II God and Immortality
We have done with the kisses that sting,
With the thief’s mouth red from the feast,
With the blood on the hands of the king,
And the lie on the lips of the priest.
—Swinburne.
Many critics contend that socialism and supernaturalism are not, as I represent, incompatibilities; but they lose sight of four facts: (1) this is a scientific age; (2) Marxian socialism is one of the sciences; (3) the vast majority of men of science reject all supernaturalism, including of course the gods and devils with their heavens and hells, and (4) only in the case of one of the sciences, psychology, is this majority greater than in the science of sociology.
The truth of the last two of these representations will be overwhelmingly evident from the chart on the next page. It and its explanation given in the following quotation is taken with the kind consent of the author and also of the publishers of a book entitled God and Immortality, by Professor James H. Leuba, the Psychologist of Bryn Mawr College. This book is having a great influence and I strongly recommend it to all who think that I am wrong in the contention that conscious, personal existence is limited to earth; that, therefore, we are having all that we shall ever know of heaven and hell, here and now, and that whether we have more of heaven and less of hell depends altogether upon men and women, not at all upon gods and devils. The second edition of Professor Leuba’s book is now in the press of The Open Court Publishing Company, 122 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. Here is the quotation in support of our contentions:
What, then, is the main outcome of this research? Chart XI, Partial Summary of Results, shows 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.
The correlation shown, without exception, in every one of our groups between eminence and disbelief appears to me of momentous significance. In three of these groups (biologists, historians, and psychologists) the number of believers among the men of greater distinction is only half, or less than half the number of believers among the less distinguished men. I do not see any way to avoid the conclusion that disbelief in a personal God and in personal immortality is directly proportional to abilities making for success in the sciences in question.
A study of the several charts of this work with regard to the kind of knowledge which favors disbelief shows that the historians and the physical scientists provide the greater; and the psychologists, the sociologists and the biologists, the smaller number of believers. The explanation I have offered is that psychologists, sociologists, and biologists in very large numbers have come to recognize fixed orderliness in organic and psychic life, and not merely in inorganic existence; while frequently physical scientists have recognized the presence of invariable law in the inorganic world only. The belief in a personal God as defined for the purpose of our investigation is, therefore, less often possible to students of psychic and of organic life than to physical scientists.
The place occupied by the historians next to the physical scientists would indicate that for the present the reign of law is not so clearly revealed in the events with which history deals as in biology, economics, and psychology. A large number of historians continue to see the hand of God in human affairs. The influence, destructive of Christian beliefs, attributed in this interpretation to more intimate knowledge of organic and psychic life, appears incontrovertibly, as far as psychic life is concerned, in the remarkable fact that whereas in every other group the number of believers in immortality is greater than that in God, among the psychologists the reverse is true; the number of believers in immortality among the greater psychologists sinks to 8.8 per cent. One may affirm it seems that, in general, the greater the ability of the psychologist, the more difficult it becomes for him to believe in the continuation of individual life after bodily death.
Within the generation to which I belong Darwin and Marx, the greatest teachers that the world has had, went over the top of entrenched ignorance with the greatest books of the world, worth infinitely more to it than all its bibles together. Darwin did this in 1859 with his Origin of Species by Natural Selection and Marx in 1867 with his Capital, a Critique of Political Economy.
Darwin with his book is driving the Christian church out of its trench of supernaturalism and uniqueism by showing that the different kinds of vegetable and animal life are not, according to the representation of its bible, so many separate creations by a personal, conscious divinity, but interrelated evolutions by an impersonal, unconscious nature, the higher out of the lower, and that, therefore, man is so far from being a special creation, having his most vital relationships with a celestial divinity and his most glorious prospects in a heavenly place with him, that he is really more or less closely related to every living thing on earth, and is as hopelessly limited to it, as an elephant, a tree or even a mountain.
Marx with his book is driving the states out of the trench of imperialism and capitalism.
As Darwin is driving the conscious, personal gods out of the realm of biology, placing all animal and human life of body, mind and soul on essentially the same footing, so Marx is driving all such divinities out of the realm of sociology, placing all life of family, state, church, lodge, store and shop on essentially the same level.
According to Darwin, all animal life is what it is at any time by reason of the effort to accommodate the physical organism to its environment.
According to Marx, human civilization is what it is at any time because of the economic system by which people feed, clothe and house themselves.
This Darwinian-Marxian interpretation of terrestrial life in general, and of the human part of it in particular, is known as materialism. It is the materialistic, naturalistic, levelistic interpretation of history, and differs fundamentally from the spiritualistic, supernaturalistic, uniqueistic interpretation of Christian preachers. The contrast between these interpretations is especially strong in the case of human history.
On the one hand the Christian preacher says, man’s history is what it is because of the directing providence of a God, the Father, Son and Spirit, and because of His directing inspiration of great leaders, such as Washington, Luther, Caesar and Moses.
On the other hand Darwin and Marx agree in saying that both the triune god and the inspired leader are what they are, because society is what it is; that, again, the character of society depends upon the economic system by which it feeds, clothes and houses itself, and that finally all such systems owe their existence to the machinery in use for the production of the basic necessities of life, the primal machine being the human hand to which all other machines are auxiliaries.
The most insatiable and universal among all human longings is for freedom—freedom from economic want, social inequality and imperialistic tyranny, also freedom to learn, think, live and teach truths.
Socialism of the Marxian type is the gospel of freedom, because a classless god, nature, reveals it in the interest of a classless world: therefore, it is true, and slavery, of which there never was so much before on the earth, and nowhere is there more than in the United States, is utterly incompatible with truth, and classless interests.
All the supernaturalistic gospels are revealed by a class god (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha) in the interest of the capitalist class: therefore, they are false and freedom is utterly incompatible with falsehood and class interest.
Ignorance is the destroyer-god and capitalism is the diabolical scourge by which he afflicts the wage-earner with many unnecessary sufferings, especially the crushing ones arising from the great trinity of evils, war, poverty and slavery.
Knowledge is the saviour-god and Marxism is his divine gospel of freedom from these capitalistic sufferings.