A Grammar of Freethought 19 – Cohen · Verses Across
Freethought · Atheism
A Grammar of Freethought 19What Is to Follow Religion?
18
Freethought · Atheism
A Grammar of Freethought 19
What Is to Follow Religion?
CohenEnglish
Books on the future of religion are numerous, and to one blessed with a sense of humour, full of entertainment. They are also not without instruction of a psychological kind. Reliable information as to what the future will be like they certainly do not give, but they do unlock the innermost desires of the writers thereof. They express what the writers of the prophecies would like the future to be. And they create the future state on earth exactly as devout believers have built up the character of their heaven beyond the clouds. Every form of faith which they disagree with is rejected as not possessing the element of vitality, with the result that there is only their own form left. And that, they triumphantly proclaim, is the religion of the future.
But the future has an old-fashioned and disconcerting habit of disappointing expectations. The factors that govern human nature are so many and so complex, their transmutations and combinations are so numerous, that it is as well to tread cautiously, and to a very considerable extent leave the future to take care of itself. At the utmost all that we can do with safety is to detect tendencies, and to hasten or retard their development as we think them good or bad. The factors that make up a science of human nature are not to-day so well-known and so well understood that we can depict the state of society a century hence with the same certainty that we can foretell the position of the planet Venus in the year 2000.
My aim in this chapter is, therefore, not to describe precisely what will be the state of society when religious belief has ceased to exist. It is rather to offer a general reply to those gloomy individuals who declare that when the aims of the Freethinker are fully realized we shall find that in destroying religion we have destroyed pretty much all that makes human life worth living. We have managed to empty the baby out with the bath.
The most general form of this fear is expressed in calling Freethought a creed of negation, or a policy of destruction, and assuring the world that mankind can never rest content with such things. That may be quite true, but we fail to see in what way it touches Freethought. A Freethought that is wholly destructive, that is a mere negation, is a creation of the pulpit, and belongs to the same class of imaginative efforts as the pietistic outbursts of famous unbelievers on their death-beds. That such things could have obtained so wide a currency, and be looked upon as quite natural occurrences, offers demonstrative evidence of the paralyzing power of Christian belief on the human mind.
As a matter of fact, neither reformers in general nor Freethinkers in particular deserve the charge of being mere destructionists. They are both far more interested in building up than they are in pulling down, and it is sheer lack of understanding that fixes the eyes of so many on one aspect of the reformer's task and so steadily ignores the other one. Of course, the phenomenon is not an unusual one. In a revolution it is the noise, the street fighting, the breaking of old rules and the shattering of established institutions that attract the most attention. The deeper aims of the revolutionists, the hidden social forces of which the revolution is the expression, the work of reconstruction that is attempted, escape notice. The old order shrieks its loudest at the threat of dissolution, the new can hardly make its voice heard. Carlyle's division of the people into the shrieking thousands and the dumb millions is eternally true. And even the millions are impressed with the importance of the thousands because of the noise they are able to make.
Actually the charge to which reformers in general are open is that of a too great zeal for reconstruction, a belittling of the difficulties that stand in the way of a radical change. They are apt to make too small an allowance for the occurrence of the unexpected and the incalculable, both of which are likely to interfere with the fruition of the most logical of schemes. And they are so obsessed with reconstruction that destruction seems no more than an incident by the way. A little less eagerness for reconstruction might easily result in a greater concern for what is being pulled down. The two greatest "destructive" movements of modern times--the French revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolution--both illustrate this point. In both movements the leading figures were men who were obsessed with the idea of building a new world. They saw this new world so clearly that the old one was almost ignored. And this is equally true of the literature that precedes and is the mouthpiece of such movements. The leading appeal is always to what is to be, what existed is only used as a means of enforcing the desirability of the new order. It is, in short, the mania for reconstruction that is chiefly responsible for the destruction which so horrifies those whose vision can never see anything but the world to which they have become accustomed.
In parenthesis it may be remarked that it is a tactical blunder to make one's attack upon an existing institution or idea depend upon the attractiveness of the ideal state depicted. It enables critics to fix attention on the precise value of the proposed remedy instead of discussing whether the suggested reform is necessary. The attacker is thus placed in the position of the defender and the point at issue obscured. This is, that a certain institution or idea has outgrown its usefulness and its removal is necessary to healthy growth. And it may well be that its removal is all that is required to enable the social organism to function naturally and healthily. The outworn institution is often the grit in the machine that prevents it running smoothly.
This by the way. The fact remains that some of our best teachers have shown themselves apt to stumble in the matter. Without belief in religion they have too often assumed that its removal would leave a serious gap in life, and so would necessitate the creation of a number of substitutes to "take the place of religion." Thus, no less profound a thinker than Herbert Spencer remarks in the preface to his Data of Ethics:--
Few things can happen more disastrous than the death and decay of a regulative system no longer fit, before another and a better regulative system has grown up to replace it. Most of those who reject the current creed appear to assume that the controlling agency furnished by it may safely be thrown aside, and the vacancy left unfilled by any other controlling agency.
Had Spencer first of all set himself to answer the question, "What is it that the Freethinker sets himself to remove?" or even the question, "What is the actual control exerted by religion?" one imagines that the passage above given would either never have been written or would have been differently worded. And when a man such as Spencer permits himself to put the matter in this form one need not be surprised at the ordinary believer assuming that he has put an unanswerable question to the Freethinker when he asks what it is that we propose to put in the place of religion, with the assumption that the question is on all fours with the enquiry as to what substitutes we have for soap and coal if we destroy all stocks of these articles.
The question assumes more than any scientific Freethinker would ever grant. It takes for granted the statement that religion does at present perform some useful function in the State. And that is the very statement that is challenged. Nor does the Freethinker deny that some "controlling agency" is desirable. What he does say is that in the modern State, at least, religion exerts no control for good, that its activities make for stagnation or retrogression, that its removal will make for the healthier operation of other agencies, and that to these other and non-religious agencies belongs the credit which is at present given to religion.
Moreover, Spencer should not have needed reminding that systems of thought while they have any vital relation to life will successfully defy all attempts at eradication. The main cause of the decay of religion is not the attack made upon it by the forces of reasoned unbelief. That attack is largely the conscious expression of a revolt against a system that has long lost all touch with reality, and so has ceased to derive support from current life and thought. From this point of view the reformer is what he is because he is alive to the drift of events, susceptible to those social influences which affect all more or less, and his strength is derived from the thousand and one subtle influences that extend from generation to generation and express themselves in what we are pleased to call the story of civilization.
But the quotation given does represent a fairly common point of view, and it is put in a form that is most favourable to religious pretensions. For it assumes that religion does really in our modern lives perform a function so useful that it would be the height of folly to remove it before we had something equally useful to take its place. But something in the place of religion is a thing that no scientific Freethinker desires. It is not a new religion, or another religion that the world needs, but the removal of religion from the control of life, and a restatement of those social qualities that have hitherto been expressed in a religious form so that their real nature will be apparent to all. Then we shall at last begin to make progress with small chance of getting a serious set-back.
This does not, of course, deny that there are many things associated with religion for the absence of which society would have cause for regret. It is part of the Freethought case that this is so. And it may also be admitted that large numbers of people honestly believe that their religious beliefs serve as motives to the expression of their better qualities. That, again, is part of the delusion we are fighting. We cannot agree that religion, as such, contains anything that is essentially useful to the race. It has maintained its power chiefly because of its association with serviceable social qualities, and it is part of the work of Freethought to distinguish between what properly belongs to religion and what has become associated with it during its long history. At present the confusion exists and the fact need cause no surprise. At best the instincts of man are deep-laid, the motives to conduct are mostly of an obscure kind, and it would be cause for surprise if, seeing how closely religion is associated with every phase of primitive life, and how persistent are primitive modes of thinking, there were not this confusion between the actual part played by religion in life and the part assigned it by tradition.
At any rate, it is idle to argue as though human conduct was governed by a single idea--that of religion. At the most religious beliefs represent no more than a part of the vast mass of influences that determine human effort. And when we see how largely religious beliefs are dependent upon constant stimulation and protection for their existence, it seems extremely unlikely that they can hold a very vital relation to life. The impotency of religion in matters of conduct is, too, decisively shown in the fact that it is quite impossible to arrange men and women in a scale of values that shall correspond with the kind or the fervency of their religious beliefs. A religious person may be a useful member of society or he may be a quite useless one. A profound religious conviction may be accompanied by the loftiest of ideals or by the meanest of aims. The unbeliever may be, and often is, a better man than the believer. No business man would ever think of making a man's religion the condition of taking one into his service, or if he did the general opinion would be that it indicated bigotry and not shrewdness. We find it quite impossible to determine the nature of religious belief by watching the way people behave. In no stage of social life does religion provide us with anything in the nature of a differentiating factor.
It was argued by the late Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, himself a Freethinker, that as men have for a long time been in the habit of associating moral feelings with the belief in God, a severance of the two may entail moral disaster. It is, of course, hard to say what may not happen in certain cases, but it is quite certain that such a consequence could not follow on any general scale. One has only to bring a statement of this kind down from the region of mere theory to that of definite fact to see how idle the fear is. If, instead of asserting in a vague way that the moral life is in some way bound up with religious beliefs we ask what moral action or moral disposition is so connected, we realize the absurdity of the statement. Professor Leuba well says:--
Our alleged essential dependence upon transcendental beliefs is belied by the most common experiences of daily life. Who does not feel the absurdity of the opinion that the lavish care for a sick child by a mother is given because of a belief in God and immortality? Are love of father and mother on the part of children, affection and serviceableness between brothers and sisters, straightforwardness and truthfulness between business men essentially dependent upon these beliefs? What sort of person would be the father who would announce divine punishment or reward in order to obtain the love and respect of his children? And if there are business men preserved from unrighteousness by the fear of future punishment, they are far more numerous who are deterred by the threat of human law. Most of them would take their chances with heaven a hundred times before they would once with society, or perchance with the imperative voice of humanity heard in the conscience (The Belief in God and Immortality, p. 323).
And in whatever degree the fear may be justified in special cases, it applies to any attempt whatever that may be made to disturb existing conventions. Luther complained that some of his own converts were behaving worse as Protestants than they behaved as Catholics, and even in the New Testament we have the same unfavourable comparison made of many of Christ's followers when compared with the Pagans around them. A transference of allegiance may easily result in certain ill-balanced minds kicking over the traces, but in the long run, and with the mass, the deeper social needs are paramount. There was the same fear expressed concerning man's political and social duties when the relations of Church and State were first challenged. Yet the connection between the two has been quite severed in some countries, and very much weakened in many more, without society in the least suffering from the change. On the contrary, one may say that man's duties towards the State have been more intelligently perceived and more efficiently discharged in proportion as those religious considerations that once ruled have been set on one side.
The reply of the Freethinker to the question of "What is to follow religion?" may, therefore, easily be seen. In effect it is, "Nothing at all." In any study of social evolution the properly equipped student commences his task with the full conviction that whatever the future may be like its germs are already with us. If nature does not "abhor a vacuum" it has at least an intense dislike to absolute beginnings. The future will be an elaboration of the present as the present is an elaboration of the past. For good or evil that principle remains unimpeachable.
The essential question is not, What is to follow religion? but rather what will the disappearance of religion affect that is of real value to the world. The moment the question is raised in this unambiguous manner the answer suggests itself. For assume that by some strange and unexpected happening there set in a raging epidemic of common sense. Assume that as a consequence of this the world was to awake with its mind completely cleared of all belief in religion. What would be the effect of the transformation? It is quite clear that it would not affect any of the fundamental processes of life. The tragi-comedy of life would still be performed, it would run through the same number of acts, and it would end in the same happy or unhappy manner. Human beings would still get born, they would grow up, they would fall in love, they would marry, they would beget their kind, and they would in turn pass away to make room for another generation. Birth and death, with all their accompanying feelings, would remain. Human society would continue, all the glories of art, the greatness of science, all the marvels and wonders of the universe would be there whether we believed in a God or not. The only difference would be that we should no longer associate these things with the existence of a God. And in that respect we should be following the same course of development that has been followed in many other departments of life. We do not nowadays associate the existence of spirits with a good or a bad harvest, the anger of God with an epidemic, or the good-will of deity with a spell of fine weather. Yet in each case there was once the same assumed association between these things, and the same fears of what would happen if that association was discarded. We are only carrying the process a step further; all that is required is a little courage to take the step. In short, there is not a single useful or worthy quality, intellectual or moral, that can possibly suffer from the disappearance of religion.
On this point we may again quote from Professor Leuba:--
The heroism of religious martyrs is often flaunted as marvellous instances of the unique sustaining strength derived from the belief in a personal God and the anticipation of heaven. And yet for every martyr of this sort there has been one or more heroes who has risked his life for a noble cause, without the comfort which transcendental beliefs may bring. The very present offers almost countless instances of martyrs to the cause of humanity, who are strangers to the idea of God and immortality. How many men and women in the past decade gladly offered and not infrequently lost their lives in the cause of freedom, or justice, or science? In the monstrous war we are now witnessing, is there a less heroic defence of home and nation, and less conscious self-renunciation among the non-believers than among the professed Christians? Have modern nations shown a more intense or a purer patriotism than ancient Greece and Rome, where men did not pretend to derive inspiration for their deeds of devotion in the thoughts of their gods.... The fruitful deeds of heroism are at bottom inspired not by the thought of God or a future life, but by innate tendencies or promptings that have reference to humanity. Self sacrifice, generosity, is rooted in nothing less superficial and accidental than social instincts older than the human race, for they are already present in a rudimentary form in the higher animals.
These are quite familiar statements to all Freethinkers, but to a great many Christians they may come with all the force of a new revelation.
In the earlier pages of this work I have given what I conceive solid reasons for believing that every one of the social and individual virtues is born of human intercourse and can never be seriously deranged for any length of time, so long as human society endures. The scale of values may well undergo a change with the decay of religion, but that is something which is taking place all the time, provided society is not in a state of absolute stagnation. There is not any change that takes place in society that does not affect our view of the relative value of particular qualities. The value we place upon personal loyalty to a king is not what it once was. At one stage a man is ready to place the whole of his fortune at the disposal of a monarch merely because he happens to be his "anointed" king. To-day, the man who had no better reason for doing that would be looked upon as an idiot. Unquestioning obedience to established authority, which once played so high a part in the education of children, is now ranked very low by all who understand what genuine education means. From generation to generation we go on revising our estimate of the value of particular qualities, and the world is the better for the revision. And that is what we may assume will occur with the decay of religious belief. We shall place a higher value upon certain qualities than we do at present and a lower value upon others. But there will be no discarding the old qualities and creation of new ones. Human nature will be the same then as now, as it has been for thousands of years. The nature of human qualities will be more directly conceived and more intelligently applied, and that will be an undesirable development only for those who live by exploiting the ignorance and the folly of mankind.
Thus, if one may venture upon a prophecy with regard to the non-religious society of the future it may be said with confidence that what are known as the ascetic qualities are not likely to increase in value. The cant of Christianity has always placed an excessive value upon what is called self-sacrifice. But there is no value in self-sacrifice, as such. At best it is only of value in exceptional circumstances, as an end it is worse than useless, and it may easily degenerate from a virtue to a vice. It assumed high rank with Christian teachers for various reasons. First, it was an expression of that asceticism which lies at the root of Christianity, second, because Christianity pictured this world as no more than a preparation for another, and taught that the deprivations and sufferings of the present life would be placed to a credit account in the next one, and third, because it helped men and women to tolerate injustice in this world and so helped the political game that governments and the Christian Church have together played. A really enlightened society would rank comparatively low the virtue of asceticism. Its principle would be not self-sacrifice but self-development.
What must result from this is an enlargement of our conception of justice and also of social reform. Both of these things occupy a very low place in the Christian scale of virtues. Social reform it has never bothered seriously about, and in its earlier years simply ignored. A people who were looking for the end of the world, whose teaching was that it was for man's spiritual good to suffer, and who looked for all help to supernatural intervention, could never have had seriously in their minds what we understand by social reform. And so with the conception of Justice. There is much of this in pre-Christian literature, and its entrance into the life and thought of modern Europe can be traced directly back to Greek and Roman sources. But the work of the Christian, while it may have been to heal wounds, was not to prevent their infliction. It was to minister to poverty, not to remove those conditions that made poverty inevitable.
A Spanish writer has put this point so well that I cannot do better than quote him. He says:--
The notion of justice is as entirely foreign to the spirit of Christianity as is that of intellectual honesty. It lies wholly outside the field of its ethical vision. Christianity--I am not referring to interpretations disclaimed as corruptions or applications which may be set down to frailty and error, but to the most idealized conceptions of its substance and the most exalted manifestations of its spirit--Christianity has offered consolation and comfort to men who suffered under injustice, but of that injustice itself it has remained absolutely incognizant. It has called upon the weary and heavy laden, upon the suffering and the afflicted, it has proclaimed to them the law of love, the duty of mercy and forgiveness, the Fatherhood of God; but in that torment of religious and ethical emotion which has impressed men as the summit of the sublime, and been held to transcend all other ethical ideals, common justice, common honesty have no place. The ideal Christian is seen in the saint who is seen descending like an angel from heaven amid the welter of human misery, among the victims of ruthless oppression and injustice ... but the cause of that misery lies wholly outside the range of his consciousness; no glimmer of right or wrong enters into his view of it. It is the established order of things, the divinely appointed government of the world, the trial laid upon sinners by divine ordinance. St. Vincent de Paul visits the hell of the French galleys; he proclaims the message of love and calls sinners to repentance; but to the iniquity which creates and maintains that hell he remains absolutely indifferent. He is appointed Grand Almoner to his Most Christian Majesty. The world might groan in misery under the despotism of oppressors, men's lives and men's minds might be enslaved, crushed and blighted; the spirit of Christianity would go forth and comfort them, but it would never occur to it to redress a single one of those wrongs. It has remained unconscious of them. To those wrongs, to men's right to be delivered from them, it was by nature completely blind. In respect to justice, to right and wrong, the spirit of Christianity is not so much immoral as amoral. The notion was as alien to it as the notion of truth. Included in its code was, it might be controversially alleged, an old formula, "the golden rule," a commonplace of most literature, which was popular in the East from China to Asia Minor; but that isolated precept was never interpreted in the sense of justice. It meant forgiveness, forbearing, kindness, but never mere justice, common equity; those virtues were far too unemotional in aspect to appeal to the religious enthusiast. The renunciation of life and all its vanities, the casting overboard of all sordid cares for its maintenance, the suppression of desire, prodigal almsgiving, the consecration of a life, the value of which had disappeared in his eyes, to charity and love, non-resistance, passive obedience, the turning of the other cheek to an enemy, the whole riot of these hyperbolic ethical emotions could fire the Christian consciousness, while it remained utterly unmoved by every form of wrong, iniquity and injustice (Dr. Falta de Gracia. Cited by Dr. R. Briffault, The Making of Humanity, pp. 334-5.)
That, we may assume, will be one of the most striking consequences of the displacement of Christianity in the social economy. There will be less time wasted on what is called philanthropic work--which is often the most harmful of all social labours--and more attention to the removal of those conditions that have made the display of philanthropy necessary. There will not be less feeling for the distressed or the unfortunate, but it will be emotion under the guidance of the intellect, and the dominant feeling will be that of indignation against the conditions that make human suffering and degradation inevitable, rather than a mere gratification of purely egoistic feeling which leaves the source of the evil untouched.
That will mean a rise in the scale of values of what one may call the intellectual virtues--the duty of truthseeking and truth speaking. Hitherto the type of character held up for admiration by Christianity has been that of the blind believer who allowed nothing to stand in the way of his belief, who required no proofs of its truth and allowed no disproofs to enter his mind. A society in which religion does not hold a controlling place is not likely to place a very high value upon such precepts as "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed," or "Though he slay me yet will I trust him." But a very high value will be placed upon the duty of investigation and the right of criticism. And one cannot easily over-estimate the consequences of a generation or two brought up in an atmosphere where such teachings obtain. It would mean a receptiveness to new ideas, a readiness to overhaul old institutions, a toleration of criticism such as would rapidly transform the whole mental atmosphere and with it enormously accentuate the capacity for, and the rapidity of, social progress.
There is also to be borne in mind the effect of the liberation of the enormous amount of energy at present expended in the service of religion. Stupid religious controversialists often assume that it is part of the Freethinker's case that religion enlists in its service bad men, and much time is spent in proving that religious people are mostly worthy ones. That could hardly be otherwise in a society where the overwhelming majority of men and women profess a religion of some sort. But that is, indeed, not the Freethinker's case at all, and if the badness of some religious people is cited it is only in answer to the foolish argument that religionists are better than others. The real complaint against religion is of a different kind altogether. Just as the worst thing that one can say about a clergyman intellectually is, not that he does not believe in what he preaches, but that he does, so the most serious indictment of current religion is not that it enlists in its service bad characters, but that it dissipates the energy of good men and women in a perfectly useless manner. The dissipation of Christian belief means the liberating of a store of energy for service that is at present being expended on ends that are without the least social value. A world without religion would thus be a world in which the sole ends of endeavour would be those of human betterment or human enlightenment, and probably in the end the two are one. For there is no real betterment without enlightenment, even though there may come for a time enlightenment without betterment. It would leave the world with all the means of intellectual and aesthetic and social enjoyment that exist now, and one may reasonably hope that it will lead to their cultivation and diffusion over the whole of society.
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