"I mean the same. What spiritual love has man today? What friendliness toward other men? What regard for Nature? Man fears. Man hates. And as to Nature--he is the hostile parasite on the whole of it, and calls himself its conqueror. Let him conquer his ego--and then--if he should prove to be--in some almost unimaginable era of clean passion--capable of as wide a variety of ways of loving as he is capable of simulating and extending the other faculties of other species--he will have to build his aesthetics around that. Love takes two people. If neither is injured, made less, turned hateful, rendered afraid--if the purposes of instinct, become aware and consciously directed, are not finally frustrated--no specific behavior will offend this dim-seen Nature. Shameless awareness lies far nearer to a way for mankind to grow loving than any so-called love of a Jesus which requires a man to think he is impure, vile, inevitably born a sinner, inferior physically to all other living things in Eden's Garden--and this, so he may publicly proclaim himself and secretly imagine himself to be their 'spiritual' superior. Isn't that clear?" "Sometimes I follow you--sometimes not." "Look at it this way. You say you've chucked out heaven and hell--or hell, anyhow--you modern religionists. I say, you cannot do so. I say--if your God is a god of what you consider pure goodness--you have to have a devil to balance Him. I say that all the saints and holy men and all the simple, human people who have managed, by one religion or another, to get some sense of the integration of their instincts, have done it because the religions did give them a semantic for instinct--a heaven-hell formulation of their nonverbal impulses--a yang-and-yin for Christianity, so to speak--or a Jehovah-Satan for Taoism. Take that away--and you take away all opportunity for the religious--the instinctual--experience. You produce a bunch of gassy bounders who--since hellishness is everywhere but since they've discarded hell--confuse the goodness of the species with goods, good health, prosperity, long life--things that may be possible devils for the species. They lose sight of the inwardness of the nongood and see evil as a material fact, entirely. Modern devil-seekers--men like Sheen, like Niebuhr--are closer to the mechanics of human nature than these idiot modern congregations that throw out Satan and his kingdom and as a result are condemned to evil behavior because they have made themselves blind to evil's source. Closer--but still not very damn close." "What, then, is your criterion of good and evil?" "I could give you dozens. I give you a sample. When you consider what you are doing, or what any man does, or any group of men--ask yourself whether that particular deed will benefit or injure the chances of future generations to evolve toward increased consciousness." "Great heavens, man--most _preachers_ wouldn't be able to decide a question like that! Let alone plain folks!"