>>2284089When we claim that "God does not exist," we mean to deny by this declaration the personal God of theology, the God worshiped in various ways and divers modes by believers the world over, that God who from nothing created the universe, from chaos matter, that God of absurd attributes who is an affront to human reason.
With each new discovery of chemistry, physics, biology, the anthropological sciences, of the practical application of sound principles, dogma collapses. It is a part of that old edifice of religion which crumbles and falls in ruins. The continuous progress of the natural sciences now extending from city to country, disperses the darkness of the Middle Ages, and the multitudes desert the churches where from generation to generation they betook themselves to pray to God — that monstrous product of human ignorance.
Let us examine the nature of God. We force ourselves, therefore, to reason in a vacuum, the God of religions being their own image of their mental vacuum, the proof of the complete absence of any activity in reasoning.
How can the idea of a creator be reconciled with the existence of dwarfed and atrophied organs, with anomalies and monstrosities, with the existence of pain, perpetual and universal, with the struggle and the inequalities among human beings?
Epicurus, the philosopher who lived in Rome in the time of the decadence of the Republic, posed the following questions:
"Either God wishes to do away with evil in this world and cannot succeed; or he can do away with it and does not wish to; or he cannot and does not wish to; or finally, he wishes to and can. If he wishes to but has not the power, he is not all-powerful. If he has the power to do away with evil and does not wish to, he is not infinitely good. If, as affirm the deists, he can and wants to, tell me, then, why does evil exist on earth, and why does not God make it impossible?"
That which affronts human reason most is the inconceivable fact of the creative power of a God who from nothingness created everything, from chaos the universe. . . .
One would have to be completely without knowledge of physiology, botany, and psychology to claim today the existence of a "soul" independent of the body; on the contrary, one which does not form one of the two distinct aspects of the unique human nature.
Dogma is absurd because it presupposes immobility and the absolute. Nothing in the world is absolute, everything is relative. Nothing is entirely changeless, but there is a continual transformation, a perpetual movement of forces.
Dogma presents to human reason an obstacle to progress because it imposes limitations to the painful but salutary impulses towards the search for truth, because it checks the free expansion of all intellectual energy.
Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd.
"Religion is the opium of the people." — Karl Marx.
It being demonstrated that religious dogma presents itself to the human spirit and to rational criticism as "the absolute consecration of the absurd," let us see why moral religion is "immoral."
The evangelists are ridiculous when, instead of studying the Bible as a document of a certain historic interest, they try to credit it with real life and bring to the masses the principles of Christ (who perhaps never existed) as the ethical principles of a morality everlastingly young, permanent, modern, in complete accord with the present age. The Bible and morals called Christian are two cadavers which the evangelists attempt to galvanize into life with, it must be agreed, small enough success.
It is, therefore, clear that religious morality is one of resignation and sacrifice, a morality which may be dear to the weak, to the degenerate, to slaves, but which results in the diminution of reason and human personality. It bends man toward the earth, making him a slave to divinity. It favors the conservation of those primitive sentiments which belong to that period of animal life long left behind, and transforms the "thinking being" into a "passive sheep" who lives in the fear of the universal judgment.
Religious morality shows the original stigmata of authoritarianism precisely because it pretends to be the revelation of divine authority. In order to translate this authoritarianism into action and impose it upon humanity, the priestly caste of revealers has sprung up and with it the most atrocious intolerance.
Certain it is that religion is a psychic disease of the brain, a contraction, a tightening up of the individual who, if he is profoundly religious, appears to us as abnormal.
The history of many saints, beatified by the church, is repugnant. It shows nothing more than a profound aberration of the human spirit in search of ultra-terrestrial chimeras; it is a delirium which can attain the state of spasms of passion and which ends in madness.
Therefore, many of those who today hover over the altars of the Catholic Church are pathological cases, hysterics, deomanes and demonomaniacs.
Even today in the more remote parts of Italy and Spain we can witness similar phenomena, Saint January for the people of Naples, and the Madonna of Lourdes for French bigotry. Are they not analogous aberrations?
If we read the history of religions, we find that it deals with the pathology of the human brain. If today the Middle Ages are retiring into the thick shadows of convents, it is due to triumphant skepticism; and if the epidemic disease of religion no longer appears with the terrible intensity of former times, it is due to the diminution of the political power of the Church which formerly placed on the heads of people its cap of lead.
Religion presents itself to our eyes in another characteristic: the atrophy of reason. The faculty by which man is differentiated from the lower animals is his reasoning power. But the devout believer renounces reason, refuses to explain the things which surround him. the innumerable natural phenomena, because his religious faith is enough for him. The brain loses the habit of thinking; and this religious sottishness hurls mankind back into animalism.
In concluding we say that "religious man" is an abnormality and that "religion" is the certain cause of epidemic diseases of the mind which require the care of alienists.
Religion has shown itself in the open as the institution whose aim is political power by which to externalize the exploitation and the ignorance of the people.