THE UTILITY OF RELIGION.
The real nature of religion being as stated, it having originated in an
utterly erroneous view of things, it would seem that nothing more can be
needed to justify its rejection. But the conclusion would not be
correct, at least so far as the mass of believers or quasi-believers are
concerned. Here the conviction still obtains that religion, no matter
what its origin, still wields an enormous influence for good. The
curious thing is that when one enquires "what religion is it that has
exerted this beneficent influence?" the replies effectually cancel one
another. Each means by religion his own religion, and each accuses the
religion of the other man of all the faults with which the Freethinker
accuses the whole. The avowed object of our widespread missionary
activity is to save the "heathen" from the evil effects of their
religion; and there is not the least doubt that if the heathen had the
brute force at their command, and the impudence that we have, they would
cordially reciprocate. And the efforts of the various Christian sects to
convert each other is too well known to need mention. So that the only
logical inference from all this is that, while all religions are, when
taken singly, injurious, taken in the bulk they are sources of profound
benefit.
It is not alone the common or garden order of religionist who takes up
this curious position, nor is it even the better educated believer; it
is not uncommon to find those who have rejected all the formal
religions of the world yet seeking to discover some good that religion
has done or is doing. As an illustration of this we may cite an example
from Sir James Frazer, than whom no one has done more to bring home to
students a knowledge of the real nature of religious beliefs. It is the
more surprising to find him putting in a plea for the good done by
religion, not in the present, but in the past. And such an instance, if
it does nothing else, may at least serve to mitigate our ferocity
towards the common type of religionist.
In an address delivered in 1909, entitled "Psyche's Task: A discourse
concerning the influence of superstition on the growth of Institutions,"
he puts in a plea for the consideration of superstition (religion) at
various stages of culture. Of its effects generally, he says:--
That it has done much harm in the world cannot be denied. It has
sacrificed countless lives, wasted untold treasures, embroiled
nations, severed friends, parted husbands and wives, parents and
children, putting swords and worse than swords between them; it has
filled gaols and madhouses with its deluded victims; it has broken
many hearts, embittered the whole of many a life, and not content
with persecuting the living it has pursued the dead into the grave
and beyond it, gloating over the horrors which its foul imagination
has conjured up to appal and torture the survivors. It has done all
this and more.
Now this is a severe indictment, and one is a little surprised to find
following that a plea on behalf of this same superstition to the effect
that it has "among certain races and at certain times strengthened the
respect for government, property, marriage, and human life." In support
of this proposition he cites a large number of instances from various
races of people, all of which prove, not what Sir James sets out to
prove, but only that religious observances and beliefs have been
connected with certain institutions that are in themselves admirable
enough. And on this point there is not, nor can there be, any serious
dispute. One can find many similar instances among ourselves to-day. But
the real question at issue is a deeper one than that. It is not enough
for the religionist to show that religion has often been associated with
good things and has given them its sanction. The reply to this would be
that if it had been otherwise religion would long since have
disappeared. The essential question here is, Have the institutions named
a basis in secular and social life, and would they have developed in the
absence of superstition as they have developed with superstition in the
field?
Now I do not see that Sir James Frazer proves either that these
institutions have not a sufficient basis in secular life--he would, I
imagine, admit that they have; or that they would not have developed as
well in the absence of superstition as they have done with it. In fact,
the whole plea that good has been done by superstition seems to be
destroyed in the statements that although certain institutions "have
been based partly on superstitions, it by no means follows that even
among these races they have never been based on anything else," and that
whenever institutions have proved themselves stable and permanent "there
is a strong presumption that they rest on something more solid than
superstition." So that, after all, it may well be that superstition is
all the time taking credit for the working of forces that are not of its
kind or nature.
Let us take the example given of the respect for human life as a crucial
test. Admitting that religions have taught that to take life was a
sinful act, one might well interpose with the query as to whether it
was ever necessary to teach man that homicide within certain limits was
a wrong thing. Pre-evolutionary sociology, which sometimes taught that
man originally led an existence in which his hand was against every
other man, and who, therefore, fought the battle of life strictly off
his own bat, may have favoured that assumption. But that we now know is
quite wrong. We know that man slowly emerged from a pre-human gregarious
stage, and that in all group life there is an organic restraint on
mutual slaughter. The essential condition of group life is that the
nature of the individual shall be normally devoid of the desire for the
indiscriminate slaughter of his fellows. And if that is true of animals,
it is certainly true of man. Primitive human society does not and cannot
represent a group of beings each of whom must be restrained by direct
coercion from murdering the other.
In this case, therefore, we have to reckon with both biological and
sociological forces, and I do not see that it needs more than this to
explain all there is to explain. Human life is always associated life,
and this means not alone a basis of mutual forbearance and co-operation,
but a development of the sympathetic feelings which tends to increase as
society develops, they being, as a matter of fact, the conditions of its
growth. And whatever competition existed between tribes would still
further emphasize the value of those feelings that led to effective
co-operation.
The question, then, whether the anti-homicidal feeling is at all
dependent upon religion is answered in the negative by the fact that it
ante-dates what we may term the era of conscious social organization.
That of whether religion strengthens this feeling still remains,
although even that has been answered by implication. And the first thing
to be noted here is that whatever may be the value of the superstitious
safeguard against homicide it certainly has no value as against people
outside the tribe. In fact, when a savage desires to kill an enemy he
finds in superstition a fancied source of strength, and often of
encouragement. Westermarck points out that "savages carefully
distinguish between an act of homicide committed in their own community
and one where the victim is a stranger. Whilst the former is under
ordinary circumstances disapproved of, the latter is in most cases
allowed and often regarded as praiseworthy." And Frazer himself points
out that the belief in immortality plays no small part in encouraging
war among primitive peoples,[19] while if we add the facts of the killing
of children, of old men and women, and wives, together with the practice
of human sacrifice, we shall see little cause to attribute the
development of the feeling against homicide to religious beliefs.
[19] The state of war which normally exists between many, if not most,
neighbouring savage tribes, springs in large measure directly from their
belief in immortality; since one of the commonest motives to hostility
is a desire to appease the angry ghosts of friends who are supposed to
have perished by baleful arts of sorcerers in another tribe, and who, if
vengeance is not inflicted on their real or imaginary murderers, will
wreak their fury on their undutiful fellow-tribesmen.--_The Belief in
Immortality_, Vol. I., p. 468.
In one passage in his address Sir James does show himself quite alive to
the evil influence of the belief in immortality. He says:--
It might with some show of reason be maintained that no belief has
done so much to retard the economic and thereby the social progress
of mankind as the belief in the immortality of the soul; for this
belief has led race after race, generation after generation, to
sacrifice the real wants of the living to the imaginary wants of
the dead. The waste and destruction of life and property which
this faith has entailed has been enormous and incalculable. But I
am not here concerned with the disastrous and deplorable
consequences, the unspeakable follies and crimes and miseries which
have flowed in practice from the theory of a future life. My
business at present is with the more cheerful side of a gloomy
subject.
Every author has, of course, the fullest right to select whichever
aspect of a subject he thinks deserves treatment, but all the same one
may point out that it is this dwelling on the "cheerful side" of these
beliefs that encourages the religionist to put forward claims on behalf
of present day religion that Sir James himself would be the first to
challenge. There is surely greater need to emphasize the darker side of
a creed that has thousands of paid advocates presenting an imaginary
bright side to the public gaze.
But what has been said of the relation of the feeling against homicide
applies with no more than a variation of terms to the other instances
given by Sir James Frazer. Either these institutions have a basis in
utility or they have not. If they have not, then religion can claim no
social credit for their preservation. If they have a basis in utility,
then the reason for their preservation is to be found in social
selection, although the precise local form in which an institution
appears may be determined by other circumstances. And when Sir James
says that the task of government has been facilitated by the
superstition that the governors belonged to a superior class of beings,
one may safely assume that the statement holds good only of individual
governors, or of particular forms of government. It may well be that
when a people are led to believe that a certain individual possesses
supernatural powers, or that a particular government enjoys the favour
of supernatural beings, there will be less inclination to resentment
against orders than there would be otherwise. But government and
governors, in other words, a general body of rules for the government of
the tribe, and the admitted leadership of certain favoured individuals,
would remain natural facts in the absence of superstition, and their
development or suppression would remain subject to the operation of
social or natural selection. So, again, with the desire for private
property. The desire to retain certain things as belonging to oneself is
not altogether unnoticeable among animals. A dog will fight for its
bone, monkeys secrete things which they desire to retain for their own
use, etc., and so far as the custom possesses advantages, we may
certainly credit savages with enough common-sense to be aware of the
fact. But the curious thing is that the institution of private property
is not nearly so powerful among primitive peoples as it is among those
more advanced. So that we are faced with this curious comment upon Sir
James's thesis. Granting that the institution of private property has
been strengthened by superstition we have the strange circumstance that
that institution is weakest where superstition is strongest and
strongest where superstition is weakest.
The truth is that Sir James Frazer seems here to have fallen into the
same error as the late Walter Bagehot, and to have formed the belief
that primitive man required breaking in to the "social yoke." The truth
is that the great need of primitive mankind is not to be broken in but
to acquire the courage and determination to break out. This error may
have originated in the disinclination of the savage to obey _our_ rules,
or it may have been a heritage from the eighteenth century philosophy of
the existence of an idyllic primitive social state. The truth is,
however, that there is no one so fettered by custom as is the savage.
The restrictions set by a savage society on its members would be
positively intolerable to civilized beings. And if it be said that these
customs required formation, the reply is that inheriting the imitability
of the pre-human gregarious animal, this would form the basis on which
the tyrannizing custom of primitive life is built.
There was, however, another generalization of Bagehot's that was
unquestionably sound. Assuming that the first step necessary to
primitive mankind was to frame a custom as the means of his being
"broken in," the next step in progress was to break it, and that was a
far more difficult matter. Progress was impossible until this was done,
and how difficult it is to get this step taken observation of the people
living in civilized countries will show. But it is in relation to this
second and all important step that one can clearly trace the influence
of religion. And its influence is completely the reverse of being
helpful. For of all the hindrances to a change of custom there is none
that act with such force as does religion. This is the case with those
customs with which vested interest has no direct connection, but it
operates with tenfold force where this exists. Once a custom is
established in a primitive community the conditions of social life
surround it with religious beliefs, and thereafter to break it means a
breach in the wall of religious observances with which the savage is
surrounded. And so soon as we reach the stage of the establishment of a
regular priesthood, we have to reckon with the operation of a vested
interest that has always been keenly alive to anything which affected
its profit or prestige.
It would not be right to dismiss the discussion of a subject connected
with so well-respected a name as that of Sir James Frazer and leave the
reader with the impression that he is putting in a plea for current
religion. He is not. He hints pretty plainly that his argument that
religion has been of some use to the race applies to savage times only.
We see this in such sentences as the following: "More and more, as time
goes on, morality shifts its grounds from the sands of superstition to
the rock of reason, from the imaginary to the real, from the
supernatural to the natural.... The State has found a better reason than
these old wives' fables for guarding with the flaming sword of justice
the approach to the tree of life," and also in saying that, "If it can
be proved that in certain races and at certain times the institutions in
question have been based partly on superstition, it by no means follows
that even among these races they have never been based on anything else.
On the contrary ... there is a strong presumption that they rest mainly
on something much more solid than superstition." In modern times no such
argument as the one I have been discussing has the least claim to
logical force. But that, as we all know, does not prevent its being used
by full-blown religionists, and by those whose minds are only partly
liberated from a great historic superstition.
It will be observed that the plea of Frazer's we have been examining
argues that the function of religion in social life is of a conservative
character. And so far he is correct, he is only wrong in assuming it to
have been of a beneficial nature. The main function of religion in
sociology is conservative, not the wise conservatism which supports an
institution or a custom because of its approved value, but of the kind
that sees in an established custom a reason for its continuance. Urged,
in the first instance, by the belief that innumerable spirits are
forever on the watch, punishing the slightest infraction of their
wishes, opposition to reform or to new ideas receives definite shape and
increased strength by the rise of a priesthood. Henceforth economic
interest goes hand in hand with superstitious fears. Whichever way man
turns he finds artificial obstacles erected. Every deviation from the
prescribed path is threatened with penalties in this world and the next.
The history of every race and of every science tells the same story, and
the amount of time and energy that mankind has spent in fighting these
ghosts of its own savage past is the measure of the degree to which
religion has kept the race in a state of relative barbarism.
This function of unreasoning conservatism is not, it must be remembered,
accidental. It belongs to the very nature of religion. Dependent upon
the maintenance of certain primitive conceptions of the world and of
man, religion dare not encourage new ideas lest it sap its own
foundations. Spencer has reminded us that religion is, under the
conditions of its origin, perfectly rational. That is quite true.[20]
Religion meets science, when the stage of conflict arises, as an
opposing interpretation of certain classes of facts. The one
interpretation can only grow at the expense of the other. While
religion is committed to the explanation of the world in terms of vital
force, science is committed to that of non-conscious mechanism.
Opposition is thus present at the outset, and it must continue to the
end. The old cannot be maintained without anathematizing the new; the
new cannot be established without displacing the old. The conflict is
inevitable; the antagonism is irreconcilable.
[20] It may with equal truth be said that all beliefs are with a similar
qualification quite rational. The attempt to divide people into
"Rationalists" and "Irrationalists" is quite fallacious and is
philosophically absurd. Reason is used in the formation of religious as
in the formation of non-religious beliefs. The distinction between the
man who is religious and one who is not, or, if it be preferred, one who
is superstitious and one who is not, is not that the one reasons and the
other does not. Both reason. Indeed, the reasoning of the superstitionist
is often of the most elaborate kind. The distinction is that of one
having false premises, or drawing unwarrantable conclusions from sound
premises. The only ultimate distinctions are those of religionist and
non-religionist, supernaturalist and non-supernaturalist, Theist or
Atheist. All else are mere matters of compromise, exhibitions of
timidity, or illustrations of that confused thinking which itself gives
rise to religion in all its forms.
It lies, therefore, in the very nature of the case that religion, as
religion, can give no real help to man in the understanding of himself
and the world. Whatever good religion may appear to do is properly to be
attributed to the non-religious forces with which it is associated. But
religion, being properly concerned with the relations between man and
mythical supernatural beings, can exert no real influence for good on
human affairs. Far from that being the case, it can easily be shown to
have had quite an opposite effect. There is not merely the waste of
energy in the direction above indicated, but in many other ways. If we
confine ourselves to Christianity some conception of the nature of its
influence may be formed if we think what the state of the world might
have been to-day had the work of enlightenment continued from the point
it had reached under the old Greek and Roman civilizations. Bacon and
Galileo in their prisons, Bruno and Vanini at the stake are
illustrations of the disservice that Christianity has done the cause of
civilization, and the obstruction it has offered to human well-being.
Again, consider the incubus placed on human progress by the institution
of a priesthood devoted to the service of supernatural beings. In the
fullest and truest sense of the word a priesthood represents a parasitic
growth on the social body. I am not referring to individual members of
the priesthood in their capacity as private citizens, but as priests, as
agents or representatives of the supernatural. And here the truth is
that of all the inventions and discoveries that have helped to build up
civilization not one of them is owing to the priesthood, as such. One
may confidently say that if all the energies of all the priests in the
whole world were concentrated on a single community, and all their
prayers, formulae, and doctrines devoted to the one end, the well-being
of that community would not be advanced thereby a single iota.
Far and away, the priesthood is the greatest parasitic class the world
has known. All over the world, in both savage and civilized times, we
see the priesthoods of the world enthroned, we see them enjoying a
subsistence wrung from toil through credulity, and from wealth through
self-interest. From the savage medicine hut up to the modern cathedral
we see the earth covered with useless edifices devoted to the foolish
service of imaginary deities. We see the priesthood endowed with special
privileges, their buildings relieved from the taxes which all citizens
are compelled to pay, and even special taxes levied upon the public for
their maintenance. The gods may no longer demand the sacrifice of the
first born, but they still demand the sacrifice of time, energy, and
money that might well be applied elsewhere. And the people in every
country, out of their stupidity, continue to maintain a large body of
men who, by their whole training and interest, are compelled to act as
the enemies of liberty and progress.
It is useless arguing that the evils that follow religion are not
produced by it, that they are casual, and will disappear with a truer
understanding of what religion is. It is not true, and the man who
argues in that way shows that he does not yet understand what religion
is. The evils that follow religion are deeply imbedded in the nature of
religion itself. All religion takes its rise in error, and vested error
threatened with destruction instinctively resorts to force, fraud, and
imposture, in self defence. The universality of the evils that accompany
religion would alone prove that there is more than a mere accident in
the association. The whole history of religion is, on the purely
intellectual side, the history of a delusion. Happily this delusion is
losing its hold on the human mind. Year by year its intellectual and
moral worthlessness is being more generally recognized. Religion
explains nothing, and it does nothing that is useful. Yet in its name
millions of pounds are annually squandered and many thousands of men
withdrawn from useful labour, and saddled on the rest of the community
for maintenance. But here, again, economic and intellectual forces are
combining for the liberation of the race from its historic incubus.
Complete emancipation will not come in a day, but it will come, and its
arrival will mark the close of the greatest revolution that has taken
place in the history of the race.