"Not at all. Here's the Sin. Religions have been used not so much as formulations for guidance as to convince their various Believers that man is, himself, godlike, wherefore God. Not an animal with a fresh neurological awareness. Not a beast of the field, who knows it and who therefore knows that what goes on inside beasts is nothing to sneer at. But God Almighty, personified according to His self-personifications of Zeus, Amon-Ra, the Prophets, Jehovah, or Who-not. God Almighty—destined to live forever with all the numerous Gods-Almighties—in the Elysian Fields, Nirvana, or Wherever. You follow me?"
"I think so."
"You don't. Let's try it again. Imagine a band of apes that developed self-awareness. Apes that suddenly saw themselves as selves. Imagine those apes interpreting the new cortical phenomenon not as a fresh and fascinating development amongst animals—but as evidence of their metamorphosis from the flesh to something Higher. They don't know what, exactly. They work out What in a series of mythologies and religions. 'What' turns out, in our era, to be Sons of God, Brothers in Christ, Redeemed Eternally by Grace. That's where they are today. Not humble animals, carrying on the business of Evolution for species yet unguessed. They feel sure (in Christ) that they are the perfect biology right now. They sit at the end of an age-old endeavor to acquire that seeming. An endeavor which has shucked off or hidden every aspect of animal reality it can."
He was shaking his head. "I feel puzzled—"
"The use of religions, in effect, has been to conceal and deny the animal nature of man. That is perverse. Man eats—a simple, animal activity. How many religious rituals—turned into social functions in how many cases—could you list, all of which were designed to give a nonanimal cast to eating? Hundreds?"
"I suppose you mean feasts and fasts and such?"
"Food taboos, food rituals, food symbols—like your bread and wine—religious dietary laws. Sure. Man—like the beasts—must eat. But he has tried ten thousand tricks to make it seem nonanimal, or 'godlike.' Now. Consider sex—another human function which is exactly like its animal counterpart. Here there is less exigency than in eating—more time-lag for ritual and style. Man went passionately into the business of developing systems which would conceal the animal and instinctual nature of sexuality and lend to it the superior qualities of his various gods, religions, his self-glorifying self-images."
"I think I begin to see—"
"Exactly. By now—we dwell amid a species that is twenty or thirty or forty thousand years away from the contemplation of its instincts as germane to animal instincts. The distance in time is matched by countless steps in illusion. It is hardly possible for a man to think of himself as an animal in the true sense, any more. It is all but impossible for him to feel, to experience, his animal fact. And—since I believe instinct seen locally in time and space is as 'good' as it is 'evil'—and that, in sum, it is all good—I find this long attempt to translate natural instincts into ridiculous and unnatural dogmas and god-images—is a very sad mistake. A very great sin—the 'original' sin of assuming a superiority toward terrestrial, psychological, and cosmic Nature.
"Each new religion may be—usually is—an 'improvement' in some way upon its discarded or waning predecessor. But each is, always, founded on the premise that man is 'above' that which works within him and occurs around him. So, in the end, even though intelligent religious premises may benefit humanity in many ways—for instance, the search for truth inspired by Jesus, led haltingly to the birth of the scientific method—the fundamental premise is always false and the benefits are finally fouled by the basic blunder. Instinct frustrated by the delusions of Believers of all sorts has to go into autonomous operation on the multitudes, simply because they deny and repress instinct until this society or that—and all of them—fails to meet their instinctual needs. And instinct, acting in violent fashion, upon such blind, willful repudiators of necessary process—always brings calamity. It has to wipe out or at least reduce each new aggregate of the self-deceived. So another civilization topples. Then another creed arises and we begin again. Until we get straightened out about what instinct is—get, so to speak, a real picture of our inner selves, of what it is in us that we have made into all gods and theology—a picture congruent with such truths as we can see and can admit—we're bound to operate in this roller-coaster fashion."