A Grammar of Freethought 10 – Cohen · Verses Across
Freethought · Atheism
A Grammar of Freethought 10Freethought and Death
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Freethought · Atheism
A Grammar of Freethought 10
Freethought and Death
CohenEnglish
In the early months of the European war a mortally wounded British soldier was picked up between the lines, after lying there unattended for two days. He died soon after he was brought in, and one of his last requests was that a copy of Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olive should be buried with him. He said the book had been with him all the time he had been in France, it had given him great comfort, and he wished it to be buried with him. Needless to say, his wish was carried out, and "somewhere in France" there lies a soldier with a copy of the Crown of Wild Olive clasped to his breast.
There is another story, of a commoner character, which, although different in form, is wholly similar in substance. This tells of the soldier who in his last moments asks to see a priest, accepts his ministrations with thankfulness, and dies comforted with the repetition of familiar formulae and customary prayers. In the one case a Bible and a priest; in the other a volume of lectures by one of the masters of English prose. The difference is, at first, striking, but there is an underlying agreement, and they may be used together to illustrate a single psychological principle.
Freethinker and Christian read the record of both cases, but it is the Freethinker alone whose philosophy of life is wide enough to explain both. The Freethinker knows that the feeling of comfort and the fact of truth are two distinct things. They may coalesce, but they may be as far asunder as the poles. A delusion may be as consoling as a reality provided it be accepted as genuine. The soldier with his copy of Ruskin does not prove the truth of the teachings of the Crown of Wild Olive, does not prove that Ruskin said the last word or even the truest word on the subjects dealt with therein. Neither does the consolation which religion gives some people prove the truth of its teachings. The comfort which religion brings is a product of the belief in religion. The consolation that comes from reading a volume of essays is a product of the conviction of the truth of the message delivered, or a sense of the beauty of the language in which the book is written. Both cases illustrate the power of belief, and that no Freethinker was ever stupid enough to question. The finest literature in the world would bring small comfort to a man who was convinced that he stood in deadly need of a priest, and the presence of a priest would be quite useless to a man who believed that all the religions of the world were so many geographical absurdities. Comfort does not produce conviction, it follows it. The truth and the social value of convictions are quite distinct questions.
There is here a confusion of values, and for this we have to thank the influence of the Churches. Because the service of the priest is sought by some we are asked to believe that it is necessary to all. But the essential value of a thing is shown, not by the number of people who get on with it, but by the number that can get on without it. The canon of agreement and difference is applicable whether we are dealing with human nature or conducting an ordinary scientific experiment. Thus, the indispensability of meat-eating is not shown by the number of people who swear that they cannot work without it, but by noting how people fare in its absence. The drinker does not confound the abstainer; it is the other way about. In the same way there is nothing of evidential value in the protests of those who say that human nature cannot get along without religion. We have to test the statement by the cases where religion is absent. And here, it is not the Christian that confounds the Freethinker, it is the Freethinker who confounds the Christian. If the religious view of life is correct the Freethinker should be a very rare bird indeed; he should be clearly recognizable as a departure from the normal type, and, in fact, he was always so represented in religious literature until he disproved the legend by multiplying himself with confusing rapidity. Now it is the Freethinker who will not fit into the Christian scheme of things. It is puzzling to see what can be done with a man who repudiates the religious idea in theory and fact, root and branch, and yet appears to be getting on quite well in its absence. That is the awkward fact that will not fit in with the religious theory. And, other things equal, one man without religion is greater evidential value than five hundred with it. All the five hundred prove at the most is that human nature can get on with religion, but the one case proves that human nature can get on without it, and that challenges the whole religious position. And unless we take up the rather absurd position that the non-religious man is a sheer abnormality, this consideration at once reduces religion from a necessity to a luxury or a dissipation.
The bearing of this on our attitude towards such a fact as death should be obvious. During the European war death from being an ever-present fact became an obtrusive one. Day after day we received news of the death of friend or relative, and those who escaped that degree of intimacy with the unpleasant visitor, met him in the columns of the daily press. And the Christian clergy would have been untrue to their traditions and to their interests--and there is no corporate body more alert in these directions--if they had not tried to exploit the situation to the utmost. There was nothing new in the tactics employed, it was the special circumstances that gave them a little more force than was usual. The following, for example, may be accepted as typical:--
The weight of our sorrow is immensely lightened if we can feel sure that one whom we have loved and lost has but ascended to spheres of further development, education, service, achievement, where, by and by, we shall rejoin him.
Quite a common statement, and one which by long usage has become almost immune from criticism. And yet it has about as much relation to fact as have the stories of death-bed conversions, or of people dying and shrieking for Jesus to save them. One may, indeed, apply a rough and ready test by an appeal to facts. How many cases has the reader of these lines come across in which religion has made people calmer and more resigned in the presence of death than others have been who were quite destitute of belief in religion? Of course, religious folk will repeat religious phrases, they will attend church, they will listen to the ministrations of their favourite clergyman, and they will say that their religion brings them comfort. But if one gets below the stereotyped phraseology and puts on one side also the sophisticated attitude in relation to religion, one quite fails to detect any respect in which the Freethinking parent differs from the Christian one. Does the religious parent grieve less? Does he bear the blow with greater fortitude? Is his grief of shorter duration? To anyone who will open his eyes the talk of the comfort of religion will appear to be largely cant. There are differences due to character, to temperament, to training; there is a use of traditional phrases in the one case that is absent in the other, but the incidence of a deep sorrow only serves to show how superficial are the vapourings of religion to a civilized mind, and how each one of us is thrown back upon those deeper feelings that are inseparable from a common humanity. The thought of an only son who is living with the angels brings no real solace to a parent's mind. Whatever genuine comfort is available must come from the thought of a life that has been well lived, from the sympathetic presence of friends, from the silent handclasp, which on such occasions is so often more eloquent than speech--in a word, from those healing currents that are part and parcel of the life of the race. A Freethinker can easily appreciate the readiness of a clergyman to help a mind that is suffering from a great sorrow, but it is the deliberate exploitation of human grief in the name and in the interests of religion, the manufacturing of cases of death-bed consolation and repentance, the citation of evidence to which the experience of all gives the lie, that fill one with a feeling akin to disgust.
The writer from whom I have quoted says:--
It is, indeed, possible for people who are Agnostic or unbelieving with regard to immortality to give themselves wholly to the pursuit of truth and to the service of their fellowmen, in moral earnestness and heroic endeavour; they may endure pain and sorrow with calm resignation, and toil on in patience and perseverance. The best of the ancient Stoics did so, and many a modern Agnostic is doing so to-day.
The significance of such a statement is in no wise diminished by the accompanying qualification that Freethinkers are "missing a joy which would have been to them a well-spring of courage and strength." That is a pure assumption. They who are without religious belief are conscious of no lack of courage, and they are oppressed by no feeling of despair. On this their own statement must be taken as final. Moreover, they are speaking as, in the main, those who are fully acquainted with the Christian position, having once occupied it. They are able to measure the relative value of the two positions. The Christian has no such experience to guide him. In the crises of life the behaviour of the Freethinker is at least as calm and as courageous as that of the Christian. And it may certainly be argued that a serene resignation in the presence of death is quite as valuable as the hectic emotionalism of cultivated religious belief.
What, after all, is there in the fact of natural death that should breed irresolution, rob us of courage, or fill us with fear? Experience proves there are many things that people dread more than death, and will even seek death rather than face, or, again, there are a hundred and one things to obtain which men and women will face death without fear. And this readiness to face or seek death does not seem to be at all determined by religious belief. The millions of men who faced death during the war were not determined in their attitude by their faith in religious dogmas. If questioned they might, in the majority of cases, say that they believed in a future life, and also that they found it a source of strength, but it would need little reflection to assess the reply at its true value. And as a racial fact, the fear of death is a negative quality. The positive aspect is the will to live, and that may be seen in operation in the animal world as well as in the world of man. But this has no reference, not even the remotest, to a belief in a future life. There are no "Intimations of Immortality" here. There is simply one of the conditions of animal survival, developed in man to the point at which its further strengthening would become a threat to the welfare of the species. The desire to live is one of the conditions that secures the struggle to live, and a species of animals in which this did not exist would soon go under before a more virile type. And it is one of the peculiarities of religious reasoning that a will to live here should be taken as clear proof of a desire to live somewhere else.
The fear of death could never be a powerful factor in life; existence would be next to impossible if it were. It would rob the organism of its daring, its tenacity, and ultimately divest life itself of value. Against that danger we have an efficient guard in the operation of natural selection. In the animal world there is no fear of death, there is, in fact, no reason to assume that there exists even a consciousness of death. And with man, when reflection and knowledge give birth to that consciousness, there arises a strong other regarding instinct which effectively prevents it assuming a too positive or a too dangerous form. Fear of death is, in brief, part of the jargon of priestcraft. The priest has taught it the people because it was to his interest to do so. And the jargon retains a certain currency because it is only the minority that rise above the parrot-like capacity to repeat current phrases, or who ever make an attempt to analyse their meaning and challenge their veracity.
The positive fear of death is largely an acquired mental attitude. In its origin it is largely motived by religion. Generally speaking there is no very great fear of death among savages, and among the pagans of old Greece and Rome there was none of that abject fear of death that became so common with the establishment of Christianity. To the pagan, death was a natural fact, sad enough, but not of necessity terrible. Of the Greek sculptures representing death Professor Mahaffy says: "They are simple pictures of the grief of parting, of the recollection of pleasant days of love and friendship, of the gloom of an unknown future. But there is no exaggeration in the picture." Throughout Roman literature also there runs the conception of death as the necessary complement of life. Pliny puts this clearly in the following: "Unto all, the state of being after the last day is the same as it was before the first day of life; neither is there any more variation of it in either body or soul after death than there was before death." Among the uneducated there does appear to have been some fear of death, and one may assume that with some of even of the educated this was not altogether absent. It may also be assumed that it was to this type of mind that Christianity made its first appeal, and upon which it rested its nightmare-like conception of death and the after-life. On this matter the modern mind can well appreciate the attitude of Lucretius, who saw the great danger in front of the race and sought to guard men against it by pointing out the artificiality of the fear of death and the cleansing effect of genuine knowledge.
So shalt thou feed on Death who feeds on men,
And Death once dead there's no more dying then.
The policy of Christianity was the belittling of this life and an exaggeration of the life after death, with a boundless exaggeration of the terrors that awaited the unwary and the unfaithful. The state of knowledge under Christian auspices made this task easy enough. Of the mediaeval period Mr. Lionel Cust, in his History of Engraving during the Fifteenth Century, says:--
The keys of knowledge, as of salvation, were entirely in the hands of the Church, and the lay public, both high and low, were, generally speaking, ignorant and illiterate. One of the secrets of the great power exercised by the Church lay in its ability to represent the life of man as environed from the outset by legions of horrible and insidious demons, who beset his path throughout life at every stage up to his very last breath, and are eminently active and often triumphant when man's fortitude is undermined by sickness, suffering, and the prospect of dissolution.
F. Parkes Weber also points out that, "It was in mediaeval Europe, under the auspices of the Catholic Church, that descriptions of hell began to take on their most horrible aspects." So, again, we have Sir James Frazer pointing out that the fear of death is not common to the lower races, and "Among the causes which thus tend to make us cowards may be numbered the spread of luxury and the doctrines of a gloomy theology, which by proclaiming the eternal damnation and excruciating torments of the vast majority of mankind has added incalculably to the dread and horror of death."
No religion has emphasized the terror of death as Christianity has done, and in the truest sense, no religion has so served to make men such cowards in its presence. Upon that fear a large part of the power of the Christian Church has been built, and men having become so obsessed with the fear of death and what lay beyond, it is not surprising that they should turn to the Church for some measure of relief. The poisoner thus did a lucrative trade by selling a doubtful remedy for his own toxic preparation. More than anything else the fear of death and hell laid the foundation of the wealth and power of the Christian Church. If it drew its authority from God, it derived its profit from the devil. The two truths that emerge from a sober and impartial study of Christian history are that the power of the Church was rooted in death and that it flourished in dishonour.
It was Christianity, and Christianity alone that made death so abiding a terror to the European mind. And society once Christianized, the uneducated could find no adequate corrective from the more educated. The baser elements which existed in the Pagan world were eagerly seized upon by the Christian writers and developed to their fullest extent. Some of the Pagan writers had speculated, in a more or less fanciful spirit, on a hell of a thousand years. Christianity stretched it to eternity. Pre-Christianity had reserved the miseries of the after-life for adults. Christian writers paved the floor of hell with infants, "scarce a span long." Plutarch and other Pagan moralists had poured discredit upon the popular notions of a future life. Christianity reaffirmed them with all the exaggerations of a diseased imagination. The Pagans held that death was as normal and as natural as life. Christianity returned to the conception current among savages and depicted death as a penal infliction. The Pagan art of living was superseded by the Christian art of dying. Human ingenuity exhausted itself in depicting the terrors of the future life, and when one remembers the powers of the Church, and the murderous manner in which it exercised them, there is small wonder that under the auspices of the Church the fear of death gained a strength it had never before attained.
Small wonder, then, that we still have with us the talk of the comfort that Christianity brings in the face of death. Where the belief in the Christian after-life really exists, the retention of a conviction of the saving power of Christianity is a condition of sanity. Where the belief does not really exist, we are fronted with nothing but a parrot-like repetition of familiar phrases. The Christian talk of comfort is thus, on either count, no more than a product of Christian education. Christianity does not make men brave in the presence of death, that is no more than a popular superstition. What it does is to cover a natural fact with supernatural terrors, and then exploit a frame of mind that it has created. The comfort is only necessary so long as the special belief is present. Remove that belief and death takes its place as one of the inevitable facts of existence, surrounded with all the sadness of a last farewell, but rid of all the terror that has been created by religion.
Our dying soldier, asking for a copy of the Crown of Wild Olive to be buried with him, and the other who calls for priestly ministrations, represent, ultimately, two different educational results. The one is a product of an educational process applied during the darkest periods of European history, and perpetuated by a training that has been mainly directed by the self-interest of a class. The other represents an educational product which stands as the triumph of the pressure of life over artificial dogmas. The Freethinker, because he is a Freethinker, needs none of those artificial stimulants for which the Christian craves. And he pays him the compliment--in spite of his protests--of believing that without his religion the Christian would display as much manliness in the face of death as he does himself. He believes there is plenty of healthy human nature in the average Christian, and the Freethinker merely begs him to give it a chance of finding expression. In this matter, it must be observed, the Freethinker makes no claim to superiority over the Christian; it is the Christian who forces that claim upon him. The Freethinker does not assume that the difference between himself and the Christian is nearly so great as the latter would have him believe. He believes that what is dispensable by the one, without loss, is dispensable by the other. If Freethinkers can devote themselves to "the pursuit of truth and the service of their fellow men," if they can "endure pain and sorrow with calm resignation," if they live with honour and face death without fear, I see no reason why the Christian should not be able to reach the same level of development. It is paying the Freethinker a "violent compliment," to use an expression of John Wesley's, to place him upon a level of excellence that is apparently so far above that of the average Christian. As a Freethinker, I decline to accept it. I believe that what the Freethinker is, the Christian may well become. He, too, may learn to do his duty without the fear of hell or the hope of heaven. All that is required is that he shall give his healthier instincts an opportunity for expression.
