"Each new religion may be--usually is--an 'improvement' in some way upon its discarded or waning predecessor. But each is, always, founded on the premise that man is 'above' that which works within him and occurs around him. So, in the end, even though intelligent religious premises may benefit humanity in many ways--for instance, the search for truth inspired by Jesus, led haltingly to the birth of the scientific method--the fundamental premise is _always false_ and the benefits are finally fouled by the basic blunder. Instinct frustrated by the delusions of Believers of all sorts _has_ to go into autonomous operation on the multitudes, simply because they deny and repress instinct until this society or that--and all of them--fails to meet their instinctual needs. And instinct, acting in violent fashion, upon such blind, willful repudiators of necessary process--always brings calamity. It _has_ to wipe out or at least reduce each new aggregate of the self-deceived. So another civilization topples. Then another creed arises and we begin again. Until we get straightened out about _what instinct is_--get, so to speak, a real picture of our inner selves, of what it is in us that we have made into all gods and theology--a picture congruent with such truths as we _can_ see and _can_ admit--we're bound to operate in this roller-coaster fashion." "In other words, your Original Sin is the church itself!" He sounded disturbed. "It's--any ism. Any person or group with sure-fire dogmas that you have to accept on faith--as offering ends justifying physical means and psychological means that are illogical, unethical, unreasonable, that fail to take into account the innate facts of our animal instinct, that exclude valid opposites to their tenets, and so on." "And you think God is what might be called the _cause_ in instinct?"