"The use of religions, in effect, has been to conceal and deny the animal nature of man. That is perverse. Man eats--a simple, animal activity. How many religious rituals--turned into social functions in how many cases--could you list, all of which were designed to give a nonanimal cast to eating? Hundreds?" "I suppose you mean feasts and fasts and such?" "Food taboos, food rituals, food symbols--like your bread and wine--religious dietary laws. Sure. Man--like the beasts--must eat. But he has tried ten thousand tricks to make it seem nonanimal, or 'godlike.' Now. Consider sex--another human function which is exactly like its animal counterpart. Here there is less exigency than in eating--more time-lag for ritual and style. Man went passionately into the business of developing systems which would conceal the animal and instinctual nature of sexuality and lend to it the superior qualities of his various gods, religions, his self-glorifying self-images." "I think I begin to see--" "Exactly. By now--we dwell amid a species that is twenty or thirty or forty thousand years away from the contemplation of its instincts as germane to animal instincts. The distance in time is matched by countless steps in illusion. It is hardly possible for a man to think of himself as an animal in the true sense, any more. It is all but impossible for him to feel, to experience, his animal fact. And--since I believe instinct seen locally in time and space is as 'good' as it is 'evil'--and that, in sum, it is _all good_--I find this long attempt to translate natural instincts into ridiculous and unnatural dogmas and god-images--is a very sad mistake. A very great sin--the 'original' sin of assuming a superiority toward terrestrial, psychological, and cosmic Nature.