HAS RELIGION MADE USEFUL CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVILIZATION? By Bertrand Russell 1930 My own

          HAS RELIGION MADE USEFUL CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVILIZATION?

                                    By

                             Bertrand Russell

                                   1930

        My  own  view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard
it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the
human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions
to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it
caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in
time they became able to predict them.  These two services I am prepared
to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.

 The word religion is used nowadays in a very loose sense. Some people,
under the influence of extreme Protestantism, employ the word to 
denote any serious personal convictions as to morals or the nature of
the universe. This use of the word is quite unhistorical. Religion
is primarily a social phenomenon. Churches may owe their origin to
teachers with strong individual convictions, but these teachers have
seldom had much influence upon the churches that they have founded,
whereas churches have had enormous influence upon the communities in
which they flourished. To take the case that is of most interest to
members of Western civilization: the teaching of Christ, as it appears
in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics
of Christians. The most important thing about Christianity, from a
social and historical point of view, is not Christ but the church, and
if we are to judge of Christianity as a social force we must not go to
the Gospels for our material. Christ taught that you should give your
goods to the poor, that you should not fight, that you should not go to
church, and that you should not punish adultery. Neither Catholics
nor Protestants have shown any strong desire to follow His teaching in
any of these respects. Some of the Franciscans, it is true, attempted
to teach the doctrine of apostolic poverty, but the Pope condemned them,
and their doctrine was declared heretical. Or, again, consider such a
text as "Judge not, that ye be not judged," and ask yourself what
influence such a text has had upon the Inquisition and the Ku Klux Klan.

 What is true of Christianity is equally true of Buddhism. The Buddha
was amiable and enlightened; on his deathbed he laughed at his disciples
for supposing that he was immortal. But the Buddhist priesthood - as it
exists, for example, in Tibet - has been obscurantist, tyrannous, and cruel
in the highest degree.

 There is nothing accidental about this difference between a church and
its founder. As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the
sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his
sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the
key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for
their own advantage. They are, however, in one respect worse than any
other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an
unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that
they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress.
The church opposed Galileo and Darwin; in our own day it opposes Freud. In
the days of its greatest power it went further in its opposition to the
intellectual life. Pope Gregory the Great wrote to a certain bishop a letter
beginning: "A report has reached us which we cannot mention without a blush,
that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends." The bishop was
compelled by pontifical authority to desist from this wicked labor, and Latinity
did not recover until the Renaissance. It is not only intellectually
but also morally that religion is pernicious. I mean by this that it
teaches ethical codes which are not conducive to human happiness.
When, a few years ago, a plebiscite was taken in Germany as to whether the
deposed royal houses should still be allowed to enjoy their private
property, the churches in Germany officially stated that it would be
contrary to the teaching of Christianity to deprive them of it. The churches, as
everyone knows, opposed the abolition of slavery as long as they dared,
and with a few well-advertised exceptions they oppose at the present
day every movement toward economic justice. The Pope has officially
condemned Socialism.

                        Christianity and Sex

 The worst feature of the Christian religion, however, is its attitude
toward sex - an attitude so morbid and so unnatural that it can be
understood only when taken in relation to the sickness of the civilized
world at the time the Roman Empire was decaying. We sometimes hear talk to
the effect that Christianity improved the status of women. This is one of
the grossest perversions of history that it is possible to make. Women
cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered of the
utmost importance that they should not infringe a very rigid moral code.
Monks have always regarded Woman primarily as the temptress; they have
thought of her mainly as the inspirer of impure lusts. The teaching of the
church has been, and still is, that virginity is best, but that for those
who find this impossible marriage is permissible. "It is better to marry
than to burn," as St. Paul puts it. By making marriage indissoluble, and
by stamping out all knowledge of the ars amandi, the church did what it
could to secure that the only form of sex which it permitted should
involve very little pleasure and a great deal of pain. The opposition
to birth control has, in fact, the same motive: if a woman has a child a
year until she dies worn out, it is not to be supposed that she will
derive much pleasure from her married life; therefore birth control
must be discouraged.

 The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one
that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an
outlet for their sadism which they believe to be legitimate, and even
noble. Take, for example, the question of the prevention of syphilis. It
is known that, by precautions taken in advance, the danger of contracting
this disease can be made negligible. Christians, however, object to the
dissemination of knowledge of this fact, since they hold it good that
sinners should be punished. They hold this so good that they are even
willing that punishment should extend to the wives and children of
sinners. There are in the world at the present moment many thousands of
children suffering from congenital syphilis who would never have been born
but for the desire of Christians to see sinners punished. I cannot
understand how doctrines leading us to this fiendish cruelty can be considered to
have any good effects upon morals.

 It is not only in regard to sexual behaviour but also in regard to
knowledge on sex subjects that the attitude of Christians is dangerous to
human welfare. Every person who has taken the trouble to study the
question in an unbiased spirit knows that the artificial ignorance on sex
subjects which orthodox Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is
extremely dangerous to mental and physical health, and causes in those who
pick up their knowledge by the way of "improper" talk, as most
children do, an attitude that sex is in itself indecent and ridiculous. I do
not think there can be any defense for the view that knowledge is ever
undesirable. I should not out barriers in the way of the acquisition of
knowledge by anybody at any age. But in the particular case of sex knowledge
there are much weightier arguments in its favor than in the case of
most other knowledge. A person is much less likely to act wisely when he is
ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to give young
people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an
important matter.

 Every boy is interested in trains. Suppose we told him that an
interest in trains is wicked; suppose we kept his eyes bandaged
whenever he was in a train or on a railway station; suppose we never allowed
the word "train" to be mentioned in his presence and preserved an
impenetrable mystery as to the means by which he is transported from one
place to another. The result would not be that he would cease to be
interested in trains; on the contrary, he would become more interested than
ever but would have a morbid sense of sin, because this interest
had been represented to him as improper. Every boy of active intelligence
could by this means be rendered in a greater or less degree neurasthenic.
This is precisely what is done in the matter of sex; but, as sex
is more interesting than trains, the results are worse. Almost every
adult in a Christian community is more or less diseased nervously as a
result of the taboo on sex knowledge when he or she was young. And the
sense of sin which is thus artificially implanted is one of the causes of
cruelty, timidity, and stupidity in later life. There is no rational
ground of any sort or kind in keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may
wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter. And we shall never
get a sane population until this fact is recognized in early education,
which is impossible so long as the churches are able to control
educational politics.

 Leaving these comparatively detailed objections on one side, it is
clear that the fundamental doctrines of Christianity demand a great
deal of ethical perversion before they can be accepted. The world, we
are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He
created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would
contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that
the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not
true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes
to erupt. But even if it were true, it would make no difference. If I were
going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal
maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the
sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for
all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man.
The usual Christian argument is that the suffering in the world is a
purification for sin and is therefore a good thing. This argument is, of
course, only a rationalization of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor
argument. I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children's
ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and
then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally
abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to bring himself to say
this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy and compassion.
He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No
man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can
keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find
excuses for pain and misery.

                        The Objections to Religion

 The objections to religion are of two sorts - intellectual and moral.
The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any
religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a
time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to
perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would
otherwise outgrow. 

 To take the intellectual objection first: there is a certain tendency
in our practical age to consider that it does not much matter whether
religious teaching is true or not, since the important question is whether
it is useful. One question cannot, however, well be decided without the
other. If we believe the Christian religion, our notions of what is good
will be different from what they will be if we do not believe it.
Therefore, to Christians, the effects of Christianity may seem good, while
to unbelievers they may seem bad. Moreover, the attitude that one ought to
believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether
there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to
evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit
our prejudices. 

 A certain kind of scientific candor is a very important quality, and it
is one which can hardly exist in a man who imagines that there are things
which it is his duty to believe. We cannot, therefore, really decide
whether religion does good without investigating the question whether
religion is true. To Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews the most
fundamental question involved in the truth of religion is the existence of
God. In the days when religion was still triumphant the word "God" had a
perfectly definite meaning; but as a result of the onslaughts of the
Rationalists the word has become paler and paler, until it is difficult to
see what people mean when they assert that they believe in God. Let us
take, for purposes of argument, Matthew Arnold's definition: "A power not
ourselves that makes for righteousness." Perhaps we might make this even
more vague and ask ourselves whether we have any evidence of purpose in
this universe apart from the purposes of living beings on the surface of
this planet. 

 The usual argument of religious people on this subject is roughly as
follows: "I and my friends are persons of amazing intelligence and virtue.
It is hardly conceivable that so much intelligence and virtue could have
come about by chance. There must, therefore, be someone at least as
intelligent and virtuous as we are who set the cosmic machinery in motion
with a view to producing Us." I am sorry to say that I do not find this
argument so impressive as it is found by those who use it. The universe is
large; yet, if we are to believe Eddington, there are probably
nowhere else in the universe beings as intelligent as men. If you consider
the total amount of matter in the world and compare it with the amount
forming the bodies of intelligent beings, you will see that the latter bears
an almost infinitesimal proportion to the former. Consequently, even
if it is enormously improbable that the laws of chance will produce an
organism capable of intelligence out of a casual selection of
atoms, it is nevertheless probable that there will be in the universe that
very small number of such organisms that we do in fact find.

 Then again, considered as the climax to such a vast process, we do not
really seem to me sufficiently marvelous. Of course, I am aware that many
divines are far more marvelous than I am, and that I cannot wholly
appreciate merits so far transcending my own. Nevertheless, even after
making allowances under this head, I cannot but think that Omnipotence
operating through all eternity might have produced something better. And
then we have to reflect that even this result is only a flash in the pan.
The earth will not always remain habitable; the human race will die out,
and if the cosmic process is to justify itself hereafter it will
have to do so elsewhere than on the surface of our planet.. And even if
this should occur, it must stop sooner or later. The second law of
thermodynamics makes it scarcely possible to doubt that the universe is running
down, and that ultimately nothing of the slightest interest will be
possible anywhere. Of course, it is open to us to say that when that time
comes God will wind up the machinery again; but if we do not say this, we
can base our assertion only upon faith, not upon one shred of scientific
evidence. So far as scientific evidence goes, the universe has crawled by
slow stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth and is going to crawl
by still more pitiful stages to a condition of universal death. If this
is to be taken as evidence of a purpose, I can only say that the purpose is
one that does not appeal to me. I see no reason, therefore, to believe in
any sort of God, however vague and however attenuated. I leave on one side
the old metaphysical arguments, since religious apologists themselves
have thrown them over.

                        The Soul and Immortality

 The Christian emphasis on the individual soul has had a profound
influence upon the ethics of Christian communities. It is a doctrine
fundamentally akin to that of the Stoics, arising as theirs did in
communities that could no longer cherish political hopes. The natural
impulse of the vigorous person of decent character is to attempt to do
good, but if he is deprived of all political power and of all opportunity
to influence events, he will be deflected from his natural course and will
decide that the important thing is to be good. This is what happened to
the early Christians; it led to a conception of personal holiness as
something quite independent of beneficient action, since holiness
had to be something that could be achieved by people who were impotent in
action. Social virtue came therefore to be excluded from Christian ethics.
To this day conventional Christians think an adulterer more wicked
than a politician who takes bribes, although the latter probably does a
thousand times as much harm. The medieval conception of virtue, as one
sees in their pictures, was of something wishy-washy, feeble, and
sentimental. The most virtuous man was the man who retired from the world; the
only men of action who were regarded as saints were those who wasted the
lives and substance of their subjects in fighting the Turks, like St.
Louis. The church would never regard a man as a saint because he
reformed the finances, or the criminal law, or the judiciary. Such mere
contributions to human welfare would be regarded as of no importance. I do not
believe there is a single saint in the whole calendar whose saintship
is due to work of public utility. With this separation between the social
and the moral person there went an increasing separation between soul
and body, which has survived in Christian metaphysics and in the systems
derived from Descartes. One may say, broadly speaking, that the body
represents the social and public part of a man, whereas the soul represents the
private part. In emphasizing the soul, Christian ethics has made itself
completely individualistic. I think it is clear that the net result of
all the centuries of Christianity has been to make men more egotistic, more
shut up in themselves, than nature made them; for the impulses that
naturally take a man outside the walls of his ego are those of sex,
parenthood, and patriotism or herd instinct. Sex the church did everything it
could to decry and degrade; family affection was decried by Christ himself
and the bulk of his followers; and patriotism could find no place among the
subject populations of the Roman Empire. The polemic against the
family in the Gospels is a matter that has not received the attention it
deserves. The church treats the Mother of Christ with reverence, but He
Himself showed little of this attitude. "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"
(John ii, 4) is His way of speaking to her. He says also that He has come
to set a man at variance against his father, the daughter against her
mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and that he
that loveth father and mother more than Him is not worthy of Him (Matt. x,
35-37). All this means the breakup of the biological family tie for the
sake of creed - an attitude which had a great deal to do with the
intolerance that came into the world with the spread of Christianity.

 This individualism culminated in the doctrine of the immortality of the
individual soul, which was to enjoy hereafter endless bliss or endless woe
according to circumstances. The circumstances upon which this momentous
difference depended were somewhat curious. For example, if you died
immediately after a priest had sprinkled water upon you while pronouncing
certain words, you inherited eternal bliss; whereas, if after a long and
virtuous life you happened to be struck by lightning at a moment when you
were using bad language because you had broken a bootlace, you would
inherit eternal torment. I do not say that the modern Protestant Christian
believes this, nor even perhaps the modern Catholic Christian who has not
been adequately instructed in theology; but I do say that this is the
orthodox doctrine and was firmly believed until recent times. The
Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then
immediately dash their brains out: by this means they secured that these
infants went to Heaven. No orthodox Christian can find any logical reason
for condemning their action, although all nowadays do so. In countless
ways the doctrine of personal immortality in its Christian form has had
disastrous effects upon morals, and the metaphysical separation of
soul and body has had disastrous effects upon philosophy.

                        Sources of Intolerance

 The intolerance that spread over the world with the advent of
Christianity is one of the most curious features, due, I think, to the
Jewish belief in righteousness and in the exclusive reality of the Jewish
God. Why the Jews should have had these peculiarities I do not know. They
seem to have developed during the captivity as a reaction against the
attempt to absorb the Jews into alien populations. However that may be,
the Jews, and more especially the prophets, invented emphasis upon
personal righteousness and the idea that it is wicked to tolerate any
religion except one. These two ideas have had an extraordinarily
disastrous effect upon Occidental history. The church made much of the
persecution of Christians by the Roman State before the time of
Constantine. This persecution, however, was slight and intermittent and wholly
political. At all times, from the age of Constantine to the end of the
seventeenth century, Christians were far more fiercely persecuted by other
Christians than they ever were by the Roman emperors. Before the rise of
Christianity this persecuting attitude was unknown to the ancient world except
among the Jews. If you read, for example, Herodotus, you find a bland and
tolerant account of the habits of the foreign nations he visited.
Sometimes, it is true, a peculiarly barbarous custom may shock him, but in
general he is hospitable to foreign gods and foreign customs. He is not anxious
to prove that people who call Zeus by some other name will suffer eternal
punishment and ought to be put to death in order that their punishment may
begin as soon as possible. This attitude has been reserved for
Christians. It is true that the modern Christian is less robust, but that is not
thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the generations of freethinkers, who
from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of
many of their traditional beliefs. It is amusing to hear the modern
Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and
ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the
teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox
Christians. Nobody nowadays believes that the world was created in 4004 b.c.;
but not so very long ago skepticism on this point was thought an
abominable crime. My great-great-grandfather, after observing the depth of the
lava on the slopes of Etna, came to the conclusion that the world must be
older than the orthodox supposed and published this opinion in a book.
For this offense he was cut by the county and ostracized from society. Had
he been a man in humbler circumstances, his punishment would doubtless
have been more severe. It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now
believe all the absurdities that were believed 150 years ago. The
gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in
spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the
onslaughts of freethinkers.

                        The Doctrine of Free Will

 The attitude of the Christians on the subject of natural law has been
curiously vacillating and uncertain. There was, on the one hand, the
doctrine of free will, in which the great majority of Christians believed;
and this doctrine required that the acts of human beings at least should
not be subject to natural law. There was, on the other hand, especially in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a belief in God as the Lawgiver
and in natural law as one of the main evidences of the existence of a
Creator. In recent times the objection to the reign of law in the
interests of free will has begun to be felt more strongly than the belief
in natural law as affording evidence for a Lawgiver. Materialists used the
laws of physics to show, or attempt to show, that the movements of human
bodies are mechanically determined, and that consequently everything that
we say and every change of position that we effect fall outside the sphere
of any possible free will. If this be so, whatever may be left for our
unfettered volitions is of little value. If, when a man writes a poem or
commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely
from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to
him in the one case and to hang him in the other. There might in certain
metaphysical systems remain a region of pure thought in which the will would
be free; but, since that can be communicated to others only by means
of bodily movement, the realm of freedom would be one that could never be the
subject of communication and could never have any social importance.

 Then, again, evolution has had a considerable influence upon those
Christians who have accepted it. They have seen that it will not do to
make claims on behalf of man which are totally different from those which
are made on behalf of other forms of life. Therefore, in order to
safeguard free will in man, they have objected to every attempt at
explaining the behaviour of living matter in terms of physical and
chemical laws. The position of Descartes, to the effect that all lower
animals are automata, no longer finds favor with liberal theologians. The
doctrine of continuity makes them inclined to go a step further still and
maintain that even what is called dead matter is not rigidly governed in its
behaviour by unalterable laws. They seem to have overlooked the fact
that, if you abolish the reign of law, you also abolish the possibility of
miracles, since miracles are acts of God which contravene the laws governing
ordinary phenomena. I can, however, imagine the modern liberal
theologian maintaining with an air of profundity that all creation is
miraculous, so that he no longer needs to fasten upon certain occurrences as
special evidence of Divine intervention.

 Under the influence of this reaction against natural law, some
Christian apologists have seized upon the latest doctrines of the atom,
which tend to show that the physical laws in which we have hitherto
believed have only an approximate and average truth as applied to large
numbers of atoms, while the individual electron behaves pretty much as it
likes. My own belief is that this is a temporary phase, and that the
physicists will in time discover laws governing minute phenomena, although
these laws may differ considerably from those of traditional physics.
However that may be, it is worth while to observe that the modern
doctrines as to minute phenomena have no bearing upon anything that is of
practical importance. Visible motions, and indeed all motions that
make any difference to anybody, involve such large numbers of atoms that
they come well within the scope of the old laws. To write a poem or commit
a murder (reverting to our previous illustration), it is necessary to
move an appreciable mass of ink or lead. The electrons composing the
ink may be dancing freely around their little ballroom, but the ballroom as a
whole is moving according to the old laws of physics, and this alone
is what concerns the poet and his publisher. The modern doctrines,
therefore, have no appreciable bearing upon any of those problems of human
interest with which the theologian is concerned.

 The free-will question consequently remains just where it was.
Whatever may be thought about it as a matter of ultimate
metaphysics, it is quite clear that nobody believes it in practice. Everyone
has always believed that it is possible to train character; everyone has
always known that alcohol or opium will have a certain effect on behaviour. The
apostle of free will maintains that a man can by will power avoid
getting drunk, but he does not maintain that when drunk a man can say
"British Constitution" as clearly as if he were sober. And everybody who
has ever had to do with children knows that a suitable diet does more to
make them virtuous than the most eloquent preaching in the world. The
one effect that the free-will doctrine has in practice is to prevent
people from following out such common-sense knowledge to its rational
conclusion. When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and
we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is a result of
antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you
beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot
be held responsible by any stretch of imagination.

 No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being.
When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behaviour to
sin; he does not say, "You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you
any more petrol until you go." He attempts to find out what is
wrong and to set it right. An analogous way of treating human beings is,
however, considered to be contrary to the truths of our holy religion.
And this applies even in the treatment of little children. Many children
have bad habits which are perpetuated by punishment but will probably pass
away of themselves if left unnoticed. Nevertheless, nurses, with
very few exceptions, consider it right to inflict punishment, although by
so doing they run the risk of causing insanity. When insanity has been
caused it is cited in courts of law as a proof of the harmfulness of the
habit, not of the punishment. (I am alluding to a recent prosecution for
obscenity in the State of New York.)

 Reforms in education have come very largely through the study of the
insane and feeble-minded, because they have not been held morally
responsible for their failures and have therefore been treated more
scientifically than normal children. Until very recently it was held that,
if a boy could not learn his lesson, the proper cure was caning or
flogging. This view is nearly extinct in the treatment of children, but it
survives in the criminal law. It is evident that a man with a propensity
to crime must be stopped, but so must a man who has hydrophobia and wants
to bite people, although nobody considers him morally responsible. A man
who is suffering from plague has to be imprisoned until he is cured,
although nobody thinks him wicked. The same thing should be done with a
man who suffers from a propensity to commit forgery; but there
should be no more idea of guilt in the one case than in the other. And this
is only common sense, though it is a form of common sense to which
Christian ethics and metaphysics are opposed.

 To judge of the moral influence of any institution upon a community, we
have to consider the kind of impulse which is embodied in the institution
and the degree to which the institution increases the efficacy of the
impulse in that community. Sometimes the impulse concerned is quite
obvious, sometimes it is more hidden. An Alpine club, for example,
obviously embodies the impulse to adventure, and a learned society
embodies the impulse toward knowledge. The family as an institution
embodies jealousy and parental feeling; a football club or a
political party embodies the impulse toward competitive play; but the two
greatest social institutions - namely, the church and the state - are more complex
in their psychological motivation. The primary purpose of the state is
clearly security against both internal criminals and external
enemies. It is rooted in the tendency of children to huddle together when
they are frightened and to look for a grown-up person who will give them a
sense of security. The church has more complex origins. Undoubtedly
the most important source of religion is fear; this can be seen in the
present day, since anything that causes alarm is apt to turn people's thoughts
to God. Battle, pestilence, and shipwreck all tend to make people
religious. Religion has, however, other appeals besides that of terror; it
appeals specifically to our human self- esteem. If Christianity is true,
mankind are not such pitiful worms as they seem to be; they are of
interest to the Creator of the universe, who takes the trouble to be pleased with
them when they behave well and displeased when they behave badly. This is
a great compliment. We should not think of studying an ants' nest to
find out which of the ants performed their formicular duty, and we should
certainly not think of picking out those individual ants who were remiss and
putting them into a bonfire. If God does this for us, it is a
compliment to our importance; and it is even a pleasanter compliment if he awards to
the good among us everlasting happiness in heaven. Then there is the
comparitively modern idea that cosmic evolution is all designed to bring about
the sort of results which we call good - that is to say, the sort of
results that give us pleasure. Here again it is flattering to suppose that the
universe is controlled by a Being who shares our tastes and prejudices.

                        The Idea of Righteousness

 The third psychological impulse which is embodied in religion is that
which has led to the conception of righteousness. I am aware that many
freethinkers treat this conception with great respect and hold that it
should be preserved in spite of the decay of dogmatic religion. I cannot
agree with them on this point. The psychological analysis of the idea of
righteousness seems to me to show that it is rooted in undesirable
passions and ought not to be strengthened by the imprimatur of
reason. Righteousness and unrighteousness must be taken together; it is
impossible to stress the one without stressing the other also. Now,
what is "unrighteousness" in practise? It is in practise behaviour
of a kind disliked by the herd. By calling it unrighteousness, and by
arranging an elaborate system of ethics around this conception, the herd
justifies itself in wreaking punishment upon the objects of its own dislike,
while at the same time, since the herd is righteous by definition, it
enhances its own self- esteem at the very moment when it lets loose its
impulse to cruelty. This is the psychology of lynching, and of the other
ways in which criminals are punished. The essence of the
conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by
cloaking cruelty as justice.

 But, it will be said, the account you have been giving of righteousness
is wholly inapplicable to the Hebrew prophets, who, after all, on your own
showing, invented the idea. There is truth in this: righteousness in the
mouths of the Hebrew prophets meant what was approved by them and Yahweh.
One finds the same attitude expressed in the Acts of the Apostles, where
the Apostles began a pronouncement with the words "For it seemed good to
the Holy Ghost, and to us" (Acts xv, 28). This kind of individual
certainty as to God's tastes and opinions cannot, however, be made the
basis of any institution. That has always been the difficulty with which
Protestantism has had to contend: a new prophet could maintain that his
revelation was more authentic than those of his predecessors, and
there was nothing in the general outlook of Protestantism to show that this
claim was invalid. Consequently Protestantism split into innumerable
sects, which weakened one another; and there is reason to suppose that a
hundred years hence Catholicism will be the only effective representation
of the Christian faith. In the Catholic Church inspiration such as the
prophets enjoyed has its place; but it is recognized that phenomena
which look rather like genuine divine inspiration may be inspired by the
Devil, and it is the business of the church to discriminate, just as it is the
business of the art connoisseur to know a genuine Leonardo from a forgery.
In this way revelation becomes institutionalized at the same time.
Righteousness is what the church approves, and unrighteousness is what it
disapproves. Thus the effective part of the conception of
righteousness is a justification of herd antipathy.

 It would seem, therefore, that the three human impulses embodied in
religion are fear, conceit, and hatred. The purpose of religion, one may
say, is to give an air of respectability to these passions, provided they
run in certain channels. It is because these passions make, on the whole,
for human misery that religion is a force for evil, since it
permits men to indulge these passions without restraint, where but for its
sanction they might, at least to a certain degree, control them.

 I can imagine at this point an objection, not likely to be urged
perhaps by most orthodox believers but nevertheless worthy to be examined.
Hatred and fear, it may be said, are essential human characteristics;
mankind always has felt them and always will. The best that you can do
with them, I may be told, is to direct them into certain channels in which
they are less harmful than they would be in certain other channels. A
Christian theologian might say that their treatment by the church in
analogous to its treatment of the sex impulse, which it deplores. It
attempts to render concupiscence innocuous by confining it within the
bounds of matrimony. So, it may be said, if mankind must inevitably feel
hatred, it is better to direct this hatred against those who are really
harmful, and this is precisely what the church does by its conception of
righteousness.

 To this contention there are two replies - one comparatively
superficial; the other going to the root of the matter. The superficial
reply is that the church's conception of righteousness is not the best
possible; the fundamental reply is that hatred and fear can, with our
present psychological knowledge and our present industrial technique, be
eliminated altogether from human life.

 To take the first point first. The church's conception of
righteousness is socially undesirable in various ways - first and foremost
in its depriciation of intelligence and science. This defect is inherited
from the Gospels. Christ tells us to become as little children, but little
children cannot understand the differential calculus, or the principles of
currency, or the modern methods of combating disease. To acquire such
knowledge is no part of our duty, according to the church. The church no
longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did
so in its palmy days; but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not
sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to a pride of intellect, and
hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma. Take, for example, two
men, one of whom has stamped out yellow fever throughout some large
region in the tropics but has in the course of his labors had occasional
relations with women to whom he was not married; while the other has been
lazy and shiftless, begetting a child a year until his wife died of
exhaustion and taking so little care of his children that half of them
died from preventable causes, but never indulging in illicit sexual
intercourse. Every good Christian must maintain that the second of these men
is more virtuous than the first. Such an attitude is, of course,
superstitious and totally contrary to reason. Yet something of this absurdity is
inevitable so long as avoidance of sin is thought more important than
positive merit, and so long as the importance of knowledge as a help to a useful
life is not recognized.

 The second and more fundamental objection to the utilization of fear
and hatred practised by the church is that these emotions can now
be almost wholly eliminated from human nature by educational, economic, and
political reforms. The educational reforms must be the basis, since men
who feel hatred and fear will also admire these emotions and wish to
perpetuate them, although this admiration and wish will probably be
unconscious, as it is in the ordinary Christian. An education designed to eliminate
fear is by no means difficult to create. It is only necessary to treat
a child with kindness, to put him in an environment where initiative is
possible without disastrous results, and to save him from contact with
adults who have irrational terrors, whether of the dark, of mice, or
of social revolution. A child must also not be subject to severe
punishment, or to threats, or to grave and excessive reproof. To save a child from
hatred is a somewhat more elaborate business. Situations arousing jealousy
must be very carefully avoided by means of scrupulous and exact justice as
between different children. A child must feel himself the object of warm
affection on the part of some at least of the adults with whom he has to
do, and he must not be thwarted in his natural activities and curiosities
except when danger to life or health is concerned. In particular, there
must be no taboo on sex knowledge, or on conversation about matters which
conventional people consider improper. If these simple precepts are observed
from the start, the child will be fearless and friendly.

 On entering adult life, however, a young person so educated will find
himself or herself plunged into a world full of injustice, full of
cruelty, full of preventable misery. The injustice, the cruelty, and
the misery that exist in the modern world are an inheritance from the past,
and their ultimate source is economic, since life-and-death competition for
the means of subsistence was in former days inevitable. It is not
inevitable in our age. With our present industrial technique we can, if we choose,
provide a tolerable subsistence for everybody. We could also secure that the
world's population should be stationary if we were not prevented by the
political influence of churches which prefer war, pestilence, and
famine to contraception. The knowledge exists by which universal
happiness can be secured; the chief obstacle to its utilization for that
purpose is the teaching of religion. Religion prevents our children from
having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the
fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of
scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and
punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age;
but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the
door, and this dragon is religion.