The Man from Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion

by William Simpson

As your civilization advanced, it was to be seen that the virtues, and especially those which had a direct influence upon material welfare, grew and enlarged. The path to honor was no longer exclusively through carnage and victory, and the possession and cultivation of certain virtues brought consideration and respect. It was at this critical stage of your progress that there was inflicted upon you an evil greater than any your people have known. You were not content with viewing the deity as we do from afar, and with accepting the impulses of virtue as a part of yourselves, instituted for the wise purpose of a continuous self-development toward a better earthly life; but instead, in your unreasonable yearning to communicate with the supreme Author, you surrendered yourself to the wiles of the seers, and became the willing dupes of their delusions.

There is nothing more unhappy to tell of you than the consequences of this grave error. Your assumed possession of the commands and wishes of the Deity in the shape of a revelation, has proved more a misfortune than a blessing to you. In the first place, it has lowered your conception of the Deity below ours. It has turned your religion into a contest. It has rendered possible the establishment of certain ecclesiastical bodies among you, who, while assuming entire control of the morals of your people, are beset in their internal parts with all the vices which come from cruelty, cupidity, and love of power. Besides, your formulated conditions of punishments and rewards have degraded religion from a cultivation of virtue for itself, and the immediate good it brings, to a selfish scramble, each one struggling to shoulder his way into the midst of celestial delights.

It can be easily understood why your religion, with all its crudities and superstitions, has taken so firm a hold upon your society. You are constituted as we are, with the same inherent elements of progress. The steady increase of your affinity for the virtues, and those who practice them, is a marked quality of your career, and as they all lead, in one way or another, towards that union of interests which constitutes the perfect social state, you are thereby impelled by a natural and providential desire to build them up. So that, as a matter of fact, there being an inherent love of goodness ingrafted in your very natures, your religious creeds have attracted you to them, and held you in fetters, under the false theory that the good within you is but a contribution from their exclusive and abundant sources of supply.

It has been your misfortune to be held captive throughout your progress by the shrewd designs of your seers and prophets, who have not failed until recently to supply you with an occasional change of supernatural pabulum, to meet the new wants of a steadily advancing development.

When at a certain stage of your civilization, about two thousand years ago, you had attained a point of intellectual culture among the few, the fruits of which have been reflected upon you to this day, in some of the grandest recorded achievements of human thought, and while the masses were left to take their undirected way among the empty superstitions which conceded nothing to the growing human sympathy, a seer appeared among you, who served rather as a suggestion than as an immediate success. After the lapse of sufficient time from his death to allow full scope for romance, there was built up out of his memory by your seers a picture of all the virtues which had been growing within your hearts, so entirely adapted to the new age that all the pent-up forces of human sympathy within its scope and influence surrendered to it. But what might have been a triumph and a boon to you in the new impetus to a better and broader humanity, unfortunately held concealed within itself the subtle machinery of your seers and prophets, and was guarded by their evil eyes, so that with this tremendous lever to move you in the direction of their purposes, instead of advancing you, they have turned your civilization back upon itself more than a thousand years. No historical fact is more capable of demonstration than this. None has been more persistently and ingeniously denied, and no natural sequence ever followed more directly a moving cause. From a free and independent exercise of the intellectual activities in the direction of science, art, philosophy, and all knowledge pertaining to yourselves, the Earth upon which you dwell, and the universe, so far as your vision extends, the whole current of your thoughts was turned by the new doctrines toward a paradise, compared with which all things of the Earth were trifles. When you were brought by the fascination of these promises, and the unflagging efforts an interested body of ecclesiastics, to a general belief in these doctrines, you sank into an intellectual torpor, from which you only emerged by a protest of your reason not yet wholly suppressed.

You cannot fail to see the utterly dehumanizing tendency of the influences which surrounded you for so many centuries. The common aims and purposes of your lives were submerged by the one engrossing wish to reach heaven; and while your imagination was carried away by its picture, you were led, without hesitation, to place your feet upon the neck of any earthly enterprise that seemed to stand in its way.

From the beginning of your history you have accepted one object of worship after another, each an ideal impersonation of the goodness which was inseparately a part of yourselves, and which was given to you for the wise purpose of making your society possible, and to perfect it; just as the parental instinct was bestowed upon you to protect your infants. All these subjects of adoration have perfectly reflected your intellectual condition, and have been discarded, one after another, as they outlived their uses; until you are just now beginning to realize, that for all these many centuries you have been virtually worshipping yourselves. Your present ideal will, in time, share the fate of those which preceded it, and in the absence of a prevailing superstition, your seers luckily cannot build up for you another one. Your long period devoted to the pursuit of phantoms is rapidly passing away, and your new age of rationalism is approaching. You have no just conception of the evils it will remove, and the glories it has in store for you.

The difference between your present and future religion can be easily outlined. Your present religion, from a long course of erroneous teaching, is intense, aggressive and hysterical. It feeds and fattens itself upon the miseries of life, which it does not undertake to remove, except in a meretricious way for effect. Your religion of the future will be tranquil and voluntary, and its chief mission will be to permanently reduce the evils and misfortunes of life to a minimum. The impulses of your present religion are entirely apart from the moral sense, a significant fact easily substantiated by a glance over the every-day life of your people. Except in their observance of religious forms, your devout are not distinguished from your profane. The practical virtues are no greater among believers than among unbelievers. Your coming religion will be founded upon the moral sense, and will be inseparable from it. It will support no doctrine of a ready and convenient atonement for bad acts, as the present one does. It will teach you that there can be no complete reparation of an evil deed except in its undoing, and that such an act, once performed, spreads its dire consequences in accordance with its enormity over a part or the whole career of the doer. It will not undertake to unburden the conscience of a crime, nor to give assurance of celestial bliss to the most heinous of offenders, upon the trifling and fallacious compliance with religious forms.

Your peculiar religious beliefs have so shaped and moulded your character that we have observed, what you are not likely to see of yourselves, certain traits or inclinations which are not promising as factors in your ultimate regeneration. Your churches, with the shrewd purpose of rendering their services invaluable, have given you to believe that your natural tendencies are evil, and that the unavoidable misfortunes and sorrows of your lives are but penalties for your many misdeeds. The general acceptance of this belief has lowered your pride, and given you, to some extent, that character of dejection and submissiveness which is entirely subversive to the attainment of any destiny to be reached by yourselves.

There is a quality of mind which we acknowledge as, above all others, the one which has assisted us to our present very desirable social condition, and that is the feeling to resist the perpetration of a mean or bad act, on account of the sense of degradation it inflicts upon the feelings of the doer. This motive of conscience, so plainly the offspring of self-esteem, and growing out of a cultivation of the mind alone, without any regard whatever to creed influences or teachings, is totally ignored, either as a promoter of virtue or preventive of vice, by all the religions that have existed upon your planet. The reason for this is easily explained. Under the knowledge that a cultivation of the mind and conscience, without creed influence, was capable of doing for you a better service in the advancement of your morals than your churches have performed, it has been made a part of their doctrine to belittle and abuse your purely intellectual faculties, under the unwarranted and unreasonable imputation that the free exercise of your reason was an assumption beyond your right. And all this, too, in face of the overwhelming evidence about you, that the most corroding and dangerous of your vices germinate and seed themselves only in places where the mind lies in fallow.