Supernaturalism arouses the stupid interests and the brutish passions,
and from these are born the bitter fruits of ignorance and hatred. The
secularist is one in whom the intellect is passionate, and the passions
cold. The supernaturalist on the other hand reverses the order, and in
him the passions are active and the intellect inert. In each man there
dwells a tyrant who creates for him a deity materialized out of these
factors of ignorance and fear. It is science and reason which must
destroy for him this monstrous apparition. But, as yet, there is no
indication that our mental development in relation to social progress
has made the great strides that our purely material progress has made.
The twentieth century man utilizes and enjoys the material benefits of
his century, but his mental progress lies bound and drugged by the
viewpoints of 2000 years ago.
Sir Leslie Stephen has declared, "How much intellect and zeal runs to
waste in the spasmodic efforts of good men to cling to the last fragment
of decaying systems, to galvanize dead formulae into some dim semblance
of life! Society will not improve as it might when those who should be
leaders of progress are staggering backward and forward with their eyes
passionately reverted to the past. Nay, we shall never be duly sensitive
to the miseries and cruelties which make the world a place of torture
for so many, so long as men are encouraged in the name of religion to
look for a remedy, not in fighting against surrounding evils, but in
cultivating aimless contemplations of an imaginary ideal. Much of our
popular religion seems to be expressly directed to deaden our sympathies
with our fellow men by encouraging an indolent optimism; our thoughts of
the other world are used in many forms as an opiate to drug our minds
with indifference to the evils of this; and the last word of half of our
preachers is, 'dream rather than work.'"
There is always a great deal of discrepancy between that which is best
for the gods and that which is best for the individual and for society
in general. One cannot serve man perfectly and the traditional gods as
well. It is, therefore, the contention of freethinkers that if man had
given to the service of man all that he had given to the gods in the
past, our present stage of civilization would be much in advance of
where it is today.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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