The Story of My Mind

tigator as an enemy of morals as well as of religion. Reason, the theologians contend, is incapable of understanding the divine mysteries, and forgets, of course, th

erson without making one's self utterly unintelligible, not to say, absurd. There is not a single statement made about a god, which can be harmonized with sense. It is because the beliefs about the supernatural cannot be reconciled

hing but guesses as to the kind of worship he prefers, or why he should be praised. And yet, entire countries have been plundered, pillaged, and laid waste for no other re

has never been, and in the nature of things there never can be a divin

ursue? Would he reveal himself to us as he is, or only as much of himself as we needed to know or could comprehend? To reveal himself to

our knowledge of supernatural beings must be as incomplete as is the knowledge of animals concerning man. We see objects as the structure of our eyes permits us to see them, or as our minds grasp them. The reflection of the sky in a drop of dew is limited to the capacity of the dew. Owing to this adaptation of objects to the pow

. As he advances in refinement and humanity, his God advances too. If he sinks into deeper ignorance and brutality, he drags his God down with him. The God of the Quaker is peaceful; that of the Hebrew was a "man of war." The God of the Negro, who has never seen white folks, is necessarily black

r with everything that he fears and despises. He therefore, as a later evolution, makes his devils white. The idea I wish to present is that just as man determines the color of his gods and devils he determines also their charact

wes every one of his prerogatives to the very people who bend before him; they make him infallible, they seat him on a throne, and place the Keys of Heaven and Hell in his hands; yet before this creature of their own vanity or fear they behave like a race of bondsmen. Who created the Sultan or the Czar? Their own subjects! And yet see ho

a supernatural origin for itself, vehemently denies it to all others, renders all such claims exceedingly suspicious. It would be easier for me, for instance, to believe that God has also spoken to you, if he has really spoken to me. But if he has not spoken to me, I am apt to consider the claim that he has spoken to you, as an impertinence. The

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an individual-a Moses, a Mohammed, a Jesus, etc. But if we ourselves are not inspired, how are we to tell which teacher is telling the truth? If we are to use our own reason to decide this momentous question, why,

o superiority to human reason. It follows then unmistakably that a revelation is impossible since it is we who ha

of the world done this? Have they not, on the contrary, added to the perplexities of the mind? A god who reveals himself to an individual privatel

all we have faith in the one our parents believed, in the one of the country we were

t inspired, why not another? If faith

t cannot be a subject of study cannot be an object of faith. We do not deny the gods, for we know nothing ab

f life upon it. The great teachers and founders of religions are proper subjects both for criticism and commendation. Being men they cannot claim immunity from a free and fearless examination of their teachings. The more h

g, loaves and raising the dead. All the wonders of the world cannot make what is bad, good, or what is false, true. A teacher who has a falsehood which he wishes to pass for the truth may resort to a miracle; but why should an honest soul undertake to win converts by unintelligible performances? If physical and mathematical truth can, unaided, command universal assent, why should there be "signs and wonders" to maintain moral or intellectual truths? Moreover, if a teacher has power to stop the sun, h

t a man by miracle

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, we must try to arrive at some sort of an agreement as to what we woul

most degrading, and the most deadly of the vices that human nature is heir to. Cruelty is consummate wickedness. It is the passion of the bad because it is bad. It is doing evil from pleasure, Think, then, what a serious thing it is for a religion purporting to be "divine" to recommend the halter, the fire-brand

eligion? Life is an evil, taught the Hindu reformer. To desire life is the acme of immorality according to this doctrine for it is to desire that which is evil. Desire is the soil in which spring up all the noxious weeds which choke to death the flower of happiness. To cease to desire is to conquer freedom from suffering. Salvation according to Buddhism consists in winding up and sealing forever the book of life, leaving not the remotest possibility for any fresh life to spring up again. This pessimism, which while it has attractions for the speculative and supine Oriental, is justly abhorred by the creative and ever-youthful European. The important question is not, "Is life worth living?" but "How can life be made worth living, since live we must?" While therefore Buddha taught a scrupulous morality, while his own character st

is no soul to go anywhere. Neither could reincarnation produce the moral discipline claimed by its advocates. It is no punishment to return to the world in a lower form of life, since there is no memory, clear and ringing, of a former and higher existence. Moreover, the lower forms of

d the rainbow arch of Nirvana, that is to say, deliverance for all from every form of suffering, in sleep-ete

o long and too often upon the thorns, Buddhism becomes blind to the rose which is as real as the thorns. And again this Oriental teacher set up an unattainable ideal when he dema

to the least of sentient things. The birds, the fishes, the crawling worms, as well as man, he looked upon as his brothers. Buddhism might be called the Religion of Pi

ir reign over the minds of men, in part at least, to the wonderful miracles attributed to them, Confucius, on the contrary, owes his increasing reputation to the complete absence o

To lose this world that we may win the next was the burden of the teaching of both Buddha and Jesus. But the great Chinaman completely ignored the so-called next world, and directed all his efforts toward the enlightenment of man concerning the world that now is. It will readily be seen what a radical difference there is between Confucius and his colleagues. When they spoke of gods, Confucius spoke of man; when they a

les, delivered no inspired oracles, dealt in no mysteries, claimed no supernatural powers, did not think that the less sense there was in a religion the more divine it would be, and made no attempt to allure with future promises, or to fr

vil with the love of God or Ormuzd, the principle of goodness. The dualism is the distinguishing characteristic of the religion founded by Zoroaster, and is also its contribution to nearly all the other religions; for we find in Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism the same fundamental belief in the existence of a God invariably accompanied by his rival-the Devil. What the one creat

vestas, attributed to his pen,-we are compelled by the evidence to charge the religion of Zoroaster, that is to say, the religion of dualism, of a God plus a Devil, with having invented, so to speak, the awful doctrine of hell, and therefore of religious persecution. It was a natural consequence of the belief in a God opp

it of exclusiveness holds sway, there religious toleration will be considered a crime, both against God and the State. Of course in all three of these faiths are to be found passages which seem to possess an accent of universality. But it is a universality conditioned on the conversion of the whole world to the faith in question. "My house shall be a house of prayer for all nations," writes the Jewish prophet, but observe it says,-"My house,"-which means that the whole world will come to worship in a Jewish temple. It does not mean that Pagan and Christ

to make their God acceptable they had only to make him intensely partisan. One who loves his own only. But they have made him, necessarily, as terrible as he is exclusive. He is not only called a jealous God, but also a consuming fire, a man of war. It is expressly stated that "He is angry every day." The English translators have interpolated the words-"with the wicked,"-but the original as render

los dies," are the w

shall have no pity upon them." Each of the three religions, unfortunately, has been too willing to obey to the letter this unfraternal injunction introduced into the mouth of the Deity by the priesthood. As the authors of the

o not into the cities of the Gentiles," assuring them at the same time that the world would come to an end before they had even finished preaching to the lost sheep of Israel. Jesus as a Jew shared the belief of his people that "none are beloved before God but Israel." It was the Greek and Latin genius that made of Christianity more than merely another. Jewish sect, by breathing into it as much of its universalism as a dogmatic religion would admit Of course, the best service which paganism rendered Christianity was to introduce into it a new God-the man God as against the all-God Jehovah-who, by personal sacrifices, conquered for the whole world an opportunity to be saved. Ch

and a great part of Asia and Africa captive for many centuries, prompted their God to solemnly declare in infallible documents, that a father should not hesitate to kill his own son, or a son his own father; that a mother should destroy her child, and the child its mother,-to prevent them from professing or following another religion. It is impossible to bring a more horrible accusation against a set of men. The worst thing that we can say against the profession of the law or of medic

th the divine? Furthermore, if the mental and moral limitations of a people determine the character of revelation, what advantage is there in having a revelation? Moreover, because a child cannot comprehend algebra, is it right to teach him that one and one make three? Is the inability of the primitiv

. 7: 1

. Kings 22: 23;

I. Sam. 16: 1, 2,;

. Am I asked what good these religions have done? I answer: They have taught man science by forbidding it. It may sound strange, but religion aroused human curiosity, which again discovered science. The time came when man was not satisfied with information only about the next world, about spirits and demons, about mysteries and divine attribu

nd to think for a purpose, that is to say, to reason. The savage has ideas too, but he can not put them together, he can not classify or systematize them. There has been iron in the bowels of the earth, and lying on the surface in many places for long ages, but only when man could give shape and form to it did he enter the p

nd to understand itself and its environment. At the core of every religion, however crude, there is a philo

The civilized man crosses himself in the presence of danger. Both practice

s trying to evolve harmony out of chaos,-music out of the discord and babel of life; and he thinks he has succeeded, when he has pronounced the word Allah! Of course, his philosophy is that of a beginner, but it is a philosophy, nevertheless. He is an embryo scientist, taking his first lesson in logical reasoning. That is the truth at the heart of all re

ree agents, like himself, acting from choice, as he thought he did, was a very crude one, but it was an explanation, all the same, and for the time being proved helpful to him. From the very beginning, man has shown a hunger for knowledge, which has put his mind in action. Religion, then, is man's first attempt at scientific and philosophical thinking. Religion is, in a sense, the primer of science and philosophy. The mistake we make is to declare this primer infallible. We take the first composition of the child, so to speak-his first prattle in the prese

f; the second truth is that all the religious rites and ceremonies, the most superstitious of them, embody likewise a truth;-they represent the effort of man to get the control of the universe into his own hands. If today we possess any power over the r

control of the universe. As soon as primitive man concluded that the sun, for example, or the river, was a god, he set to work to learn the habits, tastes, pleasure of his gods, that he might prevent them from hurting him and encourage them to gratify his needs. In other words, he wished to replace them in the government of the world. He did not feel safe until

s of modern times-because, forsooth, they started our race in its career of progress? Shall the candle light be permitted to prejudice us against electricity; the stagecoach against the locomotive; the cave of the savage against the sanitary dwellings of modern cities; or the primitive forms of communication against the wonderful wireless? Why, then, should Moses or Mohammed or Jesus stand in the wa

were the first to replace faith by knowledge have invariably been the first also in civilization. While Palestine remained a desert, Greece became the garden of the world. Whatever of beauty there is in our lives today, we owe it to the immortal Greeks. Tru