Fix Not Your Faith On An Absentee God

( Originally Published 1908 )

Canned Philosophy

GEOLOGY is canned philosophy. It is supplied to the individual with the best success at adolescence, when glimmering intellect is in doubt; when an explanation of physical phenomena is demanded; when nerves are vibrating, and the person being in a transition period, craves protection. At this time, mysticism coupled with the religious rite of " confirmation " meets with a glad response from the vascillating, restless, feverish, uncertain condition of the novitiate.

Centuries of pious priestcraft have reduced the scheme to a science.

Formalized religions with their bells, responses, swinging censers, robes, processions, genuflections, and strange sights, sounds and smells, are well calculated to stampede reason and make cowards of us all.

These things were first worked out in the adolescence of the race, long before any definite knowledge of the actual world was considered either possible or desirable. Hence the warfare of religion with science. Science sets free, formal religion fetters.

A reasonable amount of superstition, to paraphrase our old friend David Hamm, is desirable at a certain time in our evolution. The fairies fit the child-mind. They arouse imagination, and surely this animation is better than deadness, inertia and dumb indifference. So superstition has its use. Its danger lies in crystallizing it into a dogma and teaching it as truth to grown-ups, forcing it upon humanity with injunction, threat and coercion.

Up to the time of Thomas Jefferson, religion and government were one, and even now, altho they are not legally wedded, they continue to have "relations. " No candidate for the presidency dares express his honest belief. The church still uses the government to force canned philosophy upon us.

And yet I believe that most priests and preachers are honest men who think they are really serving humanity. When we get our living out of a thing, self-interest prompts us to defend it, and we believe that which is to our own interest to believe.

Jesus was a rebel against a formal, ossified religion. He had nothing to do with organizing a religious trust. The " Christian" religion had its rise in Egypt, Assyria and Chaldea.

The customs and costumes of Babylon and Nineveh have come down to us, and are still perpetuated without a single patentable improvement. Jesus was dead and not able to defend His good name; and so His gentle philosophy of combined protest and affirmation was seized and worked up into the prevailing pagan hash of superstition.

Now and then a so-called liberal arises and announces that he has discovered a formaldehyde that will disinfect, sweeten and freshen the mass, and he, too, is probably honest. His future, his fortune, his good name depend upon the success of the thing which he upholds, and so he maintains it even with his life. Martyrdom does not prove a thing true, any more than does success. Vice has always had a thousand martyrs to Virtue's one. The heroism and persistency shown by criminals in following their bent is admirable, were it not appalling.

Criminals have been trained by society, unknowingly, of course, to do this one thing, and so they cleave and cling to it, and " die in the harness. "

It is so with theology. The men trained to it can do nothing else, and so they clutch it and cling to it, declaring it the hope of the world and prophesy terrible things that will happen to a godless government. And the people to whom the canned philosophy has been fed, are used to it, and are unable to digest anything else. Our minds like our bodies crave the accustomed.

So long as government and church were one, no thinker was safe. Treason and blasphemy were net and spear, always in waiting for the lives of those who failed to conform. It was Jefferson who first fixed in a constitution the definition that treason should not consist in anything you might say or write. Treason now consists in armed war upon your country, or in giving aid and succor to its armed enemies.

Blasphemy now consists in speaking disrespectfully of another man's conception of the Deity.

And this in America you have a perfect legal right to do.

And so it was Jefferson and Ingersoll who killed the ptomaines in theology—or at least filed their teeth. And now behold theology as a sawdust breakfast food, made palatable to the unthinking—educated and uneducated—thru a dash of morality and a sprinkling of sweet ethics Formal religion was organized for slaves; it offered them consolation which earth did not provide.Work for them offered no solace. Today it is different : sensible people realize that the man who does not enjoy his work will never enjoy anything. Work is our refuge and defense; and art is the expression of man's joy in his work.