generations die into rising ones, so the old traditional ages, when nations and sects looked to their rival gods in the skies for help, are happily dying into the new scientific age, when all sensible and good men, relying upon the strength of a common divinity which is within themselves, will unite in an all-inclusive brotherhood for the promotion of the ideal civilization, a universal reign of righteousness.
It is night,—midnight. The clock is striking twelve. But this is the very hour and the very minute, when all the saviours of mankind have always been and ever will be born. Then it is that the Virgin, Nature, comes to this dark world with her new born Son, Truth, whom to know and follow is morality, religion, politics and life. It is then that those who give expression to the highest ideals and deepest longings of mankind, hear the angels, Reason and Hope, sing: On earth peace and good will towards men.
Very cordially and gratefully yours,
WM. M. BROWN.
Brownella Cottage,
Galion, Ohio.
Footnotes
H The difference between a political republic, such as America has developed, and an industrial republic, such as Russia is developing, is that the administrators of the former are elected from the geographical divisions and those of the latter from the productive divisions into which the population is divided.
If we liken states to fruit trees, the American tree may be said to have been evolutionized for the purpose of producing the fruit of commodities for the profit of the owning class, and the Russian, the fruit of commodities for the use of the working class.
I See appendix.
J Nevertheless I consider church-going to be a bad habit, and if I could live my life over, I would not allow myself to become addicted to it.