Communism and Christianism: Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of ViewBrown, William Montgomery
Religion
Communism and Christianism: Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View
Brown, William Montgomery
Christian socialism; Communism; Communism and Christianity
Prof. Leuba, the Bryn Mawr psychologist, is one among my authorities for
these representations. In his "Belief in God and Immortality" (1916) he
exhibits the results of a recent and thorough-going investigation in a
chart from which it appears that, taking the greater and lesser
representatives of the scientists together, they fall below 50 per cent
as to their belief in God, and below 55 per cent in their belief in
immortality.[I]
The showing for the scientists who are especially concerned with the
origin and destiny of life, biologists and psychologists, is much less
favorable to you; for, taking the greater and lesser together, only 31
per cent of the biologists believe in God and 35 per cent in
immortality; and only 25 per cent of the psychologists believe in God,
and 20 per cent in immortality.
But the worst by far, is yet to come; for, taking the greater biologists
and psychologists, those who count most, of the former 18 per cent
believe in God, and 25 per cent in immortality; and of the latter, the
greatest of all authorities, only 13 per cent believe in God, and only 8
per cent in immortality.
The greater psychologists are comparatively consistent in that fewer
among them believe in a conscious, personal life for humanity beyond the
grave than in the conscious, personal life of divinity beyond the
clouds. Human immortality is an absurdity without divine existence. The
overwhelming majority of great psychologists (the greatest of all
authorities, as to whether or not gods "without bodies, parts or
passions" can consciously exist in the skies, and disembodied men, women
and children in celestial paradises) see this and limit the career of
man to earth. In their judgment his heaven and hell are here, and the
gods who make and the devils who unmake civilizations are humans, not
good or bad divinities.
This is the conclusion of a rapidly increasing number of educated
people. A century ago only a few men of science and scientific
philosophers had reached it, not twenty five per cent, but now the
percentage is nearly ninety and it will soon be ninety-nine. The time is
coming, and in the not distant future, when no educated man shall look
to the god of any supernaturalistic interpretation of religion for light
or strength, and when none shall hope for a heaven above the earth or
fear a hell below it.
Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerg'd from, shall so soon expire.
--Omar.
Joseph McCabe and Chapman Cohen are among the most brilliant of present
day writers on scientific and philosophic subjects. They are not
socialists, but both see that modern socialism and orthodox Christianism
are utterly irreconcilable incompatibilities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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