My Path to Atheism

by Annie Besant

Would to God that Christian men and women would ponder it well and think it out for themselves, and when they go into the worst parts of our great cities and their hearts almost break with the misery there, then let them remember how that misery is but a faint picture of the endless, hopeless, misery, to which the vast majority of their fellow-men are doomed.

Christian reader, do not be afraid to realise the future in which you say you believe, and which the God of Love has prepared for the home of some of his children. Imagine yourself, or any dear to you, plunged into guilt from which there is no redeemer, and where the voice cannot penetrate of him that speaks in righteousness, mighty to save. In the well-weighed words of a champion of Christian orthodoxy, think there is no reason to believe that hell is only a punishment for past offences; in that dark world sin and misery reproduce each other in infinite succession. "What if the sin perpetuates itself, if the prolonged misery may be the offspring of the prolonged guilt?" Ponder it well, and, if you find it true, then cast out from your creed the belief in a Jesus who loved the lost; blot out from your Bible every verse that speaks of a Father's heart; tear from your Prayer-books every page that prays to a Father in heaven. If the lowest of God's creatures is to be left in the foul embraces of sin for ever, God cannot be the Eternal Righteousness, the unconquerable Love. For what sort of Righteousness is that which rests idly contented in a heaven of bliss, while millions of souls capable of righteousness are bound by it in helpless sin; what sort of love is that which is satisfied to be repulsed, and is willing to be hated? As long as God is righteous, as long as God is love, so long is it impossible that men and women shall be left by him forever in a state to which our worst dens of earth are a very paradise of beauty and purity. Bible writers may have erred, but "Thou continuest holy, O Thou worship of Israel!" There is one revelation that cannot err, and that is written by God's finger on every human heart. What man recoils from doing, even at his lowest, can never be done by his Creator, from whose inspiration he draws every righteous thought. Is there one father, however brutalized, who would deliberately keep his child in sin because of a childish fault? one mother who would aimlessly torture her son, keeping him alive but to torment? Yet this, nothing less,—nay, a thousand times more, for it is this multiplied infinitely by infinite power of torture,—this is what Christians ask us to believe about our Father and our God, a glimmer from the radiance of whose throne falls on to our earth, when men love their enemies and forgive freely those who wrong them If this so-called orthodox belief is right, then is their gospel of the Love of God to the world a delusion and a lie; if this is true, the teaching of Jesus to publicans and harlots of the Fatherhood of God is a cruel mockery of our divinest instincts; the tale of the good Shepherd who could not rest while one sheep was lost is the bitterest irony. But this awful dogma is not true, and the Love of God cradles his creation; not one son of the Father's family shall be left under the power of sin, to be an eternal blot on God's creation, an endless reproach to his Maker's wisdom, an everlasting and irreparable mistake.

No amount of argument, however powerful, should make us believe a doctrine from which our hearts recoil with such shuddering horror as they do from this doctrine of eternal torture and eternal sin. There is a divine instinct in the human heart which may be trusted as an arbiter between right and wrong; no supernatural revelation, no miracle, no angel from heaven, should have power to make us accept as divine that which our hearts proclaim as vile and devilish. It is not true faith to crush down our moral sense beneath the hoof of credulity; true faith believes in God only as a "Power which makes for Righteousness" and recks little of threats or curses which would force her to accept that which conscience disapproves. And what is more, if it were possible that God were not what we dream, if he were not "righteous in all his ways and holy in all his works," then were it craven cowardice to worship him at all. It has been well said, "that to worship simple power, without virtue, is nothing but devil-worship;" in that case it were nobler to refuse to praise him and to take what he might send. Then indeed we must say, with John Stuart Mill, in that burst of passion which reads so strangely in the midst of his passionless logic, that if I am told that this is justice and love, and that if I do not call it so, God will send me to hell, then "to hell I'll go."

I have purposely put first my strong reprobation of eternal hell, because of its own essential hideousness, and because, were it ever so true, I should deem myself disgraced by acknowledging it as either loving or good. But it is, however, a satisfaction to note the feebleness of the arguments advanced in support of this dogma, and to find that justice and holiness, as well as love, frown on the idea of an eternal hell.

The first argument put forth is this: "God has made a law which man breaks; man must therefore in justice suffer the penalty of his transgression." This, like so many of the orthodox arguments, sounds just and right, and at first we perfectly agree with it. The instinct of justice in our own breasts confirms the statement, and looking abroad into the world we see its truth proved by facts. Law is around us on every side; man is placed in a realm of law; he may-strive against the laws which encircle him, but he will only dash himself to pieces against a rock; he is under a code which he breaks at his peril. Here is perfect justice, a justice absolutely unwavering, deaf to cries, unseducible by-flatteries, unalloyed by favouritism: a law exists, break it, and you suffer the inevitable consequences. So far, then, the orthodox argument is sound and strong, but now it takes a sudden leap. "The penalty of the broken law is hell." Why? What common factor is there between a lie, and the "lake of fire in which all liars shall have their part?" Nature is absolutely against the orthodox corollary, because hell as a punishment of sin is purely arbitrary, the punishment might quite as well have been something else; but in nature the penalty of a broken law is always strictly in character with the law itself, and is derived from it. Men imagine the most extraordinary "judgment." A nation is given to excessive drinking, and is punished with cattle-plague; or shows leanings towards popery, and is chastised with cholera. It is as reasonable to believe this as it would be to expect that if a child fell down stairs he would be picked up covered with blisters from burning, instead of his receiving his natural punishment of being bruised. Why, because I lie and forget God, should I be punished with fire and brimstone? Fire is not derivable from truth, nor is brimstone a stimulus to memory. There is also a strange confusion in many minds about the punishment of sin. A child is told not to put his hand into the fire, he does so, and is burnt; the burning is a punishment, he is told; for what? Not for disobedience to the parent, as is generally said, but for disregarding the law of nature which says that fire burns. One often hears it said: "God's punishments for sin are not equal: one man sins once and suffers for it all his life, while another sins twenty times and is not punished at all." By no means: the two men both break a moral law, and suffer a moral degradation; one of them breaks in addition some physical law, and suffers a physical injury. People see injustice where none exists, because they will not take the trouble to distinguish what laws are broken when material punishments follow. There is nothing arbitrary in nature: cause and effect rule in her realm. Hell is then unjust, in the first place, because physical torture has nothing in common with moral guilt.

It is unjust, secondly, because it is excessive. Sin, say theologians, is to be punished infinitely, because sin is an offence committed against an infinite being. Of course, then, good must logically be rewarded infinitely, because it is duty offered to an infinite being. There is no man who has never done a single good act, so every man deserves an infinite reward. There is no man who has never done a single bad act, so every man deserves an infinite punishment. Therefore every man deserves both an infinite reward and an infinite punishment, "which," as Euclid says, "is absurd." And this is quite enough answer to the proposition. But I must protest, in passing, against this notion of "sin against God" as properly understood. If by this expression is only meant that every sin committed is a sin against God, because every sin is done against man's higher nature, which is God in man, then indeed there is no objection to be made to it. But this is not what is generally meant by the phrase. It usually means that we are able, as it were, to injure God in some way, to dishonour him, to affront him, to trouble him. By sin we make him "angry," we "provoke him to wrath;" because of this feeling on his own part he punishes us, and demands "satisfaction." Surely a moment's reflection must prove to any reasonable being that sin against God in this sense is perfectly impossible. What can the littleness of man do against the greatness of the Eternal! Imagine a speck of dust troubling the depths of the ocean, an aphis burdening an oak-tree with its weight: each is far more probable than that a man could ruffle the perfect serenity of God. Suppose I stand on a lawn watching an ant-heap, an ant twinkles his feelers at me scornfully; do I fly into a passion and rush on the insect to destroy it, or seize it and slowly torture it? Yet I am far less above the level of the ant than God is above mine.

But I must add a word here to guard against the misapprehension that in saying this I am depriving man of the strength he finds in believing that he is personally known to God and an object of his care. Were I the ant's creator familiar with all the workings of its mind, I might regret, for its sake, the pride and scorn of its maker shown by its-action, because it was not rising to the perfection of nature of which it was capable. So, in that nature in which we live and move, which is too great to regard anything as-little, which is around all and in all, and which we believe to be conscious of all, there is—I cannot but think—some feeling which, for want of a better term, we must call a desire for the growth of his creatures (because in this growth lies their own happiness), and a corresponding feeling of regret when they injure themselves. But I say this in fear and reverence, knowing that human language has no terms in which to describe the nature we adore, and conscious that in the very act of putting ideas about him into words, I degrade the ideas and they no longer fully answer to the thought in my own mind. Silent adoration befits man best in the presence of his maker, only it is right to protest against the more degrading conceptions of him, although the higher conceptions are themselves far below what he really is. Sin then, being done against oneself only, cannot deserve an eternity of torture. Sin injures man already, why should he be further injured by endless agony? The infliction of pain is only justifiable when it is the means of conveying to the sufferer himself a gain greater than the suffering inflicted; therefore punishment is only righteous when reformatory. But endless torture cannot aim at reformation; it has no aim beyond itself, and can only arise, therefore, from vengeance and vindictiveness, which we have shown to be impossible with God. Hell is unjust, secondly, because its punishment is excessive and aimless. It is also unjust, because to avoid it needs an impossible perfection. It is no answer to this to say that there is an escape offered to us through the Atonement made by Jesus Christ. Why should I be called on to escape like a criminal from that which I do not deserve? God makes man imperfect, frail, sinful, utterly unable to keep perfectly a perfect law: he therefore fails, and is—what? To be strengthened? by no means; he is to go to hell. The statement of this suffices to show its injustice. We cavil not at the wisdom which made us what we are, but we protest against the idea which makes God so cruelly unjust as to torture babies because they are unable to walk as steadily as full-grown men. Hell is unjust, in the third place, because man does not deserve it.

To all this it will probably be retorted, "you are arguing as though God's justice were the same as man's, and you were therefore capable of judging it, an assumption which is unwarrantable, and is grossly presumptuous." To which I reply: "If by God's justice you do not mean justice at all, but refer to some Divine attribute of which we know nothing, all my strictures on it fall to the ground; only, do not commit the inconsistency of arguing that hell is just, when by 'just' you mean some unknown quality, and then propping up your theories with proofs drawn from human justice. It would perhaps tend to clearness in argument if you gave this Divine attribute some other name, instead of using for it an expression which has already a definite meaning."

The justice of hell disposed of, we turn to the love of God. I have never heard it stated that hell is a proof of his great love to the world, but I take the liberty myself of drawing attention to it in this light. God, we are told, existed alone before ought was created; there perfect in himself, in happiness, in glory, he might have remained, say orthodox theologians. Then, we have a right to ask in the name of charity, why did he, happy himself, create a race of beings of whom the vast majority were to be endlessly and hopelessly miserable? Was this love? "He created man to glorify him." But was it loving to create those who would only suffer for his glory? Was it not rather a gigantic, an inconceivable selfishness?

"Man may be saved if he will." That is not to the point; God foreknew that some would be lost, and yet he made them. With all reverence I say it, God had no right to create sentient beings, if of one of them it can ever be truly said, "good were it for that man that he had never been born." He who creates, imposes on himself, by the very act of creation, duties towards his creatures. If God be self-conscious and moral, it is an absolute certainty that the whole creation is moving towards the final good of every creature in it. We did not ask to be made; we suffered not when we existed not; God, who has laid existence on us without our consent, is responsible for our final good, and is bound by every tie of righteousness and justice, not to speak of love, to make the existence he gave us, unasked, a blessing and not a curse to us. Parents feel this responsibility towards the children they bring into the world, and feel themselves bound to protect and to make happy those who, without them, had not been born. But, if hell be true, then every man and woman is bound not to fulfil the Divine command of multiplying the race, since by so doing they are aiding to fill the dungeons of hell, and they will, hereafter, have their sons and their daughters cursing the day of their birth, and overwhelming their parents with reproaches for having brought into the world a body, which God was thus enabled to curse with the awful gift of an immortal soul.