"I mean the same. What spiritual love has man today? What friendliness toward other men? What regard for Nature? Man fears. Man hates. And as to Nature—he is the hostile parasite on the whole of it, and calls himself its conqueror. Let him conquer his ego—and then—if he should prove to be—in some almost unimaginable era of clean passion—capable of as wide a variety of ways of loving as he is capable of simulating and extending the other faculties of other species—he will have to build his aesthetics around that. Love takes two people. If neither is injured, made less, turned hateful, rendered afraid—if the purposes of instinct, become aware and consciously directed, are not finally frustrated—no specific behavior will offend this dim-seen Nature. Shameless awareness lies far nearer to a way for mankind to grow loving than any so-called love of a Jesus which requires a man to think he is impure, vile, inevitably born a sinner, inferior physically to all other living things in Eden's Garden—and this, so he may publicly proclaim himself and secretly imagine himself to be their 'spiritual' superior. Isn't that clear?"
"Sometimes I follow you—sometimes not."
"Look at it this way. You say you've chucked out heaven and hell—or hell, anyhow—you modern religionists. I say, you cannot do so. I say—if your God is a god of what you consider pure goodness—you have to have a devil to balance Him. I say that all the saints and holy men and all the simple, human people who have managed, by one religion or another, to get some sense of the integration of their instincts, have done it because the religions did give them a semantic for instinct—a heaven-hell formulation of their nonverbal impulses—a yang-and-yin for Christianity, so to speak—or a Jehovah-Satan for Taoism. Take that away—and you take away all opportunity for the religious—the instinctual—experience. You produce a bunch of gassy bounders who—since hellishness is everywhere but since they've discarded hell—confuse the goodness of the species with goods, good health, prosperity, long life—things that may be possible devils for the species. They lose sight of the inwardness of the nongood and see evil as a material fact, entirely. Modern devil-seekers—men like Sheen, like Niebuhr—are closer to the mechanics of human nature than these idiot modern congregations that throw out Satan and his kingdom and as a result are condemned to evil behavior because they have made themselves blind to evil's source. Closer—but still not very damn close."
"What, then, is your criterion of good and evil?"
"I could give you dozens. I give you a sample. When you consider what you are doing, or what any man does, or any group of men—ask yourself whether that particular deed will benefit or injure the chances of future generations to evolve toward increased consciousness."
"Great heavens, man—most preachers wouldn't be able to decide a question like that! Let alone plain folks!"
"Sure. Did I say that preachers—let alone plain folks—or any handful of contemporary men—knew what they were doing? Or why? Or what anybody else was doing? They don't know. So they go on by instinct—the statistical sweep of impulses that lop off nations as readily as the wind lops trees. I said we could know. I said we weren't trying. Instinct is the immortal property—the urge in behalf of the future. Ants are doing what they can for ants, bees for bees, fish for fish—without much individual hesitation. But not men for men. Men today are trying either to get themselves into heaven, or to make a mint, or just to get by, as individuals. The future, to most men, means their own here—or their reward in heaven. To instinct, the future means the future of awareness, and men are but its most conspicuous exponents here and now. If we began to plan life for our progeny—what a world!"
I was getting sick of the guy. Sick, rather, of myself—my endless efforts to put a simple idea in some form that would perfuse skulls hardened against it—sometimes even by what they imagined to be open-mindedness. "Look. You believe, don't you, that you could sit down and write out a mode of behavior satisfactory for man to the end of time?"
"I could take a crack at it," he said.