A Grammar of Freethought

by Chapman Cohen

It might with some show of reason be maintained that no belief has done so much to retard the economic and thereby the social progress of mankind as the belief in the immortality of the soul; for this belief has led race after race, generation after generation, to sacrifice the real wants of the living to the imaginary wants of the dead. The waste and destruction of life and property which this faith has entailed has been enormous and incalculable. But I am not here concerned with the disastrous and deplorable consequences, the unspeakable follies and crimes and miseries which have flowed in practice from the theory of a future life. My business at present is with the more cheerful side of a gloomy subject.

Every author has, of course, the fullest right to select whichever aspect of a subject he thinks deserves treatment, but all the same one may point out that it is this dwelling on the "cheerful side" of these beliefs that encourages the religionist to put forward claims on behalf of present day religion that Sir James himself would be the first to challenge. There is surely greater need to emphasize the darker side of a creed that has thousands of paid advocates presenting an imaginary bright side to the public gaze.

But what has been said of the relation of the feeling against homicide applies with no more than a variation of terms to the other instances given by Sir James Frazer. Either these institutions have a basis in utility or they have not. If they have not, then religion can claim no social credit for their preservation. If they have a basis in utility, then the reason for their preservation is to be found in social selection, although the precise local form in which an institution appears may be determined by other circumstances. And when Sir James says that the task of government has been facilitated by the superstition that the governors belonged to a superior class of beings, one may safely assume that the statement holds good only of individual governors, or of particular forms of government. It may well be that when a people are led to believe that a certain individual possesses supernatural powers, or that a particular government enjoys the favour of supernatural beings, there will be less inclination to resentment against orders than there would be otherwise. But government and governors, in other words, a general body of rules for the government of the tribe, and the admitted leadership of certain favoured individuals, would remain natural facts in the absence of superstition, and their development or suppression would remain subject to the operation of social or natural selection. So, again, with the desire for private property. The desire to retain certain things as belonging to oneself is not altogether unnoticeable among animals. A dog will fight for its bone, monkeys secrete things which they desire to retain for their own use, etc., and so far as the custom possesses advantages, we may certainly credit savages with enough common-sense to be aware of the fact. But the curious thing is that the institution of private property is not nearly so powerful among primitive peoples as it is among those more advanced. So that we are faced with this curious comment upon Sir James's thesis. Granting that the institution of private property has been strengthened by superstition we have the strange circumstance that that institution is weakest where superstition is strongest and strongest where superstition is weakest.

The truth is that Sir James Frazer seems here to have fallen into the same error as the late Walter Bagehot, and to have formed the belief that primitive man required breaking in to the "social yoke." The truth is that the great need of primitive mankind is not to be broken in but to acquire the courage and determination to break out. This error may have originated in the disinclination of the savage to obey our rules, or it may have been a heritage from the eighteenth century philosophy of the existence of an idyllic primitive social state. The truth is, however, that there is no one so fettered by custom as is the savage. The restrictions set by a savage society on its members would be positively intolerable to civilized beings. And if it be said that these customs required formation, the reply is that inheriting the imitability of the pre-human gregarious animal, this would form the basis on which the tyrannizing custom of primitive life is built.

There was, however, another generalization of Bagehot's that was unquestionably sound. Assuming that the first step necessary to primitive mankind was to frame a custom as the means of his being "broken in," the next step in progress was to break it, and that was a far more difficult matter. Progress was impossible until this was done, and how difficult it is to get this step taken observation of the people living in civilized countries will show. But it is in relation to this second and all important step that one can clearly trace the influence of religion. And its influence is completely the reverse of being helpful. For of all the hindrances to a change of custom there is none that act with such force as does religion. This is the case with those customs with which vested interest has no direct connection, but it operates with tenfold force where this exists. Once a custom is established in a primitive community the conditions of social life surround it with religious beliefs, and thereafter to break it means a breach in the wall of religious observances with which the savage is surrounded. And so soon as we reach the stage of the establishment of a regular priesthood, we have to reckon with the operation of a vested interest that has always been keenly alive to anything which affected its profit or prestige.

It would not be right to dismiss the discussion of a subject connected with so well-respected a name as that of Sir James Frazer and leave the reader with the impression that he is putting in a plea for current religion. He is not. He hints pretty plainly that his argument that religion has been of some use to the race applies to savage times only. We see this in such sentences as the following: "More and more, as time goes on, morality shifts its grounds from the sands of superstition to the rock of reason, from the imaginary to the real, from the supernatural to the natural.... The State has found a better reason than these old wives' fables for guarding with the flaming sword of justice the approach to the tree of life," and also in saying that, "If it can be proved that in certain races and at certain times the institutions in question have been based partly on superstition, it by no means follows that even among these races they have never been based on anything else. On the contrary ... there is a strong presumption that they rest mainly on something much more solid than superstition." In modern times no such argument as the one I have been discussing has the least claim to logical force. But that, as we all know, does not prevent its being used by full-blown religionists, and by those whose minds are only partly liberated from a great historic superstition.

It will be observed that the plea of Frazer's we have been examining argues that the function of religion in social life is of a conservative character. And so far he is correct, he is only wrong in assuming it to have been of a beneficial nature. The main function of religion in sociology is conservative, not the wise conservatism which supports an institution or a custom because of its approved value, but of the kind that sees in an established custom a reason for its continuance. Urged, in the first instance, by the belief that innumerable spirits are forever on the watch, punishing the slightest infraction of their wishes, opposition to reform or to new ideas receives definite shape and increased strength by the rise of a priesthood. Henceforth economic interest goes hand in hand with superstitious fears. Whichever way man turns he finds artificial obstacles erected. Every deviation from the prescribed path is threatened with penalties in this world and the next. The history of every race and of every science tells the same story, and the amount of time and energy that mankind has spent in fighting these ghosts of its own savage past is the measure of the degree to which religion has kept the race in a state of relative barbarism.

This function of unreasoning conservatism is not, it must be remembered, accidental. It belongs to the very nature of religion. Dependent upon the maintenance of certain primitive conceptions of the world and of man, religion dare not encourage new ideas lest it sap its own foundations. Spencer has reminded us that religion is, under the conditions of its origin, perfectly rational. That is quite true.[20] Religion meets science, when the stage of conflict arises, as an opposing interpretation of certain classes of facts. The one interpretation can only grow at the expense of the other. While religion is committed to the explanation of the world in terms of vital force, science is committed to that of non-conscious mechanism. Opposition is thus present at the outset, and it must continue to the end. The old cannot be maintained without anathematizing the new; the new cannot be established without displacing the old. The conflict is inevitable; the antagonism is irreconcilable.

It lies, therefore, in the very nature of the case that religion, as religion, can give no real help to man in the understanding of himself and the world. Whatever good religion may appear to do is properly to be attributed to the non-religious forces with which it is associated. But religion, being properly concerned with the relations between man and mythical supernatural beings, can exert no real influence for good on human affairs. Far from that being the case, it can easily be shown to have had quite an opposite effect. There is not merely the waste of energy in the direction above indicated, but in many other ways. If we confine ourselves to Christianity some conception of the nature of its influence may be formed if we think what the state of the world might have been to-day had the work of enlightenment continued from the point it had reached under the old Greek and Roman civilizations. Bacon and Galileo in their prisons, Bruno and Vanini at the stake are illustrations of the disservice that Christianity has done the cause of civilization, and the obstruction it has offered to human well-being.

Again, consider the incubus placed on human progress by the institution of a priesthood devoted to the service of supernatural beings. In the fullest and truest sense of the word a priesthood represents a parasitic growth on the social body. I am not referring to individual members of the priesthood in their capacity as private citizens, but as priests, as agents or representatives of the supernatural. And here the truth is that of all the inventions and discoveries that have helped to build up civilization not one of them is owing to the priesthood, as such. One may confidently say that if all the energies of all the priests in the whole world were concentrated on a single community, and all their prayers, formulæ, and doctrines devoted to the one end, the well-being of that community would not be advanced thereby a single iota.