Chapter X: Freethought

A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

The Brahmans have a legend that the first children of man ascended Mount Gunganoor, to visit the castle of Indra and inquire into the secret of their origin. Speculations on the source of life, on the mystery of creation, the cause of good and evil, and similar problems which we might sum up under the name of religious inquiries, seem, indeed, to have occupied the attention of our ancestors at a very early period. An irrepressible instinct appears to prompt the free discussion of such questions, and in a normal state of social relations the attempt to suppress that instinct would have appeared as preposterous as the attempt to enforce silence upon the inquirers into the problems of health or astronomy. A thousand years before the birth of Buddha, the Sakyas, or ethic philosophers, of northern Hindostan visited the mountain-passes of Himalaya to converse with travelers and seek information on the religious customs and traditions of foreign nations. The book of Job, probably the oldest literary product of the Semitic nations, records a series of free and often, indeed, absolutely agnostic discussions of ethical and cosmological problems.

“Canst thou by searching find out God?” says Zophar. “It is as high as heaven: what canst thou do? It is deeper than hell: what canst thou know?”

“Is it good unto thee that thou shouldst oppress the work of thy own hand?” Job asks his creator; “thine hands have made me; why dost thou destroy me? Thou huntest me like a fierce lion. Wherefore, then, hast thou brought me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had given up the ghost and no eye had seen me! I should have been as though I had not been; I should have been carried from the womb to the grave. Are not my days few? Cease, then, and let me alone, that I may take comfort a little, before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death.”

And again: “Man dieth and wasteth away; man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fall from the sea and the flood dryeth up: so man lieth down and riseth not; till the heavens be no more he shall not awake nor be raised out of his sleep.”... “If a man die, shall he live again?” “Wherefore is light given unto them that are in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul? who long for death, but it cometh not; who rejoice exceedingly and are glad when they can find the grave?”

Or Elihu’s interpellation: “Look up to heaven and see the clouds which are higher than thou: If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? If thou be righteous, what givest thou to him, or what can he receive of thine hand?”

Could a committee of modern skeptics and philosophers discuss the problems of existence with greater freedom?

For a series of centuries the monkish custodians of the literary treasures of Greece and Rome expurgated the writings of the bolder Freethinkers, and for the sake of its mere parchment destroyed more than one work that would have been worth whole libraries of their own lucubrations; yet even the scant relics of pagan literature furnish abundant proofs of the ethical and metaphysical liberty which the philosophers of the Mediterranean nations enjoyed for nearly a thousand years. The marvelous development of Grecian civilization in art, science, politics, literature, and general prosperity coincided with a period of almost unlimited religious freedom. Speculations on the origin of religious myths were propounded with an impunity which our latter-day Freethinkers have still cause to envy. The possibility of all definite knowledge of the attributes of the deity was boldly denied two thousand years before the birth of Emmanuel Kant. The Freethinker Diagoras traveled from city to city, propagating his system of Agnosticism with a publicity which seems to imply a degree of tolerance never yet re-attained in the progress of the most intellectual modern nations. The skeptic Pyrrho ridiculed the absurdity of all our modern Secularists would include under the name of other-worldliness. A Roman actor was applauded with cheers and laughter for quoting a passage to the effect that “if the gods exist, they seem to conduct their administration on the principle of strict neutrality in the affairs of mankind!”

Democritus, Euhemerus, Anaxagoras, Epicurus, Aristotle, Libanius, Pliny, Lucretius, and the latter Pythagoreans, almost entirely ignored the doctrines of Polytheism, which, indeed, never assumed an aggressive form, the attempted suppression of the Christian dogmatists being an only apparent exception, dictated by motives of political apprehensions, rather than by religious zeal; for at the very time when the followers of the life-hating Galilean were persecuted as “enemies of mankind,” a large number of other oriental religions enjoyed privileges bordering on license. The Grecian colonists of Asia Minor never interfered with the religious customs of their new neighbors. They studied and discussed them as they would study the curiosities of other social phenomena; and a purely naturalistic system of education would undoubtedly lead to analogous results. Intelligent children often evince a remarkable tact in avoiding certain topics of conversation, such as allusions to personal or national defects, scandals, the arcana of sexual relations, private affairs, etc., and the experience of after years may confirm such habits of discretion; but no conceivable motive but deference to an arbitrary precept could dictate a similar reticence in the discussion of purely metaphysical topics, or of dogmas which by their very pretense to a mission of extreme importance should justify an extreme frankness in debating the basis of their claims.

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

Religious liberty guarantees every other kind of freedom, as every form of slavery walks in the train of priestly despotism. In America religious emancipation led the way to the Declaration of Independence, and still continues to make this continent the chosen home of thousands of Liberals whom the material prosperity of the New World would have failed to attract. It is possible that a policy of intolerance would have averted or postponed the fate of the Moorish empire, which was ultimately overthrown by the fanatics of a creed which the followers of a more rational faith had permitted to survive in their midst; yet it is not less certain that for nearly five hundred years religious tolerance made the realm of the Spanish caliphs the one bright Goshen in a world of intellectual darkness. In northern Europe the history of civilization begins only with the triumph of Rationalism. Protestantism, in that wider sense which made the revolt of the Germanic nations an insurrection against the powers of superstition, has laid the foundation of national prosperity in Great Britain, in the Netherlands, and in the rising empire of northern Germany. The real founder of that empire was at once the greatest statesman and the boldest Freethinker of the last fourteen centuries. His capital became a city of refuge for the philosophers of Christian Europe. The eastern provinces of his kingdom were colonized by refugees from the tyranny of clerical autocrats. His absolute tolerance protected even the Jesuits, expelled by the Catholic rulers of France and Spain. During the reign of that crowned philosopher the religious and political dissenters of Prussia expressed their views with a freedom which in semi-republican England would have involved them in a maze of endless lawsuits. Among the fruits of that freedom were products of science and philosophy which have made that period the classic age of German literature. “Before the appearance of Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’” says Schopenhauer, “the works of duly installed government professors of philosophy were mostly medleys of sophisms, pretending to reconcile science and dogma, or reason and despotism. Here, at last, a state university could boast of a man who lived at once by and for the service of Truth—a phenomenon made possible only by the circumstance that, for the first time since the days of the great Aurelius and the greater Julian, a Freethinker had mounted the throne of an independent monarchy.”

The protection of Freethought is likewise the best safeguard against that virus of hypocrisy that has undermined the moral health of so many modern nations.

“What an incalculable advantage to a nation as well as to its ruler,” says a modern philosopher, “to know that the pillars of state are founded on the eternal verities, on natural science, logic, and arithmetic, instead of casuistry and immaculate conceptions!”

The consciousness of that advantage has more than once upheld the birthland of Protestantism in its struggles against the allied powers of despotism, and should uphold our republic in the inevitable struggle against the allied despots of the twentieth century.

C.—PERVERSION.

The experience of the last sixteen centuries has made priestcraft almost a synonym of intolerance; and yet it would be a mistake to suppose that the interests of Freethought are incompatible with the survival of any system of supernatural religion. The myths of polytheism were for ages accepted as the basis of a creed enjoying all the prerogatives and emoluments of an established religion, but the priests of that religion had no need of protecting their prestige by the butchery of heretics. With all their absurdities, the rites of their creed were essentially a worship of Nature, naturally attractive to all lovers of earth and life, and by their harmlessness conciliating the favor of philosophers who might have studied the baneful tendencies of a different creed—a creed which could propagate its dogmas only by an unremitting war against the natural instincts of the human race, and by constant intrigues against the protests of human reason. “The Nature-worshiping Greeks repeated the harmless myths and practiced the merry rites of their creed for centuries without troubling themselves about the myths and rites of their neighbors. Their superstition differed from that of the church as the inspired love of Nature differs from the ecstatic fury of her enemies, as the day-dream of a happy child differs from the fever-dream of a gloomy fanatic. ‘Procul Profani!’ was the cry of the Eleusinian priests. They had more followers than they wanted. Their joy-loving creed could dispense with autos-da-fé. The Hebrews, in stress of famine, conquered a little strip of territory between Arabia and the Syrian desert, and then tried their best to live in peace with heaven and earth, and their sects contented themselves with metaphorical rib-roastings. The Saracens spread their conquests from Spain to the Ganges, but their wars had a physical, rather than metaphysical, purpose. They needed land, and made a better use of it than the former occupants. They contented themselves with assessing dissenters, and did not deem it necessary to assassinate them. But the Galilean pessimists could not afford to tolerate an unconverted neighbor. To the enemies of Nature the happiness of an earth-loving, garden-planting, and science-promoting nation was an intolerable offense: reason had to be sacrificed to faith, health and happiness to the cross, and earth to heaven” (The Secret of the East, p. 62).

And even in the modified form of Protestant Christianity, that creed remains the rancorous enemy of Freethought. The doctrine of the Galilean Buddhist is essentially a doctrine of pessimism, of other-worldliness and Nature-hating renunciation of human reason and earthly prosperity, and therefore wholly irreconcilable with the promotion of progressive science and secular happiness. Philosophers have for centuries assembled their scholars undisturbed by the songs and dances of pagan festivals; the exponents of secular science have enjoyed the good-will of health-loving Hebrews and Mohammedans, and will find a modus vivendi with the Spiritualists and Theosophists of the future; but Secularism, “the Science of Happiness on Earth,” can never hope to conciliate the dogmatists of a creed that denies the value of life itself, and wages war against Nature as well as against the claims of natural science.

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

Wherever Reason surrenders to Dogma, the exponents of that dogma will claim unreasonable prerogatives. Irresponsible dogmatists have never failed to pursue the interests of their creed at the expense of the interests of mankind. The lessons of Science could not be reconciled with the doctrines of Antinaturalism, and in the interest of that doctrine the spiritual taskmasters of medieval Europe suppressed Science by methods that have retarded the progress of mankind for thirteen hundred years. The suppression of Freethought enabled the enemies of Nature to complete their triumph by the suppression of social and political liberty; and for ages the church has been the faithful ally of Despotism. The priest-ridden rulers of the expiring Roman empire and the priest-ridden rabble of the Roman provinces assisted in the persecution of Freethought, and that crime against reason was avenged by the development of a system of spiritual tyranny which at last forced even princes to kiss the dust of Canossa and degraded the lot of peasants beneath that of savages and wild beasts. The war against natural science avenged itself in the neglect of agriculture, and the enormous spread of deserts, which the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger proposed to reclaim by prayer-meetings. The surrender of Freethought to faith sealed the fate of millions of heretics and “sorcerers,” who expiated an imaginary crime in the agonies of the stake. Not the abrogation of civil rights, not the intimidation of princes and commoners, but the eradication of Freethought, enabled the priests of an unnatural creed to enforce their hideous superstitions upon the prisoners of the numberless monasteries which for a series of centuries combined all the conditions for the systematic suppression of moral, intellectual, and personal freedom.

“I am not come to bring peace but the sword,” said the ingenuous founder of a creed which could not fail to produce an irrepressible conflict between the delusions of its doctrines and the inspirations of nature and science—and, of course, also between the would-be followers of its own preposterous precepts—and neither the lust of conquest nor the jealousy of rival nations has ever stained this earth with the torrents of blood shed by the bigots of that creed after its triumph over the protests of Freethought. The fatuous attempt to crush out dissent by substituting a roll of parchment for the book of Nature avenged itself by murderous wars about the interpretation of those same parchments. The dogmatists who had tried to perpetuate their power by the murder of modest rationalists, were assailed by hordes of their own irrationalists, raging about the ceremonial details of the wafer-rite and the immersion rite. The bigots who had refused to heed the pleadings of Bruno and Campanella were forced to acknowledge the battle-axe logic of the Hussites.

E.—REFORM.

Truth that prevails against error also prevails against half truths, and the recognition of just claims cannot be furthered by unjust concessions. Uncompromising right is mightiest, and Freethinkers would have served their cause more effectually if they had contended, not for the favor to enjoy a privilege, but the right to fulfil a duty. The ministry of reason imposes obligations to posterity, and to the memory of its bygone martyrs, as well as to our help-needing contemporaries; and the defense of its rights is a truer religion than submission to the yoke of a mind-enslaving dogma. The Rishis, or sainted hermits of Brahmanism, used to devote themselves to the service of a forest temple, and guard its sanctuary against vermin and reptiles; and the believers in a personal God cannot devote their lives to a nobler task than by guarding his temples against the serpent of priestly despotism.

The disciples of Secularism should learn to value the right of Freethought as the palladium of their faith, as the basis of all other blessings—moral and material, as well as intellectual. They should learn to revere the memory of the martyrs of their faith, and recognize the importance of their services to the cause of modern civilization and its sacred principles; but they should also learn to recognize the magnitude of the remaining task. It is no trifle that the prevalent system of ethics and the temporal and eternal hopes of millions of our brethren are still based on a lie. It is no trifle that the health and happiness of millions of our fellow-men are still sacrificed on the altar of that untruth by the suppression of public recreations on the only day when a large plurality of our working-men find their only chance of leisure. It is no trifle that honest men are still branded as “Infidels,” “renegades,” and “scoffers,” for refusing to kneel in the temple of a nature-hating fanatic. The struggle against the spirits of darkness is by no means yet decided in Italy, where the arch-hierarch is spinning restless intrigues to regain the power which for ages made Europe a Gehenna of misery and despotism. Nor in Spain, where a swarm of clerical vampires is still sucking the life-blood of an impoverished nation. Nor in Austria and southern Germany, where the alliance of church and state remains a constant menace to the scant liberties of the people.

Freethinkers need not underrate the influence of individual efforts to recognize the superior advantage of organized coöperation, so urgently needed for the reform of Sabbath laws, of press laws, and the educational system of the numerous colleges still intrusted to the control of the Jesuitical enemies of science. The strength-in-union principle should encourage the oft-debated projects for the establishment of Freethought colleges (as well as Freethought communities); but still more decisive results could be hoped from that union of the powers of knowledge and of moral courage which has never yet failed to insure the triumph of social reforms. We should cease to plead for favors where we can claim an indisputable right. We should cease to admit the right of mental prostitutes to enforce the penalties of social ostracism against the champions of science; but we, in our turn, should deserve the prestige of that championship by scorning the expedients of the moral cowardice which strains at gnats and connives at beams, attacking superstition in the harmless absurdities of its ceremonial institutions, and sparing the ruinous dogmas that have drenched the face of earth with the blood of her noblest children, and turned vast areas of garden-lands into hopeless deserts. The skeptics who scoff at the inconsistencies of a poor clergyman who tries in vain to reconcile the instincts of his better nature with the demands of an anti-natural creed, should themselves be consistent enough to repudiate the worship of the fatal founder of that creed, and not let the hoary age of the Galilean doctrine palliate the tendencies of its life-blighting delusions.

III.—MORAL MAXIMS.