Man would, then, have progressed much further with the superstructure of an ideal civilization, if only in his efforts to rightly regulate his life, he had happily searched out the laws of nature as they are revealed through its phenomena and interpreted by experience and reason, instead of looking for direction to the laws of the gods (Jehovah, Allah, Buddha or even Jesus) as they are revealed through prophets and interpreted by kings or presidents, by priests or preachers and by other "powers that be of God" in states and churches—institutions which exist in the interest of the capitalist class and against that of the labor class. The world owes by far the greater part of its most poignant sufferings to this fatal mistake of looking to gods in heavens and their representatives on earth for direction instead of to nature and reason.
Life in the physical realm is dependent upon living in harmony with the matter-force law. The representative of any form of life (mineral, vegetable, animal, human) which either through ignorance, accident or willfulness does not conform to it, is destroyed or at least injured.
Life in the moral part of the psychical realm consists in a disposition and effort to learn the matter-force law, and to fulfill in thought, word and deed the individual obligations to self and the social obligations to others imposed by it when it has been humanely interpreted by a man for himself.
Religion and Christianity are but wider extensions of one and the same great all-inclusive virtue, morality, without which human life would not be worth living, indeed not even a possibility, for without morality a man is a beast, not a human.
Morality is the greatest thing in the world. Yet, paradoxical as the representation may seem, there is one greater thing, freedom—the liberty to think, speak and act in accordance with one's own convictions as to what is the law and as to what are its requirements. Without this liberty there could be no morality, and therefore, freedom is greater than the greatest thing in the world, morality.
But liberty, the greatest and most indispensable necessity to morality, religion and Christianity, indeed, to the existence of a human being, is manifestly impossible on the theory that a man must be guided by the will of a conscious, personal God in the sky as it is interpreted by the kings and priests, presidents and preachers on earth.
You will note that I am not contending for the liberty to live without reference to an external authority. If this were my contention you would rightly insist (as some among my friends do) that I am an atheist in religion and an anarchist in politics; but I am neither, for I recognize the fact that I must live with reference to the existence of an external authority, matter-force law, and there is no other, upon which anything good in religion or politics is dependent.
No one is an atheist in religion, an anarchist in politics or anything bad, who, in the physical realm of life, tries to live with reference to the law of nature, and who, in the moral realm of life, tries to live with reference to a truth which is that law humanely interpreted by himself in accordance with his own experience, observation, investigation and reason. In the nature of things, the interpretation cannot be by some one else, because one man cannot live the moral life on another's ideals any more than he can live the physical life on another's meals.
Since this is the case, it follows that the whole conception of a law which is willed by a god and revealed or formulated by his representatives (prophets, kings, priests, legislators) to which a man must have reference, if he would live the moral life, is, at best, a harmless fiction and at worst a hurtful superstition.
There is no one (man or god) with whom people can stand in the moral realm except themselves alone, and if they are not within this realm they are not men and women.