“Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd”
Neither reason nor
analogy support such a supposition. It was one of Bruno's crimes that
he dared to teach that other worlds than ours were inhabited; but he
was wiser than the monks who burned him. All the Theosophists aver is
that each phase of matter has living things suited to it, and that all
the universe is pulsing with life. 'Superstition!' shriek the bigoted.
It is no more superstition than the belief in Bacteria, or in any
other living thing invisible to the ordinary human eye. 'Spirit' is a
misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immateriality and a
supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes neither
in the one nor the other. With him all living things act in and
through a material basis, and 'matter' and 'spirit' are not found
dissociated. But he alleges that matter exists in states other than
those at present known to science. To deny this is to be about as
sensible as was the Hindû prince who denied the existence of ice
because water, in his experience, never became solid. Refusal to
believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all
outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
"One last word to my Secularist friends. If you say to me, 'Leave our
ranks,' I will leave them; I force myself on no party, and the moment
I feel myself unwelcome I will go.[29] It has cost me pain enough and
to spare to admit that the Materialism from which I hoped all has
failed me, and by such admission to bring on myself the disapproval of
some of my nearest friends. But here, as at other times in my life, I
dare not purchase peace with a lie. An imperious necessity forces me
to speak the truth, as I see it, whether the speech please or
displease, whether it bring praise or blame. That one loyalty to Truth
I must keep stainless, whatever friendships fail me or human ties be
broken. She may lead me into the wilderness, yet I must follow her;
she may strip me of all love, yet I must pursue her; though she slay
me, yet will I trust in her; and I ask no other epitaph on my tomb but
"'SHE TRIED TO FOLLOW TRUTH.'"
Meanwhile, with this new controversy on my hands, the School Board
work went on, rendered possible, I ought to say, by the generous
assistance of friends unknown to me, who sent me, £150 a year during
the last year and a half.
“For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most”
He
deliberately places virginity above marriage, and counsels
self-mutilation to those capable of making the sacrifice. "All men
cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given ... there be
eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's
sake. _He that is able to receive it, let him receive it_" (Matt. xix.
11, 12). Following this, 1 Cor. vii. teaches the superiority of an
unmarried state, and threatens "trouble in the flesh" to those who
marry. And in Rev. xiv. 1-4, we find, following the Lamb, with special
privileges, 144,000 who "were not defiled with women; for they are
virgins." This coarse and insulting way of regarding women, as though
they existed merely to be the safety-valves of men's passions, and that
the best men were above the temptation of loving them, has been the
source of unnumbered evils. To this saying of Christ are due the
self-mutilations of many, such as Origen, and the destruction of myriads
of human lives in celibacy; monks and nuns innumerable owe to this evil
teaching their shrivelled lives and withered hearts. For centuries the
leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as of a necessary evil, and
the greatest saints of the Church are those who despised women the most.
The subjection of women in Western lands is wholly due to Christianity.
Among the Teutons women were honoured, and held a noble and dignified
place in the tribe; Christianity brought with it the evil Eastern habit
of regarding women as intended for the toys and drudges of man, and
intensified it with a special spite against them, as the daughters of
Eve, who was first "deceived." Strangely different to the *general
Eastern feeling and showing a truer and nobler view of life, is the
precept of Manu: "Where women are honoured, there the deities are
pleased; but where they are dishonoured, there all religious acts become
fruitless" ("Anthology," p. 310).
Evil also is the teaching that repentance is higher than purity: "joy
shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenth, _more than_ over ninety
and nine just persons which need no repentance" (Luke xv. 7, 10). The
fatted calf is slain for the prodigal son, who returns home after he has
wasted all his substance; and to the laborious elder son, during the
many years of his service, the father never gave even a kid that he
might make merry with his friends (Ibid, 29).
“Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class.”
People have supposed that liberty means a vote. You
could not have a bigger blunder. Liberty and the vote have practically
nothing in common. The vote gives you the power to make laws, to coerce
other people; it by no means gives you necessarily liberty for yourself.
We have never yet had, as I said, liberty upon earth. We have had class
legislation of every kind in England, but liberty never. Go back in
history and you find the Kings ruling, and that built up the one nation
of England. Then the Barons ruled, and they did not on the whole do so
badly, for England was called Merrie England then, and certainly no one
would dream of applying that name to it now. Then there came the England
of Parliaments, getting duller and duller, deader and deader; then the
England of Commercialism. And who is our ruler now? Neither King nor
Lords nor Parliament altogether, but on the one side King Purse, and
King Mob on the other. Neither of those is a ruler who is likely to
make this nation great. Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong,
beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the
shouting of crowds, nor by the arguments of unbridled passion, nor by
hatred of class against class. Liberty will never descend upon earth in
outer matters until she has first descended into the hearts of men, and
until the higher Spirit which is free has dominated the lower nature, the
nature of passions and strong desires, and the will to hold for oneself
and to trample upon others. You can only have a free nation when you
have free men to build it out of—free men and women both; but no man is
free and no woman is free who is under the dominance of appetite, or
vice, or drunkenness, or any form of evil which he is unable to control.
Self-control is the foundation on which alone freedom can be built.
Without that you have anarchy, not freedom; and every increase of the
present anarchy is paid for by the price of happiness, which is given
in exchange. But when Freedom comes, she will come down to a nation
in which every man and every woman will have learned self-control and
self-mastery; and then, and then only, out of such men who are free,
out of such women who are free, strong, righteous, ruling their own
nature and training it to the noblest ends—of such only can you build up
political freedom, which is the result of the freedom of the individual,
and not the outcome of the warring passions of men.
The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God.
I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no
conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so
imperfect that he is unable to define it to me."' (Charles Bradlaugh,
"Freethinker's Text-book," p. 118.) The Atheist neither affirms nor
denies the possibility of phenomena differing from those recognised by
human experience.... As his knowledge of the universe is extremely
limited and very imperfect, the Atheist declines either to deny or to
affirm anything with regard to modes of existence of which he knows
nothing. Further, he refuses to believe anything concerning that of
which he knows nothing, and affirms that that which can never be the
subject of knowledge ought never to be the object of belief. While the
Atheist, then, neither affirms nor denies the unknown, he _does_ deny
all which conflicts with the knowledge to which he has already
attained. For example, he _knows_ that one is one, and that three
times one are three; he _denies_ that three times one are, or can be,
one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I
know nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in
it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is
therefore incredible. I do not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue
to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without
God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: "No man
can rationally affirm 'There is no God,' until the word 'God' has for
him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to
him, and known with what Leibnitz calls 'perfect knowledge.' The
Atheist's denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined
or described. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not
palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been
described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human
thought--Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they
allege that He is incomprehensible. If 'God' exists and is
incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for
being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of
self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with
damnation if they do not accept them."[6] "The belief of the Atheist
stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the existence of the
universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate, and he
finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all
phenomena.
“Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.”
“Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not prepared to act.”
“will suggest that the great aim of our education is to bring out of the child who comes into our hands every faculty that he brings with him, and then to try to win that child to turn all his abilities, his powers, his capacities, to the helping and serving of the community which is a part.”
Thought creates character.
The Atheist waits for proof of God. Till that proof comes he remains, as his name implies, without God. His mind is open to every new truth, after it has passed the warder Reason at the gate.
No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country to meet many a joy to find many a comrade to win and lose many a battle.
We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, magnified Man.
What, after all, is the object of education? To train the body in health, vigor and grace, so that it may express the emotions in beauty and the mind with accuracy and strength.
I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness.
Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and - as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis - emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness.
The true basis of morality is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of the general welfare and happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives that we may serve and bless mankind.
Quick condemnation of all that is not ours, of views with which we disagree, of ideas that do not attract us, is the sign of a narrow mind, of an uncultivated intelligence. Bigotry is always ignorant, and the wise boy, who will become the wise man, tries to understand and to see the truth in ideas with which he does not agree.
Man is a spiritual intelligence, who has taken flesh with the object of gaining experience in worlds below the spiritual, in order that he may be able to master and to rule them, and in later ages take his place in the creative and directing hierarchies of the universe.
Strange indeed would it be if all the space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the inhabitants of Earth the only forms in which intelligence could clothe itself.
Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.
