CONTEMPORARY OPINION
_The Vanguard_
_Let us make no mistake--great minds are skeptical.... The strength
and the freedom which arise from exceptional power of thought
express themselves in skepticism.... A mind which aspires to great
things and is determined to achieve them is of necessity
skeptical_.
NIETZSCHE.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease
born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I
cannot, however, deny that it has made _some_ contributions to
civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused
Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they
became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to
acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
MAX CARL OTTO
It is my conviction that the happiest and noblest life attainable by men
and women is jeopardized by reliance upon a superhuman, cosmic being for
guidance and help. I know, of course, that God has been defined in
various terms. I do not choose among them. For it seems to me
indisputable that those who turn to God, however God be defined, do so
because, consciously or unconsciously, they seek there the satisfaction
of wants, the worth of living, and security for what they passionately
prize, which they have not found and despair of finding in the human
venture as they know it. Reliance upon God for what life does not
afford, has, in my opinion, harmful consequences. It diverts attention
from the specific conditions upon which a better or a worse life
depends; it leads men to regard themselves as spectators of a course of
events which they in reality help to determine; it makes the highest
human excellence consist in acquiescence in the supposed will of a being
that is defined as not human, a being that is above the driving force of
impulse, that does not experience vacillating moods or conflicting
desires, that is never harassed by doubts or misled by ignorance....
Theism is in essence repressive, prohibitory, ascetic. The outcome of
its influence is that expertness in practical living and expertness in
evaluating life, instead of uniting to take advantage of a common
opportunity, are set against each other. This is the profound dualism
which remains to be mastered. It can be mastered by the concentration
upon human needs and powers.
JOHN DEWEY
The method we term "scientific" forms for the modern man (and a man is
not modern merely because he lives in 1931) the sole, dependable means
of disclosing the realities of existence. It is the sole authentic mode
of revelation. This possession of a new method, to the use of which no
limits can be put, signifies a new idea of the nature and possibilities
of experience. It imports a new morale of confidence, control, and
security.
C. E. M. JOAD
All through the century (nineteenth), whenever and wherever there is a
movement for change and betterment, the clergy are found opposing it. In
this they are merely carrying on the tradition of their order. When one
looks back over history, one realizes that there is scarcely any
discovery which science has made for human advancement and happiness
which churchmen and theologians have not violently opposed. Not content
with burning each other, they burnt the men who discovered the earth's
motion, burnt the men who made the first tentative beginnings of physics
and chemistry, burnt the men who laid the foundations of our medical
knowledge.... Bad as has been the church's record in the past, it is not
greatly improved in the present.... For two thousand years teachers and
preachers have striven, by inculcating the principles and precepts of
Christianity, to mould men's character and to improve their conduct; yet
we still have our prisons, our judges, and our wars, and it remains
today, as it has done for two thousand years past, an arguable question
whether men are better or worse than they were before Christianity was
introduced.
WILLIAM PEPPERELL MONTAGUE
If we will for a moment imagine the Bible to have come suddenly to our
attention today, unencumbered by a tradition of divine authority, and
with no more sacredness than a newly discovered writing of ancient China
or Egypt, we can see quite readily that it would occur to nobody who
took the work merely on its merits either to accept it as scientifically
and historically true, or to twist its statements into a far-fetched
allegory of the truth.
Religion will be _outmoded_; and its tidings of escape to another and
better world will ring cold in the ears of those who love this. The new
worldliness that religion must face is based on the faith that there is
not only no _place_ for heaven, but no _need_ for it. Humanity,
adolescent at last, has tasted the first fruits of the victory of
secular intelligence over nature, and dreams grandly of far greater
victories to come.
IRWIN EDMAN
The hope of the world certainly lies in intelligence. Certainly, there
is no hope anywhere else. I cannot look to anything so remotely
definable as God for aid, nor do I ever regret not being able to do so.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Many reasons have been adduced to explain why people do not go to church
as much as they once did. Surely the most important reason is that they
are not so certain that they are going to meet God when they go to
church. If they had that certainty they would go. If they really
believed that they were being watched by a Supreme Being who is more
powerful than all the kings of the earth put together, if they really
believed that not only their actions but their secret thoughts were
known and would be remembered by the creator, and ultimate judge of the
universe, there would be no complaint whatever about church attendance.
The most worldly would be in the front pews, and preachers would not
have to resort so often to their rather desperate expedients to attract
an audience. If the conviction were there that the creed professed was
invincibly true, the modern congregation would not come to church, as
they usually do today, to hear the preacher and to listen to the music.
They would come to worship God.
H. L. MENCKEN
Alone among the great nations of history we have got rid of religion as
a serious scourge, and by the simple process of reducing it to a petty
nuisance. For men become civilized, not in proportion to their
willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances,
the heavier his load of faith. When Copernicus proved that the earth
revolved around the sun, he did not simply prove that the earth revolved
around the sun, he also proved that the so-called revelation of God, as
contained in the Old Testament, was rubbish. The first fact was
relatively trivial: it made no difference to the average man then, as it
makes no difference to him today. But, the second fact was of stupendous
importance, for it disposed at one stroke of a mass of bogus facts that
had been choking the intelligence and retarding the progress of humanity
for a millennium and a half....
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to
mankind; that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the
ethical side have been more than overborne by the damage it has done to
clear and honest thinking.
HORACE M. KALLEN
It is a significant trait of history that the times and nations most
distinguished for piety are also most distinguished for backwardness.
Czarist Russia, and contemporary Spain are near examples, but
illustrations may be drawn from any part of the world; the Southern
States of the United States of America, for instance. Everywhere the
scope and intensity of belief in the supernatural seem to be directly
proportional to the misery and weakness of the believer (one compensates
for the other). Freedom of speech and of press and discussion which
means generally restraint of all interference in the amicable threshing
out of conflicting opinions, means, with respect to religious beliefs,
refraining from talking, writing or discussing candidly at all. In every
society belief in the supernatural is privileged belief, and there
accrue to it all the advantages and disadvantages of privilege.... But
mystics and religionists are not silent. On the contrary, they become,
having passed through a religious experience, voluble.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
I do not believe we can have any freedom at all in the philosophical
sense, for we act not only under external compulsion, but also by inner
necessity.... I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the
objects of his creation, whose purposes are modelled after our own, a
God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I
believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although
feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It
is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life
perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous
structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly
to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested
in nature.
LUTHER BURBANK
Our lives as we live them are passed on to others, whether in physical
or mental forms tinging all future lives forever. This should be enough
for one who lives for truth and service to his fellow passengers on the
way. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any
interest to him. The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of
truth itself, wherever it may lead. Every normal human being has ideals,
one or many, to look up to, to reach up to, to grow up to. Religion
refers to the sentiments and feelings; science refers to the
demonstrated everyday laws of nature. Feelings are all right, if one
does not get drunk on them. Prayer may be elevating if combined with
works, and they who labor with head, hands, or feet have faith and are
generally quite sure of an immediate and favorable reply.
Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often
wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the
great ocean of scientific truth as they would a cold bath plunge.
SIR ARTHUR KEITH
Certainly the creative power which is at work bears no resemblance to
the personal God postulated by the Hebrews, and the modern man of
science cannot fit Him into the scheme of the world as he knows it. He
has to try to reconceive God, and when he has done so, nothing but an
unsatisfying abstraction is left. It is unsatisfying because even the
greatest men of science, although they possess the intellects of giants,
have still the hearts of children. And children cling to that which is
endowed with a human shape and has been given the warmth of living
flesh.
H. LEVY
A structure of absolute moral and religious beliefs erected initially as
beyond criticism, imposed upon a changing society from above rather
than emerging from below, has no affinity with science, whatever
personal solace and comfort it may provide, for it assumes that the
facts of life, including the material facts of the world, can be
compassed within a rigidly prescribed framework. It has taken several
centuries of history for the scientific movement to be emancipated from
just these cramping human assumptions. The writings of many scientists
show, alas, that the emancipation has not yet been completed.
J. B. S. HALDANE
We know very little about what may be called the geography of the
invisible world. The religions, if I may continue the metaphor, have
covered the vacant spaces of its map with imaginary monsters; the
philosophies have ruled them with equally imaginary parallels of
latitude. But both have affirmed, in opposition to the so-called
practical man, that the meaning of the visible world is to be found in
the invisible. That has been the secret of their success. They have
failed when they tried either to describe the details of the visible
world or to dictate the details of conduct in it. The churches are half
empty today because their creeds are full of obsolete science, and their
ethical codes are suited to a social organization far simpler than that
of today.
HOWARD W. HAGGARD, M. D.
When in the fifth century the Roman Empire fell at the hands of the
barbarians, rational medicine ceased altogether in Europe. Although the
Christian religion survived, the Christian theology of that time denied
liberty of conscience and taught superstitions and dogma. It was
bitterly hostile to the scientific spirit. All knowledge necessary to
man's salvation, physical as well as spiritual, was to be found in the
Bible as the Church interpreted the Bible. Since the teachings of the
Church were supposed to be sufficient for all needs, there was no excuse
for observations and experimental investigations. The inquisitive spirit
was wholly suppressed, the rigorous methods of Greek logic were for many
centuries lost from European civilization, and intelligent thought was
replaced by revelation, speculation, tradition, and subservience to the
written word of the Bible, to the writings of saints, and later, in
medical matters, to the work of Galen. The theological beliefs of the
time became the controlling influence in Western civilization.
HARRY ELMER BARNES
There has never been any religious crisis of this kind before, and any
attempt at exact comparisons with the past are here bound to be
misleading and distorting. Even the extreme assailant of pagan
religions, like Lucretius, had no basis for the critical attitude as the
contemporary sceptic. The bitter attack of Lucretius upon supernatural
religion was based mainly upon assumptions and intuitions, as incapable
of proof at the time as were the most extreme pietistic views of his
age. Today the situation has been profoundly altered. Contemporary
science, especially astrophysics, renders the whole set of assumptions
underlying the anthropomorphic and geocentric supernaturalism of the
past absolutely archaic and preposterous. Our scientific knowledge has
undermined the most precious tales in the holy books of all peoples. The
development of biblical criticism has discredited the dogma of direct
revelation and unique nature of the Hebrew Bible. Textual scholarship
has been equally devastating to the sacred scriptures which form the
literary basis of the other world religions. It avails one nothing to
deny these things, for they are actually undeniable. We must face the
implied intellectual revolution honestly and see what is to be done
about it.
GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
To be thoroughly religious, one must, I believe, be sorely disappointed.
One's faith in God increases as one's faith in the world decreases. The
happier the man, the farther he is from God.
RUPERT HUGHES
It is important that the truth be known. Is religion, is church
membership a help to virtue? The careless will answer without
hesitation, "Yes!" Of course. The statistics, when they are not
smothered, cry, "No!"
HU SHIH
On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we
should recognize that the individual self is subject to death and decay,
but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or for worse,
lives on in the immortality of the Larger Self; that to live for the
sake of the species and posterity is religion of the highest kind; and
that those religions which seek a future life either in Heaven or in the
Pure Land, are selfish religions.
DR. FRANKWOOD E. WILLIAMS
In these difficult times we are told that we should go to the temple,
that we should get in touch with God. We do not need the temple. We do
not need to get in touch with "God." We need to get in touch with each
other.
WILLIAM FLOYD
This Bible bears every evidence of being a book like every other book,
conceived by man, written by man, altered by man, translated by man,
printed by man, but--and this is where it differs from every other
book--the Bible is swallowed by man. And it has disagreed with him; man
has not digested it properly through lack of sufficient dissection of
its parts. It has been taken with a spiritual sauce that has disguised
its real flavor. Anything in the Bible, no matter how raw, is taken as
God's food. It is used to demonstrate problems of diet which do not
provide a balanced ration; it is accepted by the gullible though
contradicted by the revelations of Geology, Astronomy, Anthropology,
Zoology, and Biology. Taken as prescribed by the doctors of divinity,
the Bible is a poisonous book.
LLEWELYN POWYS
The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race
think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in
this unique relation to its maker? Christians are like a council of
frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung hill croaking and
squeaking, "For our sakes was the world created."
THEODORE DREISER
And why again, composed though we may be of this, that, and the other
proton, electron, etc., etc., why should we not in some way be able to
sense why we are as we are--assembled as we are of the same ultimate
atoms and doing as we do? Why? Good God--surely in the face of all this
sense of aliveness and motion, and this and that, there should be some
intimation of WHY? But no--none.
UPTON SINCLAIR
It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated, that the
measure of the civilization which any nation has attained is the extent
to which it has curtailed the power of institutionalized religion. There
are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or
hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed
and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or
hundreds of millions of "true believers"; each damns all the others,
with more or less heartiness, and each is a mighty fortress of Graft.
* * * * *
_The Middle Guard_
_It is terrible to die of thirst at sea. Is it necessary that you
should salt your truth that it will no longer quench thirst_?
NIETZSCHE.
* * * * *
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
Indeed, history, down to the present day, is a melancholy record of the
horrors which can attend religion: human sacrifice, and, in particular,
the slaughter of children, cannibalism, sensual orgies, abject
superstition, hatred as between races, the maintenance of degrading
customs, hysteria, bigotry, can all be laid at it's charge. Religion is
the last refuge of human savagery.
ROBERT ANDREWS MILLIKAN
The anthropomorphic God of the ancient world--the God of human passions,
frailties, caprices, and whims is gone, and with him the old duty to
propitiate him, so that he might be induced to treat you better than
your neighbor. Can anyone question the advance that has been made in
diminishing the prevalence of these medieval, essentially childish, and
essentially selfish ideas? The new God is the God of law and order; the
new duty, to know that order and to get into harmony with it, to learn
how to make the world a better place for mankind to live in, not merely
how to save your individual soul. However, once destroy our confidence
in the principle of uniformity, our belief in the rule of law, and our
effectiveness immediately disappears, our method ceases to be
dependable, and our laboratories become deserted.
ALBERT C. DIEFFENBACH
The plain truth is, thousands upon thousands of men and women have gone
out of the Church. They take no stock in its obsolete teachings to which
they once subscribed in order to become members. After great
tribulation, they have made their declaration of religious independence.
They have taken the right turn for their own salvation. The churches as
a whole do not know that today there is a violent intellectual
revolution among all people who think. The so-called theism that is
embalmed in the old theology and is still preached is utterly defunct
for many persons of this generation. Like it or not, that is a fact.
DR. CHARLES W. ELIOT
The creeds of the churches contain conceptions of God's nature and of
his action toward the human race which are intolerable to the ethical
mind of the twentieth century. The conception of one being, human or
divine, suffering, though innocent, for the sins of others, is revolting
to the universal sense of justice and fair dealing. No school, no
family, no court, would punish the innocent when the guilty were known.
This conception of God is hideous, cruel, insane, and no Christian
church which tolerates it can be efficient in the promotion of human
welfare and happiness.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Necessity of Atheism, by Dr. D.M. Brooks