Contents Updated: Wednesday, February 14, 2001
A lot of nonsense has been written on the nature of conscience and moral law. Nothing in human history has caused and causes today as much hypocrisy. Press, literature and churches are universally and eternally concerned about public morals, usually sexual, but they display total hypocrisy in their neglect of far more important matters. Though moral and immoral actions are deeply woven into the web of religious thought, they have little connexion with religion—evolution explains it simply. What then is the nature of morality?
In a nutshell, what religious man calls “conscience” was at first the conscious inhibition of anti-social instincts. “Guilt” was the unease that went with it. “God” is the projection of conscience into the real world.
When man began to see that events have causes, and to believe that the causes in nature were spirits, he promptly made a god of thunder and lightning. And it was a great god: the sky-god, mountain-god, thunder-god of nature-religions. When the higher religions made God spiritual, they still maintained that thunder was his voice, in a special way, and lightning his weapon. Even Franklin did not destroy the belief. Today it is an act of God when lightning shatters a building; or kills innocent children.
Moral law was another kind of thunder, and, being spiritual, it remained a sort of supernatural phenomenon even when man became fully civilized. Until modern times it was quite unintelligible. There was the law, no one knew why, no one knew whence, written in every man's conscience.
The Maxims of Ptah-Hotep of more than four thousand years ago shows that even then educated men who were not priests understood that moral law was simply a human and social law of conduct. That was also the conviction of the two great moralists, Buddha and Confucius. Real speculation began with the Greeks and earnest thinking about nature and man began amongst the Greeks, not of Athens or the homeland, but of Asia Minor. The refugees of the splendid old civilization of Crete, which was destroyed by the early barbaric Greeks about 1450 BC, went to Asia Minor, where they civilized the Greek immigrants.
As these Greeks of Asia Minor were independent of the religious bigotry of the homeland, they speculated with great freedom and wonderful success. They were really scientists, not philosophers—hilosophers never believe in revelation, and they do not love science. Science must not touch spiritual things. They guessed the vastness of the universe, believed in atoms and evolution, and made little pretense of believing in gods.
Philosophers usually say that, fortunately, these mere Materialists were soon thrust aside, and the great thinkers of Athens turned to study man. It was a great misfortune, for it meant the strangling of science in its cradle. Moreover, these Greek thinkers of the homeland, while they rejected current religion, as all philosophers do, were much influenced by fear of the pious democracy, and the philosophical ideas which they gave the world instead of theology are now quite discredited.
First of them was the mystic Pythagoras. He is said to have been influenced by Buddhism and it is a pity that he did not introduce into Europe the Agnostic and purely humanitarian ethic of Buddha. Instead he discovered that the essence of justice is a square number.
Socrates did not form any theory of morals. He merely cleared up men's ideas as to what is just, and insisted that the moral sentiment depended upon knowledge.
Plato, as a student of social life, saw that moral law is utilitarian. It is social law, enforced for the good of society. But Plato also had a theory that a merely material world can produce nothing, and all truth, goodness, and beauty must come from a spiritual world or, as he said, a world of ideas: not ideas in the mind of man, but self-existing entities. The good was one of these ideas, and conscience was its voice and interpreter.
Aristotle, the most learned and logical of the Greek thinkers, did not believe in Plato's ideas. No one does today. But, although Aristotle wrote the first treatise on Ethics, the science of morality, he did not succeed in understanding the nature of moral law, and he has left us no theory of it.
In Greece there were three main opinions. There was the Platonic theory and Christian writers followed it later, saying that the ideas were in the mind of God. Then there was the theory of the Stoics and some others. Although the Stoics talked politely about the gods, it is fairly clear that they did not believe in them. For them moral law was just the Law of Nature. It existed. It was part of the scheme of things. A man was at discord with nature if he did not observe it.
The third theory was the modern theory. Democritus first discovered the object and origin of moral law was simply concern for human welfare. Hedonists said that the test of a moral act was whether it promoted happiness, the Greek of which is hedone. Some made happiness consist mainly in pleasure. Epicurus, the last and sanest of the Greeks, though his views are nearly always misrepresented and slandered, said that moral acts were those which promoted a passionless tranquillity of life. Epicurus built on science, not philosophy, and tried to bring the world back to science.
But Greece fell, and the whole tradition of independent thinking perished. The Romans were poor thinkers, and most of them followed the Stoics or the Epicureans. Their humanitarian ideas did magnificent work for the world.
During the next thirteen or fourteen centuries moral law was simply held to be a divine command. When at last the great Deistic movement attacked revelation, all the old ideas were revived. Some followed the Stoic theory, that moral law is the Law of Nature. Some connected it with the divine will, as revealed, not in a Bible but in man's conscience. But Hobbes and Locke more or less brought out its human significance and already some like Mandevilley satirized it as a superstition.
There are two main views. One is the old idea that moral law is a sort of eternal and august reality, either in Nature or in God or in a mystic world which nobody can understand. It is "intued" (seen directly) by the mind, and so these theories are known as Intuitionalism. Against this a number of British thinkers held that moral law is a human law regulating the welfare or utility of social life. These are called Utilitarians. Science scattered the philosophers right and left, proving the Utilitarians right.
In the mind of all men was a sense of moral law. Men might defy it, but they did not deny it, and it did not come from revelation, since it was just as strong among civilized people beyond the range of Christianity, or before the Christian Era. It had to be explained.
Some of the Greeks and the Deists could see how closely this law was related to the social interests of man. Justice, truthfulness and self-control are desirable social qualities, but parts of the law, like sexual purity, seemed to have no social significance, and how did even the law of justice, however useful it was, come into existence? The law was taken as existing apart from man, and sensed by him through a special faculty which he called his conscience.
The entire situation was changed when the truth of evolution was proved. Evolution said that the human race had been evolving, from early humanity to the civilized level, over hundreds of thousands of years. This meant, first, that the law may have arisen amongst, or had been formulated by, human beings themselves long before historic civilizations arose. This would explain how the ancient civilizations found themselves in possession of the moral code, and could not suppose that it was drawn up by men. If they themselves had not formulated it, who had?
This question would have been answered ages ago if the theory of evolution sketched by the first Greek scientists, had been retained and developed. Then the Greeks might have learned how all their religious and moral and political ideas had been gradually forged in the workshop of experience, by a long line of developing ancestors. Evolution lit up the whole problem, and nearly every other problem.
Evolution also suggests that primitive societies of men in the world today are examples of the stages of evolution through which the race has passed. Circumstances drove one group onward and kept other groups behind, at various stages of development. If this is true, every stage in the evolution of moral ideas and conscience might be found in the innumerable primitive tribes scattered over the earth. But philosophers had no reason to suppose savages could throw any light on the problem.
Kant was tremendously impressed with the imperiousness of conscience. There are no "ifs" about the moral impulse. But the simple answer is not God but that men had, largely under the influence of religion, actually forgotten that it was their own race which laid down the law, and why it laid down the law! It had become a peremptory command, enforced by education.
Evolution has made all this mysticism superfluous, and it is the only explanation of moral law in which you can put any confidence, because it is the only theory which takes into account all the facts of moral life.
There is no intuition whatever of an august and eternal law, and the less God is brought into connexion with these pitiful blunders and often monstrous perversions of the moral sense the better. What we see is just man's mind in possession of the idea that his conduct must be regulated by law, and clumsily working out the correct application of that idea as his intelligence grows and his social life becomes more complex. It is not a question of the mind of the savage imperfectly seeing the law. It is a plain case of the ideas of the savage reflecting and changing with his environment and the interests of his priests.
Why is justice the fundamental and essential moral law? It is a vital regulation of social life. Why is murder the greatest crime? It is the gravest social delinquency. And so on. It would be a remarkable coincidence if this mystic law of the philosophers and the theologians, existing before man existed, and surviving when he disappears, just happened to agree so well with the social interests of the observers of the law themselves!
Neither the origin of religion nor of morality can be clearly denoted in history. They rise gradually, with a long dawn. Peoples who do not even believe in spirits—and there are some—have no religion but at what precise point the belief in the shadow becomes religion no sensible man will say.
Equally, the lowest peoples have nothing corresponding to conscience or a conscious code of conduct, but they more or less automatically follow a code. At a higher level of intelligence they are conscious of a code, but it is merely "custom." At a still higher level the spirits of the dead are said to be just as interested as the living community in the observance of this code. Religion and morality enter into combination.
They arose independently, from quite different roots. No modern authority questions it. And they remained independent for some time.
With the evolutionary theory, the ancestor of the higher growth is always found at the lower level. Morality and religion gradually, and in large part naturally, blend.
The second element of the evolution of religion, the deification of the more striking parts of nature, which gave religion its great gods, was much slower in blending with morality. These big spirits did wonderful things, and were admired at a distance. But there was always a tendency in some of them to become moral deities, because they could do so much harm or withhold so much good. The moon, a popular early god or goddess, did no particular good or harm. But the sun was a terrible tyrant in the tropics. The sky might cause a drought by refusing rain or might send thunder and lightning. The water-god might cause floods. The fire-god burned houses. The wind-god sent destructive hurricanes.
Chiefly, however, it was the deified ancestors, not the nature-gods, who were concerned with the observance of custom. They had made the customs. They took an interest in them. Even great gods of the historic religion, like the Osiris of the Egyptians, are believed to have been ancestors. The Romans deified their Emperors. The Christians deified Christ, and the later Buddhists made a god of Buddha.
Now in the blending of tribes into kingdoms, when rival priesthoods had to adjust their deities, ancestor-gods often fused with old nature-gods. Osiris was blended with an old sun-god. These wise deified old ancestors were particularly interested in proper conduct, and Osiris became in time the judge of the dead. The wicked were seen to flourish in this life. So, the priests said they will get it in the next: which happens to be a good deal longer. So we find nature-gods turning ethical. Even Jupiter or Zeus was a guardian of justice. He was a sky gods, the dispenser of rain and sunshine, the fathers of all men.
Yet Zeus-Jupiter-Dyaus-Thor, the old sky-god of the Aryans, had not the slightest regard for sex-rules. Many of the nature-gods had a natural tendency to become ethical. They sent rain or sunshine or fertility, they caused drought, fires, storms, and floods. One had to gratify them by observing the rules. The spirit of mother-earth was even more important than that of father-sky, when men learned agriculture. She was the goddess, in a few places god, of fertility.
But, quite naturally, the fertility of the earth became closely connected with a woman's fertility. At first human beings copulated not even knowing that the man begot the child. In time, love and fertility became one of the mightiest facts of life in the mind of men. The most tremendous force, the most beneficent thing, in the world was the spirit of sex-pleasure. This gave a twist to the primitive moral rules, and, as the spirit of war just as naturally became deified at the same time, another grave perversion of the humanitarian code of conduct, as we understand it, occurred in moral evolution. These and other eccentricities were a normal part of the evolution of conscience.
Preachers still shudderingly refer to one of the abominations of ancient Babylon. They tell how the women had to go to the temple and have sexual intercourse with a man before they could marry. Little crowds of the less pretty women might be seen at the door soliciting the interest of a passing labourer or whatever man might be prepared to make use of her. As Frazer repeats this in his "Golden Bough," there is some excuse for the preacher. Nevertheless, it is false as an indication of general practice in the city of Babylon.
It certainly happened in temples elsewhere, where sacred prostitution was practiced, and perhaps in particular ones in Babylonia, but it was practiced only by those who chose to hoping to get some benefit from some particular god. The spirit of generation, in man and in nature, was just as likely to be deified as the sun and moon. The act of procreation then became in a sense a religious act. The god or goddess was interested in its happening, not in its prohibition.
Moreover, it was socially a desirable thing. The army wanted men: the men wanted wives and slaves. Disease and war wrought terrible havoc, and population was urgently needed. The development of polygamy, which is not a primitive institution, was scarcely enough. Concubines were allowed. It suited wealthy men.
It was believed that human copulation could influence the fertility of the earth, by a sort of sympathetic magic. When scientific men find drawings of deer in a prehistoric cavern, they tell the whole world—it was magic. The artist believed he could bring the animals nearer and have a profitable hunt. When the same scientific men find a drawing of a male organ, or a woman with an exaggerated pubic part carved out of a bit of mammoth's tusk, they say it is a pornographic graffito. Yet it is probably similar magic.
Men came to believe that by human intercourse they prompted the fertility of mother earth and the belief and practices based upon it lingered in Europe in the Middle Ages. This led to sexual license or promiscuity. The great nature festivals were marked by orgies of sexual pleasure and indulgence, and prodigious indulgence too in eating and drinking.
Priests of the goddess discovered, to their advantage, that they could announce to women that it was their particular gift to service those who desired the goddess's benefits. Nor did priestesses demure from the act of which their goddess was the presiding genius. Large carvings of the sex-organs stood unblushingly in the temples until prudish Englishmen and Americans came along in the nineteenth century.
Loutishness is not a primitive quality of man. At the most primitive level man is peaceful and honest to others within a clan. Tribal organization and hunting involve conflicts about encroachments on another tribe's territory. Conflicts lead to wars. The tribe, in self-defense, wants fierce and ruthless warriors. "Savagery" becomes a social quality in maintaining the tribal prestige. Spies and prisoners must be tortured and killed. The world begins to run with blood, and conscience, being the interpreter of custom and the interests of the tribe, sanctions everything. Yet they remain noble to each other within the tribe! Perhaps our modern tribes are too big, but it is this internal respect for each other that has broken down today. External conflict is still acceptable. It is only inhibited by its huge expense and the possibility of mutual destruction
Or again perhaps it is the huge lack of equality that causes social breakdown. Men accumulate "property," then other men steal it. In tribal society, the communal wealth was essentially communally held. A prestigious man might have a prettily carved stick or a lucky spear, but essentially he otherwise only has his prestige—and that must have been deserved. His neighbours therefore do not want to steal, have no real need to steal and in a relatively narrow community could hardly expect to get away with it if he did steal. Huge inequalities of wealth in a much vaster society makes the thief into a Robin Hood, providing a social need by redistributing unfairly proportioned wealth.
Or perhaps it is the growth of superstition that makes people dishonest. With the growth of Animism, certain objects are believed to have "medicine" or "manu" or some supernatural force, that is inherent—. A man cannot make it, so he steals it. Then, as justice is still slow and imperfect, the victim retaliates. Murder gets more common, and leads to blood-feuds, all over the earth. Revenge becomes a terrible and legitimate passion.
Formal religion makes things worse. The spirit of the murdered man has to be appeased. The murderer must die, if he can be found. If not, somebody belonging to him must die. Some would kill the murderer's best friend, not the murderer, on the idea that it inflicted more pain. Others would kill the first man they met. Others would kill the first animal they met.
The spirits or gods, who are gradually credited with concern for conduct, are the counterparts of living men. Heaven is always a feeble reflexion of earth—of the hunting grounds of the Indian, the harem of the Asiatic potentate, the pretty cottage with flowers and the balmy wind of the typical English and the American citizen, or the cuddle in the warm, comforting bosom of Jesus desired by the born again evangelist.
In the early stages the active spirits or demigods are even worse than men. They are devils, displaying the worst character of living humanity. The god is like an enraged husband who smites his wife, children, and relatives, smites his neighbour and sleeps with his wife, then smites his neighbours children. He visits the sins of the father on the children and on all his kin. In the god, he thinks this must be just, and the priests confirm that it is.
It was a ghastly stage in the evolution of thought when this was transferred to the gods. It led to human sacrifices. Somebody had to die to appease them. The larger the number of victims, the more the gods would smile. Thousands of victims in a day were sometimes ripped open in Mexico. In ancient Europe and nearly all over the earth the gods' altars stank with human blood.
Reform never came from the priests, but human advancement led to some curious modifications of this. In Peru, where the priests wanted the blood of children for the sacrament, they were in the end only permitted to punch the children's noses. In ancient Rome, dolls were strung on little trees at mid-winter instead of the old human sacrifices. In China, paper images of men were burned. Elsewhere, animals were substituted for men, but there was a peculiar development in the "scapegoat."
Sin began to be treated as a sort of unpleasant commodity that you could unload on some other person. That was in part the meaning of the human sacrifice. And as the gods wanted something good, not any shabby old thing, kings and kings' sons and daughters had to die. This, in conjunction with another idea which we see elsewhere, led to "sons of God" taking the sins of the world upon themselves.
But every variety of scapegoat is known. The Hebrews (Lev 16) believed they could unload the sins of the people upon a goat, which was driven into the wilderness. The Maoris transferred their annual accumulation of sins to a fern, which floated on the river out to sea. The Badagas of India prefer a calf, which is driven into the jungle to be eaten by the lucky tiger. The Egyptians chose a bull. The Iroquois Indians transferred all the sins of the tribe once a year to a white dog, which they burned. The Peruvians washed their sins off in the river, as the Hindus do in the Ganges today.
Where there was only a dim idea about the future life, the prosperity of the wicked was always a terrible problem. Why Shamash, or Jupiter, or Zeus, or Yehouah, permitted so much injustice, no one could say. The Babylonians, Romans, Greeks, and Hebrews had no idealised thoughts of the life beyond the grave. The Indo-Europeans invented hell, though the sinful soul was only tortured for three days before being extinguished forever. The everlasting torture of hell was probably invented by the Christians. They certainly took it to the utmost of scary levels. Christian kings were pretty brutal but it is hardly surprising when the Christian God could arrange for sinners to be roasted, charred, poked and prodded in a hot oven while being kept alive all the time to feel the pain.
And another aberration of the moral sense under the influence of superstition was cannibalism. No doubt it was sometimes due to economic pressure as the killing of the aged often is, but mostly it was "sacramental." The strength or virtue of the eaten man passed to the eater. Like much ancient religious theology, it was a primitive scientific theory. It seemed sensible that the qualities of the food passed to the eater. This led to the common religious practice of eating the god, or communion.
The menstrual trouble of women was one human characteristic which made for the restriction of sex. They were periodically "unclean." In childbirth, the superior male thought, they were again unclean. All sorts of taboos grew up, and the sex act began, over large areas, to be regarded with suspicion. Priests and priestesses were forbidden it. Sacred seasons were not to be contaminated with it. Men and women began to believe that one became wonderfully wise and enlightened if one avoided copulation and others became wonderfully holy. Out of it all arose, also, the contempt of woman, of which Egypt and Babylon knew nothing.
Religion is necessary, they tell us, for personal morality, but what precisely is necessary? All that the 21,000 various Christians sects agree upon is that religion is necessary. What good is it to tell someone who is sick that they need medicine, but 21,000 groups of doctors cannot agree on what it should be. Each group thinks they know and revile the diagnosis of the others. A moral but secular outlook—the Stoic, the Epicurean, the Confucian, or the pure Buddhist—which ignored gods has been as effective as any religion. It is time advocates of religion were all told in robust language that we want neither gods nor Christs nor priests nor hells. We can manage our own business without any of them. That is the way to shut them up.
Clergymen crudely and hypocritically pick out a few saints inspired by an imagined love of God and the the illusion of a reward in heaven, and urge the majority of us to be like them. Yet what an amiable minority might enjoy is not sufficient reason to foist it on to the majority unless it is meant to be a punishment for being wicked. No Christian society has been morally superior to the modern largely secular society. The Middle Ages were coarse, miserable, violent and immoral, not least among the clergy. The world has slowly improved in proportion to the decay of religion. The churches will gradually become ethical table tennis and tea societies, still claiming that they stand for religion.
What clerical writer or religious historian has reviewed the general state of morals from the fifth to the nineteenth century? They dare not write it, but unctuously repeat the parrot cry that our morality needs the support of religion. The morals of Europe disappeared when it became Christian, returned a little under Moorish and Greek influence, but were still feeble when the great decay of religion began in the nineteenth century. While Christianity made a moral mess of Europe, the heathen Moors in Spain proved culture was an inspiration of honour, justice, and refinement.
Anyone seeking the causes of the advance in morals since the Middle Ages, they would rule out religion. Religion has less influence now than it ever had. The millions who do not go to church or read the bible may or may not have a belief in God, but, if they have, it is feeble and unpracticed. Education is the principal cause of the advance, yet the modern Prime Minister of the UK wants to institute more church schools. Better and wiser education should not omit moral training but it should not be religious. The positive cause of the advance was the influence of a minority of lay writers and thinkers, most of whom had no religion, or thought out human problems independently of it.
Why are immoral people immoral? The clergy answer with bizarre ideas unrelated to reality. For them, morality is a law, but people today are less inclined to recognize any god-given laws, and more inclined to ask whether He set any. The moral tradition of a society was handed down from parents to children because they saw its value, but now many parents do not and cannot be bothered any more. It is a social problem not anything to do with religion, and well-enforced laws might help to keep it, but they will be the laws of society not the laws of God. What the clergy and professing Christians cannot see is that God's law was the law of a society. It was laid down by kings for their subjects to obey but laid down in the name of God. In ancient society when people were more ignorant and superstitious, a law of God meant something serious. It must have done because God set up a king to enforce it!
Religious and ethical people also always insist that the divine code of conduct is equal in authority in every line. This leads them to be like the Pharisees that their own holy book supposedly criticises, yet they are utterly blind to it. If a scribe had miswritten that people must enter church wearing a "cat" instead of a "hat," you can bet your life there would be a sect of Christianity that wore cats to church, and they would be accusing the League for the Defense of Domestic Animals that they were attacking people's right to practise their religion.
Moralists distinguish between social virtues—habits such as justice, honesty, truthfulness, from which all of us would profit if they were generally cultivated—and self-regarding virtues and habits which affect no one but oneself. More liberal-minded believers and agnostics think some shade of asceticism highly respectable and, in some strange way, conducive to wisdom. Qualities or modes of conduct and character which are highly desirable to increase the amenities of life can be cultivated without any talk about eternal laws, and gods and devils. The police will look after grosser breaches of the social virtues, if they are kept from corruption, and a fairer distribution of wealth will reduce crime, while education, public opinion, and better parenting will secure what does not concern the police. Let children be taught in school—and their parents too, if needs be—why conduct necessarily has limitations in a social group, and it will be found more profitable than telling them about the myth of gentle Jesus.
Drunkenness was never a moral problem for the church. A hundred years ago, the majority of men who could afford it got drunk habitually, and the clergy had little to say about it. In Catholic moral theology drunkenness is a "venial" (light) offence unless a man loses the use of reason "in a bestial manner," and even this principle has never been applied strictly. All the fuss about the immorality of drink, which would have astounded priests when all the world was Christian, has originated in our skeptical age. Those who exceed occasionally, with no damage to anybody except their own head and stomach, may well tell the moralist to mind his own business. Roman Catholics of distinction have these occasional "binges" and stoutly maintain that neither church nor state has anything to do with the matter. In vino veritas shows what is wrong with us today. People have no desire for self control when drunk, and express their inner prejudices openly. That says something about society not about drinking. Racist attacks under the influence of drink are no less racist attacks, and that is a far more dangerous and anti-social crime than mere drunkenness.
How often do the clergy figure in your daily paper in connection with sex-offenses? Do you find professors, doctors, or lawyers in the same position as frequently as you find clergymen? Surely not. If some person with plenty of leisure cared to compile the lists of cases, he would find that these clerical guardians of our chastity figure in the daily press for sex-irregularities three times as frequently as any other correspondingly large body of professional men. The clergy are far more immoral than teachers, doctors, or lawyers, and Catholic priests are more immoral than Protestant clergymen. A large number of the Popes themselves were notoriously immoral, and some homosexual, and the license of prelates, priests monks and nuns has been colossal.
The Christian Era, before our un-Christian days, reeks with sex-license from the fifth century to the nineteenth. The notion that Christianity has been a special guardian of purity of women is a joke. Where is the foundation of a law of chastity? The law of chastity is "priestly morality" and "emanates from religion." European-American civilization bows to it in theory only because Christ endorsed it. He did not invent it. Every moralist of those centuries, from Pythagoras to Marcus Aurelius, urged it. Three thousand years earlier Egyptians had prayed to Osiris, "I am pure, I am pure, I am pure."
The real evolution of the idea has never been traced. In its earlier form it was simply—for Egyptians, Babylonians, Hebrews, etc.—"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife", it did not forbid concubines and harlots. In the first millennium before Christ, however, priestly and philosophical ascetics arose everywhere, and "chastity" declared. The more philosophers glorified the spirit, the more the flesh was depreciated. The Essenes of Palestine got these ideas from the Persians, and Jesus got them from the Essenes, and two thousand years later this marvelous scientific civilization of ours, this generation which cuts off the heads of kings and boasts of its independence, bows down to the habits of an Essenic zealot leader.
If Jesus was not divine, he may have blundered on this point as he did in regard to the end of the world. There is no such law. The Old Testament authoritatively forbids only adultery, and married folk should keep their contract as long as they hold each other to it. The belief in a God has in itself nothing to do with the matter. Just imagine the Almighty taking an interest in the copulations of mortals. It makes him sound perverted. Yet to disapprove of it he must observe it. Christians do not see the humour of this.
The law of chastity is based on the Christian and Jewish scriptures, that most modern scholarship regard as pious fiction. Even if they do give the words of Jesus, which is hardly credible, his authority has gone. Social law can be worked out without the entanglement of laws "emanating from and grounded on religion." Christians ought to observe their own law—though most of them never did, and half of them do not now and never will—but non-Christians may justly request them to mind their own business. When they try to make it their business by invoking "the voice of conscience" and "the universal moral sense," they talk psychological rubbish. A man's feeling of obligation is the plain product of education and environment and faithfully reflects them.
Sensual people were never good Christians. Christians can be fond of good cheer and even good liquor, but it is not the ideal of Jesus and Paul. Those who indulged their senses were more apt to be tempted and to "sin." Yet someone can be sensual yet perfectly refined and of high character. Sensuality, not gluttony or any excess, is neither coarse nor vulgar, and adds to the happiness and geniality of life, having no injurious effect whatever on intellect or character. What stops a woman from being gusty in her sensual enjoyment, yet delicate in taste and sentiment, intelligent and sweet in character? Against those Fundamentalists that take literally the command to multiply, and take this as religious license to exploit their women to the limit of their health, promiscuity out of choice could hardly be worse. Not sensuality, but refinement is what we need to recommend to them.
Ask the moralists and preachers to count up the misery and suffering their law of chastity has caused and causes all over the world today, all the joy that mortals might have had in their brief lives and the clergy have persuaded them to sacrifice for an illusory heaven, all the dreary waiting and anemia and nervous disease, all the sourness of disappointment and the feverish anxiety to secure a mate. Reflect on the ghastly havoc that lies behind all this hollow rhetoric about "the Christian purity of our women." Religion alone can sustain the law of chastity. The only thing that superstition can sustain is superstition.
Christianity is considered particularly effective in checking the sex-impulses of men and women, yet people were most frankly and unrestrainedly sexual whenever they believed most confidently in the authoritative character and dire penalties of the Christian ethic.
John Buchara, the Papal Master of Ceremonies, relates, in his private Diary, how Pope Alexander VI was entertained by fifty of the loveliest prostitutes of the Holy City dancing naked before him and his court, stooping in every posture to pick up chestnuts from the floor as their lithe forms shone in the light of the candles. Cesare Borgia provided these exotic entertainments. The model who sat for a painting in the Vatican of the Virgin painted by Pinturecchio was Giulia Farnese, the the pope's golden-haired young sweetheart. Already, the word model had its modern connotation.
Our generation is more sexual than many, but if the Christian ethic was ineffective when Christianity was strongest, how will it work now?
The word "virtue" is the Roman word for "manliness." The Greek word meant "excellence"; but the Greeks conceived it in an intellectual sense, and it really meant "wisdom." To us the word is coming to mean, more and more, "common sense."
In Luke, supposed to show the virtue of Jesus at his best as a man, there is no Jesus corresponding to the pulpit rhetoric about him. If he was divine, the miracles and the casting out of devils cannot count. Indeed, what were the devils were doing there at all? The glorification of Christ is based upon his resurrection, a supposed historical event that no one saw and is based on appearances that only start being recorded after the myth has itself started.
Besides those, a collection of wise sayings have been attributed to him. Omit the sayings of Jesus from Luke and all that remains is a zealot who calls his opponents "fools" and "hypocrites" and "vipers," who predicts horrible calamities for cities which do not accept his teaching, who is gentle with sinners and harsh with his mother, who says that he has expressly come to split up families, and so on.
How were these casual remarks of Jesus given verbatim by Luke eighty years later? On the Christian hypothesis, Jesus's followers were all simple folk who would not have been able to write let alone write shorthand. The believer now treasures every word in the gospels. But how were they kept for posterity?
Christians will say they were unforgettable because they were sublime, so original, so unique, so superhuman. Yet, every one had been said already, and it was possible for any educated Jew or Greek to make a collection or compilation of them.
Revelation of a holier law broke gradually upon this world. God made himself known to one or two peoples of his holy prophets and bade them purify the conscience of the world. Stumbling man was taken by the hand and led. Well that is what the prophetss of the revelation told us and the priests who set themselves up to reveal the theophany to others.
An English clergyman declines to read certain Psalms in church because they refer to dashing the heads of little children on the stones. These Psalms were written late in the history of Judaea! The English congregation rises in wrath—these are the Word of God! Nothing miraculous or new or puzzling happened when Christ appeared. The stream of natural moral evolution just flowed on.
What are be the greatest moral innovations of Christ and Christianity? The first is the Golden Rule. Let us take it humanly. Nobody is ever going to love his neighbour as be loves himself. It can't be done. It is simply not natural because it is contrary to evolution. Human emotions are not made that way. An ideal ought to be something that can be realized. The Golden Rule of life expressed thus is a quotation from the Old Testament:
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
It is not a Christian contribution to the pretty sentiments of moralists. It was centuries old when Christ quoted it.
And as the Old Testament, in its earliest form, was written only late in the fifth century BC, its doctrine of brotherly love is more than a century later than that of Buddha. Moreover, Buddha meant universal love. Every man was not the Jew's brother, or his neighbour. The Jews never even professed to love anybody but Jews, and they hated quite a lot of those. Buddha, as any work on him will tell you, demanded that every man should love his fellows as a mother loves her children—these were his words.
Act toward others as you would have them act toward you—an admirable principle. It puts the Utilitarian theory of morality in a nutshell. It is so obvious a rule of social life that one is not surprised that few ever said it. It is not profound. It is common sense. If you do not want lies told you, don't tell them. If you want just, honourable, kindly, brotherly treatment, get it by reciprocity.
The famous and Agnostic Chinese moralist Confucius gave the Golden Rule six hundred years before Christ was born, and nearly two hundred years before the Old Testament was written. The Christian has beentaught to say Confucius only taught the Golden Rule in a negative form:
Do not unto others what you do not want them to do to you.
The Christian missionary and Chinese scholar, Dr. Legge writing about Confucius in an edition of the "Encyclopedia Britannica," wrote:
It has been said that he only gave the rule in a negative form, but be understood it in its positive and most comprehensive form.
What of the counsel to love even one's enemies—did any moralist in the world ever urge such a refinement of virtue before Christ? Loving enemies would be bad social policy. It would encourage the mean and unfair to do as they liked with no fear of recompense. The Old Testament says:
Thou shalt not hate thy brother.
Since Jesus was plainly a member of a brotherhood, this will have been his own teaching, especially as he wanted to unite a force of Jews against the Roman oppressors.
The great Chinese sage, Lao-tse, a contemporary of Confucius, said:
Recompense injury with kindness.
This doctrine seems to have been common in the humanitarian ethic of China. Later, in the fourth century BC, we find the chief disciple of Confucius, the great moralist Mencius, who seems to have been the first in the world to condemn war, saying:
A benevolent man does not lay up anger, nor cherish resentment against his brother, but only regards him with affection and love.
There in the heart of agnostic China, three hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was delivered, you have the practical doctrine of loving your enemies as a commonplace of humanitarian morality.
Buddha in India taught:
Hatred ceases by love: this is an old rule.
It seems to have been as common in India centuries before Christ as it was in China. The Laws of Manu, compiled early in the Christian Era but consisting of ancient Hindu writings, says:
Against an angry man let him not in return show anger: let him bless when he is cursed.
Non-Christian European moralists—Socrates and Plato, Seneca, Pliny, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius—all had the same sentiment. Socrates, quoted approvingly by Plato, said:
We ought not to retaliate, or render evil for evil to anyone.
Plato and Aristotle taught the Greeks that the "punishment" of a criminal was "a moral medicine" meant as a deterrent. Penalties are to deter transgressions, not as punishment. Despite their love of enemies, Christianity, preferred the concept of punishment. So it remained until humanitarian Rationalists, most of them Agnostics, won reforms in the nineteenth century.
Seneca wrote a whole treatise on anger condemning it in every form. When Greek influence began to be felt in Judaea, as we see in Ecclesiastics and Proverbs, the same sentiment was reproduced. Leviticus, the book of law brought from Persia by Ezra's priests, has:
Thou shalt not hate thy brother.
Here is a sentiment, which thousands of Christian writers have claimed to be entirely original in Christ, actually found to be a commonplace of moralists for hundreds of years before Christ and in the "Pagan" world. Christians should note the way they are misled to falsely glorify their son of God.
Candidly, how much does a Christian know about Epictetus or Apollonius, about Confucius, Lao-tse, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Epicurus, Dion Chrysostom, Seneca, or Spinoza? They are certain Christ was nobler than all put together, but they have never heard of most of them and have never read other than a few disparaging Christian remarks about any of them. How does the little that anyone pretends to know about the historic Jesus make him superior to these?
It occurred to no Christian, not even to Christ, that, if loving one's enemies is lofty, it ought above all to apply to God. On what principle must Christ as man love his enemies, and Christ as God devise for them an eternity of fiendish torment? Despite the injunction to love enemies, the priests and princes of Christendom saw that God was held to burn the transgressors of his law. Since they were God's representatives on earth, they took it on themselves to begin the toasting process without, however, the benefits of God's judgement. By definition, those who incurred their wrath incurred the wrath of God and were therefore candidates for the grill.
The world, once it had been compelled to accept the gospels, sank rapidly into the Dark Ages, when vice and violence ruled Europe. That Christianity elevated civilization is another myth of the Churches. Europe sank far lower than it had been in pagan days.
The preacher distracts attention from this broad failure of Christian morality by enlarging upon the multitudes of saints and martyrs that it inspired. It inspired a large number of forgeries of saints and martyrs. Martyrs were created by the hundred by the corrupt Roman writers of the early Middle Ages. During the fifteen hundred years of Christian domination, thousands of men and women found real inspiration in the gospels, but this is minute compared with the countless millions whose lives throughout the whole of that vast period were made hopeless and miserable by the obsessions of the Church.
Why was the teaching of Jesus so ineffective? It was not just the fault of the Church of Rome, because there was no improvement after the Reformation. England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was almost as immoral as during the Middle Ages. It was only in the nineteenth century, especially the latter part of the nineteenth century, that the standard of taste and conduct rose to the level on which we now live. But the fault lay predominantly with Rome. Dense ignorance always means coarseness and the Church was responsible for the ignorance of Europe. Moreover, the ritual service, the doctrine of Purgatory and indulgences, the practice of confession, the mechanical rites of kissing relics and attending services in an unintelligible language, all tended to blunt, instead of promote, moral delicacy.
The teaching of the gospels was not even in itself calculated to help the mass of men. Jesus was an Essenian monk certain that God was ready to finish life on earth with a final holy war before bringing in perfection. Christians have tried to make a universal morality out of the instructions of a leader who thought the world was about to end for anyone who was not righteous. Right conduct is not therefore commended by Jesus to his converts for its own sake, or even because it was the wish of God, as he doubtless believed, but to get the reward of acceptance into God's imminent kingdom—or perhaps avoiding hell fire for some.
The central tenets of the ethics of Jesus were:
Such ascetic exaggerations as are attributed to Jesus were not in those days confined to militant monks. Wandering moralists as well as Egyptian and Palestinian monks said them. Wealthy men like Seneca, emperors like Marcus Aurelius, said them, as well as slaves like Epictetus. Philosophers like Plato and Zeno and Plutarch were little less ascetic in their denunciations of the flesh and its lusts.
But all moral rhetoric of this kind is bound to be ineffective with the mass of mankind, even if they were facing the situation Jesus and his followers thought they were facing. Buddha was not more successful in Asia, on this side, than Plato was in Greece or Jesus in later Europe. Our blood is as much a part of our nature as is our reason. We feel the falseness of a philosophy or an ethic that belittles the pleasure of life and would condemn us, in a world of sunshine and flowers, to close our eyes to the light and color. Only men and women of a peculiar nature ever pay implicit attention to such counsels. The teaching of Jesus was condemned to futility by its own exaggerations. It is not too hard for human nature but human nature healthily refuses to be ruled by it.
The Churches dare not in our age consistently advocate their Christian ethic. It is a condemnation, root and branch, of all pleasure. An ethic which puts married folk on a lower level, as weaklings who cannot scale the heights of superiority, has no place in the twentieth century. An ethic that preaches that a man must embrace poverty if he would be really virtuous dare not be urged from any pulpit in America. An ethic that bids the really just man turn the other cheek to the smiter is not lofty or sublime, but a sheer blunder. And these things are essential parts of Christ's morality, however little they may be obtruded in Christian morality.
Finally, the entire atmosphere of the morality of Jesus in the gospels unfits it for use in modern times. Efforts have been made to explain away the belief in hell of the prophet of Nazareth—ridiculous efforts to get rid of the plain meaning of the Greek words used in the gospels—but no amount of ingenuity will explain away his belief that the end of the world was near. This is one of the few doctrines we can safely attribute to Jesus himself, not to the compilers of the gospels. For the source of that belief we must look toward Persia, not the Greek world.
It falsifies the entire conception of human life and duty, and makes the morality of the gospels quite unsuitable for our time. In the light of that belief we can easily understand the ascetic exaggerations of the sayings of Jesus, and we can just as easily understand how it was that Christian morality never inspired social justice, which is immeasurably more important than personal virtue. Not one of the greater problems of life was ever confronted by the gospel Jesus or early Christianity. It was left to pagan moralists to denounce war and slavery. It was left to Agnostic sociologists to discover that brutal material conditions would be reflected in brutality of mind, and that a low intellectual level meant infallibly for the majority of men a low moral level. Our modern conception of character and the way to improve and strengthen character has nothing in common with the moral platitudes of ancient Judaea.
Our conception of rights has nothing in common with an ethic framed in the belief that God would soon destroy the earth by fire and summon the souls of all men before his throne. In all our rebellions there is one sound note. We claim a freedom restricted only by the rights of others that we shall not hurt them. The alternative to that would be anarchy. The character of our age is that it is increasingly social, and only a social ethic will meet its needs.
Let the platitudes of the gospels slumber in the Greek books in which they were written. Let us cast aside the monkish morality of long ago. Now our universe extends to infinity not to just beyond the cloisters. Should we reject knowledge that no other age ever possessed in favour of errors held by everyone in history. We should need no moralists of old times to tell us how to behave.