ACCORDING to the ignorant prejudices which priestcraft has interwoven
through the human mind, the subjects treated of in the following
Lectures, are considered as sacred ground by the votaries of
superstition; and therefore every attempt to examine them with freedom,
or to expose them to the test of reason and free discussion, appears
shocking to the blindly bigoted, and alarming to interested priests.
But as neither complaisance nor forbearance is due to either of these
parties, the free inquirer, stimulated by the love of truth alone, will
be earnestly desirous of emancipating the minds of his fellows from the
fears and delusions of a sanguinary and distracting superstition, which
has no foundation in reason, either as regards the past or the future;
and from the gloomy grasp of its active, subtle, and vindictive
priesthood, who want nothing but the _power_ to imprison and roast
alive, as they did in former ages. Yet even in the present times of
science and reform, what has been the fate of the daring wight who
has ventured to expose the origin and shown the terrible effects of
Christianity during fifteen hundred years? He has drawn upon himself the
concentrated essence of malice from all the hireling sacerdotal orders,
abetted by their allies the aristocracy of every country, by whom he has
commonly been robbed and imprisoned, or otherwise ruined both in fortune
and reputation.*
* "Knowledge is called infidelity:
.... Hence the few who knew
Aught worth recording, and were fools enough
To vent their free opinions, what has been
Their recompense and their reward? The stake,
The fagot and the cross."
--Goethe's "Faust."
Infidelity--we say; but to what?
To vulgar superstitions enforced.
How does he incur the implacable vengeance of the theologians? Because
his search after truth, in the paths of Nature, has a direct tendency
to overturn that monstrous fabric of delusion, which enables so
many hundreds of thousands of them to live in ease and luxury, at a
prodigious expense to human industry. Why do the aristocracy and the
rich of the land persecute and pursue him to ruin? The aristocracy
being, in point of fact, the national rulers, as such, have hitherto
considered it necessary to support some kind of superstition (any sort
does equally well for the ignorant and vulgar), perceiving that, by
an iniquitous confederacy with its priesthood for mutual support, the
strongest arm of bad government is created. Moreover, the ranks of the
hierarchy are recruited by scions from aristocratical stocks, who are
called by the "Holy Ghost," to receive revenues sufficient for "_the
attraction of gentlemen_" and whether these be younger sons, brothers,
blackguards, or blockheads, it is all the same--they are good enough
for Mother Church. This is a powerful--an almost irresistible scheme
for fostering ignorance and falsehood--for upholding the foul connexion
between Church and State, and for perpetuating the mental slavery of the
people. The cause of truth and the welfare of society call loudly for
the exposure of these enormous corruptions; and the dangerous task will
be hailed and encouraged by every true friend to human improvement,
as the surest means of banishing from amongst men the blasting and
demoralizing belief in supenaturalism, for that is the principal, if not
the sole source of all the moral evils on the face of the earth.
It was the strikingly eloquent saying of Mr. Paine, that "prejudice is
the spider that spins its web on the mind." This entangling web is so
interwoven into the tender and plastic mind of youth by systematized
deception, that even the strongest intellect can hardly extricate itself
during life; and this spell holds equally good with Jew, Christian,
Mahommedan, or in any other of all the heaven-derived superstitions
that have afflicted the human race. These are the universal plagues--the
fatal barriers which stand perpetually between man and the harmonious
union which he would ever maintain with nature. All religions have in
succession sprung out of the superstitions which preceded them, and
there is no difficulty in proving that the Christian scheme is no
exception to the rule; for, on its very front, it carries the most
conclusive evidence of having been drawn out of the exhaustless ethnical
magazines of Paganism,* and metamorphosed there is not a vestige--not
an iota of Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, that did not
belong to Paganism, thousands of years before the reign of Tiberius;
and that all the "religion" practised in Europe is merely the exoteric
quackery of the old universal solar mythos. In like manner, it was only
the initiated Jews of their cabbala, who knew the secret of the same
mythos. This was called Gnosticism.
* Beyond the limits of the papal conclave of cardinals,
there is every reason to believe that very little true, or
esoteric Christianity is known; and that only among the
learned and most laborious in fearless research. In that
modern cabbala of the initiated, the secret is guarded with
the most solemn and profound vigilance; and the sacred trust
is, that into that unsightly and distorted texture of wild
and irrational superstition, which has deluded men by
teaching them to overlook the moral and physical realities
of nature--fixing their minds upon imaginary existence; and
by an intercourse which surpliced magicians have pretended
to, with a place called heaven, everything that is good and
congenial to man upon earth has been destroyed.
"For the the craft of priesthood that hath shaped
A future world,--the kings of distant days
Have countenanced the fraud, that fools content,
Might look for blessings in another scene,
And bear the yoke more tranquilly in this."
None but bigoted and priest-subdued minds will deny that it has been
Christian superstition, and its offspring, cherished ignorance, that
have distracted and made stages for theological gladiators, of Spain,
Portugal, and Ireland, for a succession of ages. By its natural tendency
to corrupt every kind of government, it has shed the blood of Erin's
priest-ridden sons, to satisfy the rapacious hierarchy of a more favored
sect! In England, at this moment, is it not a demonstrable fact that,
as theology enters into, and taints everything, so it is the ready and
insuperable barrier against every salutary improvement; for, whenever a
reform of bad laws and abuses is proposed, or any measure attempted
that would tend to the relief and benefit of the people at large, do not
Churchcraft, Aristocracy and Co. put their veto upon it immediately? *
It is the essence of this pretended science of theology, particularly
that of triune-Christianity, to oppose, and in everything to combat
the light of Nature and reason--to degrade and crush the human mind in
youth, as the best security against its future expansion; and hence it
is that, poor deluded man, in his abject and ludicrous terrors, has
been rendered the most bewildered, piteous, and contemptible of all
animals,** wishing to live for ever _after death_, yet afraid to die!
Such being the nature of this dark pestilence, the terrible evils it has
produced in Europe for so many centuries, and is still producing even to
this day are precisely what might be expected from such a cause.
* The demon of Toryism, which pervades Europe throughout, is
the legitimate offspring of Priestcraft, Aristocracy and
Co.--that is, a confederacy of the great monopolisers of the
land and the church hierarchy, for the honest purpose of
subjugating and fleecing the industrious wealth-producers.
** No man will ever write as a true philosopher who seeks
the approbation of more than one in every ten thousand of
men, as they are moulded at present by theology.
To any species of political tyranny that happened to be strong enough to
bestow riches and power upon its priests, it has ever been ready to
link itself; and to form the mainstay and support of that flagitious and
shameful policy which promotes ignorance, as the surest medium through
which to deceive mankind into submission to bad government. Even now,
in the nineteenth century, there are no legislative disputes and
dissensions in which it is not the perpetual bone of contention--no
national interests discussed wherein it forms not the most inflaming
ingredient.* From a cause that is thus essentially and innately evil,
such effects must emanate of necessity; and, therefore, there would be
the highest folly in expecting that this baleful superstition can ever
change, or be anything else than that which it hitherto has been--a
burden and a scourge to every country _in the exact ratio of its
influence_.
The reproachful canting cry of heretic, infidel, atheist, etc., will be
raised against the author of these lectures, by every fiery intolerant
bigot into whose hands they may fall. But he alone is the true infidel
who forsakes the laws of his Nature, and gives up his mind to a belief
in fabulous and demoralising legends, which contradict all experience,
and stand in opposition to the testimony of his own senses and reason.**
In regard to the term Atheist, which, of all others, is meant to be
the most opprobrious, let our angry zealot, in the first place, define
precisely what he means by the word:--if he explains it by saying "it
signifies one who supposes that there is no God;" we reply that it is
impossible to understand this definition until he declares in express
and intelligible terms what he means by the word "God." If it is used
to designate that incomprehensible POWER by which the universe is ruled,
there cannot be such a thing as an Atheist in existence.
* It was formerly maintained by hangmen and funeral piles,
and now by clerical riches and power, hereditary lawgivers,
harsh judges, ignorant juries, fines and imprisonments.
** Diderot, in illustrating the conflict of priests against
reason, says, "Bewildered in an immense forest during the
night, and having only one small torch for my guide, a
stranger approaches, and thus addresses me,--'Friend, blow
out thy light if thou wouldst make sure of the right
path.'"--This stranger was a priest.
Do the Jews, Christians, and Mahommedans, by their wild and degrading
anthropomorphism, or by forming their deity in the likeness of any
entity that the human mind can conceive, evince a worthy, or anything
approaching to an adequate, conception of the unknown,* all-ruling
_Power_? Quite the contrary; for in absurdly imbodying it as a
located Being, or by conferring personification in any shape or manner
whatsoever, they impiously create one of those idols which they pretend
to abhor, and become themselves idolators. These alone are the real
Atheists, as they not only endow their man-God with the worst of human
frailties and passions, but contemn and repudiate the true revelation of
Nature. The mean and grovelling notions which the half-inch mind of the
priest-led fanatic has of his God (for instance the Jewish one), form a
striking contrast with the elevated and pure ideas which fill the mind
of Nature's free votary, towards the one universal Power,--a veneration
infinitely too exalted to allow for a moment the puerile and ridiculous
notion of its being personified in the form or likeness of any existing
thing.**
* What do theologues now know of that which they call Deity
more than was known to the philosophic Brahmin, Egyptian, or
Zoroastrian, ten thousand years ago? Absolutely nothing.
What does the pampered Oxonian professor of theology know
more of it than the meanest cow-boy in England? Absolutely
nothing.
** The deist talks of "Nature's God," that is, the powers of
Nature personified, for it is impossible it should mean
anything else. As a poetic figure, we have no objection to
this.
But the priests of all religions that have at any time plagued the
earth, have agreed in the absolute necessity of inventing such imbodied
Gods or idols; and whether they be Jupiters or Jehovahs is no great
matter, as they answer equally well as mystic sources from whence to
derive the usurped power of the sacerdotal orders; and as relentless
tormentors, to keep the minds of their frenzied dupes in perpetual
terror. Without these pre-requisities, their trade would soon come to
an end. Hence arises their well-known malignity against all who are
sceptical respecting the existence of such _supernatural personages_;
for those who have doubts about that which is indispensable to the
theologians, are denounced by them as abominable Atheists, which, being
explained, designates the few unfettered, ingenuous minds, who are
capable of perceiving the matchless absurdity of attempting, by
any entity, or personified representation whatsoever, to convey the
slightest rational idea of that incomprehensible Power, by which
countless millions of worlds are ruled.