The religious commentators defend the respective scriptures of these religions by saying that their teachings were limited to the mental level of the times and the peoples. But if God had to descend to the plane of man and become brutal and bigoted like him, how was man benefited by his intercourse with 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 primitive man to appreciate the higher virtues of generosity, justice and fellowship with aliens, an excuse to command him to exterminate his neighbors, * to bear false witness, ** to practice immorality, to plunder, to be cruel and credulous? *** If a revelation cannot civilize a barbarian, what is its value?
* Deut. 7: 16, etc.
** Jer. 4: 10; I. Kings 22: 23; Ezek. 14: 9, etc.
***Exod. 12: 85, 36; I. Sam. 16: 1, 2,; Exod. 1; 18-20, etc.
But while denouncing intolerance we must not become intolerant ourselves. With all their faults these three religions have been, in their day, of considerable service to the world. We may justly say of them that having done all the bad and all the good of which they were capable it is time for them to step aside and leave the field to science. 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 attributes; he asked also information about this world, about man, the past history of the earth and so forth. Just as by seeking the philosopher's stone men discovered chemistry, and by the way of astrology they came to the science of astronomy, and by the way of sorcery and magic to the knowledge of medicine,—so did theology develop into philosophy.
Religion also must be credited with having been the first to give man a system of thought. Now a system, however crude, is a work of art. It is a creation. It is a putting together of ideas and beliefs for the purpose of arriving at a conclusion. Thus religion taught man to think connectedly, to see the relation of things, and 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 path of civilization. In the same sense, not until man could forge, fuse and combine his ideas into a system of some kind, did he begin his intellectual evolution. Religion started civilization by enabling man to put his ideas together. Even as the worm was the prophecy of the coming man, the creed was the beginning of science.
Let us see if we cannot make this idea a little clearer: All religions represent the effort of the human mind to understand itself and its environment. At the core of every religion, however crude, there is a philosophy,—that is to say, every belief, be it ever so foolish, has a meaning, and at one time was a help to man.
The savage carries a fetish on his person to secure himself against evil. The civilized man crosses himself in the presence of danger. Both practices embody a truth, and it is the province of criticism to define that truth.
When the turbaned Oriental, standing in his mosque, pronounces the name of Allah with such awe and joy, what is it he means? In his groping way he is aiming to be scientific; he is trying his hand at philosophy; he wishes to put his finger upon the nerve of the universe; he is trying to bring the multifarious forces of nature about him into a focus; he is 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 religions which we must recognize. They represent the desire of man to make things clear to his intelligence, and to wrest life's secret from the universe. Man seeks knowledge because in the consciousness of knowledge there is happiness and power. The strain of ignorance is intolerable to him. Darkness embarrasses his mind and he seeks the light by instinct.
The primitive man, for instance, alarmed by the things he did not understand, proposed explanation after explanation, in his effort to throw off the darkness from his mind. When the sky frowned upon him and the winds wailed in his ears, he did not know what to make of them, and felt insecure until he could satisfy himself that he understood how and why the dark clouds swept over the face of the skies and the winds moaned about his dwelling. He felt relieved when he believed that he had grasped the situation. His explanation that the sun and the wind were free 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 presence of the universe—and pronounce it inspired. When Moses, or whoever wrote the first chapters of the book of Genesis, described how man and woman were fashioned, he was trying to be scientific, in his modest way. But the best explanation that his mentality could produce was that God took some clay from the ground and kneaded it into the form of man, and from one of the ribs of this man he formed woman. It is not his science we commend; it is his desire to explain man's origin that honors him, for out of that desire, philosophy, science,—progress—are born.
But there is another truth hidden in the bosom of all religions which it is the mission of philosophy to disclose. The first truth I called your attention to was that the primitive beliefs of man represented his effort to understand the world and himself; 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 resources and forces of nature, if we can utilize them, command them to do our errands, to wait upon us, to serve us,—this power is the fruition of that primitive desire of our barbarian ancestors to get the gods under control by presents and compliments.
The scientist masters the laws of nature,—the movements of the atmosphere, the currents of the ocean, the lightning's secret, for the purpose of putting a bit into their mouths to control them for human service; but the priest when he offered his bloody sacrifices, when he performed his incantations, and repeated magical formulas, had the same aim in view,—the 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 he could get the reins in his own hands. When I was in one of the churches of Florence, and stood looking at a figure of the pope with the keys of heaven and hell in his hand, it dawned upon me that man, from time immemorial, has coveted the ownership of the universe, and even in his feebleness gave himself the satisfaction of holding the keys in his own hands.