Fundamentalism

“ It is necessary—e.g., to approach the subject from a rational and reasonable standpoint—to detach the mind from all preconceived dogmas and opinions; to lay aside all prejudices, racial, religious, social and otherwise, and all bigotries and intolerance; to be confined to no one creed, sect or denomination of any kind, sort or description, but the one great world of Humanity that, in the eyes of Nature, is of one soul and body. ”

“ It seems to me that it cannot last, as nothing can endure, or ought to endure, that is not founded upon principle; and its principle I have not discovered. In nothing, whether it be religion, or government, or manners, sacred or political or social life, do I find faith; and if there be no faith, how can there be duty? Is there such a thing as religious truth? Is there such a thing as political right? ”

“ Inasmuch as this hatred and enmity, this bigotry and intolerance are outcomes of misunderstandings, the reality of religious unity will appear when these misunderstandings are dispelled. For the foundation of the divine religions is one foundation. This is the oneness of revelation or teaching; but alas! we have turned away from that foundation, holding tenaciously to various dogmatic forms and blind imitation of ancestral beliefs. This is the real cause of enmity, hatred and bloodshed in the world; the reason of alienation and estrangement among mankind. ”

“ What, in truth, are the conditions necessary to constitute a religion? There must be a creed, or conviction, claiming authority over the whole of human life; a belief, or set of beliefs, deliberately adopted, respecting human destiny and duty, to which the believer inwardly acknowledges that all his actions ought to be subordinate. Moreover, there must be a sentiment connected with this creed, or capable of being invoked by it, sufficiently powerful to give it in fact, the authority over human conduct to which it lays claim in theory. ”

“ Theocracy must be the creed of one class, and atheism of the second. The advocates of good moral principles, such as truth, freedom of religion, knowledge, limitation of power and equal Fights, cannot be atheists; and the advocates of evil moral principles, such as fraud, force, ignorance, despotism and exclusive privileges, cannot be believers. ”

“ Lay hold on the myriads of juvenile spirits before they have time to grow up through ignorance, into a reckless hostility to social order; train them to sense and good morals; inculcate the principles of religion, simply and solemnly, as religion, as a thing directly of divine dictation, and not as if its authority were chiefly in virtue of human institutions; let the higher orders, generally, make it evident to the multitude that they are desirous to raise them in value, and promote their happiness ”

“ That every religion subjecting man's reason to mysteries, or to the authority of any revelation speaking in God's name, is a religion of constraint and slavery; that as such it should be annihilated in order to reestablish the indefeasible rights of Equality and Liberty as to the belief or disbelief of all that the reason of man approves or disapproves: and they will call this Equality and Liberty the reign of Reason and the empire of Philosophy. ”

“ In the contests of opinion, which embrace the general relations of society, it is far less those dogmas in which each individual seeks light, aid, strength and repose for his feelings and his conscience, his inward struggles and his final hopes—than the single article of faith respecting man, and what constitutes his essential being, his internal nature, and his higher destiny, which determines the Christian or unchristian view—the religion or irreligion of history, if I may be allowed the expression. ”

“ But this spirit of genuine Christianity was soon obscured and the world movement toward ethical universalism obstructed and checked by the theological teaching which made moral merit and salvation dependent upon the acceptance of a prescribed creed. In place of the tribal and racial walls of division which had originally separated the communities of men and which the progress of events had thrown down, it raised a new partition wall which divided mankind into two great ethically artificial classes, believers and unbelievers, Christians and pagans. ”

“ For you know well, Venerable Brethren, that at this time there are found not a few, who applying to civil intercourse the impious and absurd principles of what they call Naturalism, dare teach, "that the best form of Society, and the exigencies of civil progress absolutely require human society to be constituted and governed without any regard whatsoever to Religion, as if this (Religion) did not even exist, or at least without making any distinction between true and false religions." ”

“ Now, in every one of these protests, the social consciousness instinctively joins. It cannot rest in a conception of religion that belittles the personal in God or man; for it is itself an emphatic insistence upon the fully personal. And it can, least of all, get on with the mystical ignoring of the rational and the ethical, for it holds that the social evolution moves steadily on to a rational like-mindedness, and to a definitely ethical civilization. ”

“ But how long before they will be so,—when they shall have become the mere creatures of the State, and, under the plea of no sectarianism, mere naturalism shall be the substance of all the religious, and the basis of all the secular teaching which they shall give? ”

“ When, however, the State is not permitted to derive any further advantage from religion, or when people think far too variously on religious matters to allow the State to adopt a consistent and uniform procedure with respect to them, the way out of the difficulty will necessarily present itself, namely to treat religion as a private affair and leave it to the conscience and custom of each single individual. ”

“ If disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.
But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop. ”

“ The problem, the real problem, is: how to feed these people on truly vital knowledge, how to make common to all, the beautiful, the harmonious, the ethical; how to bring to all, the knowledge of that religion which indeed makes free from tribal pride and racial hate and leads men into the freedom of the sons of God. ”

“ People have and should have the freedom of "thought, conscience, and religion." [fn7] This right "includes freedom to change religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others, in public or private, to manifest any religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance, regardless of doctrine." ”

“ Could Religion excite the angry passions that she does, if her aims were spiritual and not doctrinal? Could Religion be divorced as she is from practical life, and confined to a class kept under powerful stimulants, and called the “religious public,” if her aims were spiritual and not doctrinal? ”

“ To every social gathering around the religious idea that explains and sustains it, what a disturbance in the secular system formed by the co-ordination and mutual adaptation of laws, customs, morality, and institutions! ”

“ But I see no reason why we should not like it. If we believe in the development of religious thought, we must allow it a means of developing, and that can only be done by granting the utmost liberty to the individual and to the community. ”

“ The measure now before you will drag this religion from the depths of men’s souls into the public street, as it were, in defiance of the original deep-felt sense of the word, and of the spirit of our traditions and customs; it will create a State-religion, and condemn every man’s opinions to wear at least the same livery. ”

“ In the cool moments of reflection, both humanity and philosophy revolt at the diabolical disposition, that has prevailed in almost every country, to persecute such as either from education or principle, from caprice or custom, refuse to subscribe to the religious creed of those, who, by various adventitious circumstances, have acquired a degree of superiority or power. ”

“ If the religions of the world would forsake these causes of difficulty and seek the fundamentals, all would agree, and strife and dissension would pass away; for religion and reality are one and not multiple. ”

“ An individualistic social order demands an individualizing religion. So far as I know, the older religions, with the lofty moral teachings which one may freely admit them to have, make no determined or even distinct effort to secure the activity of the individual will in the adoption of moral ideals. ”

“ And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. ”

“ On the other hand, the Rules clearly indicate that the Society is at full liberty to investigate any philosophical system, ancient or modern, with a view to ascertain the broad fundamental principles which form the basis of every school of religious philosophy, properly so called, and thereby "promote the principle of a Universal Brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race or creed." ”

“ But all real existence, as we saw in our Second Book, is essentially individual. Hence it is of the essence of religion that it looks upon the ideal as already existing in individual form. This is why devotion to an abstract principle, such as nationality, socialism, democracy, humanity, proves so much inferior as a permanent expression of religious life, to devotion to a person, however imperfect. ”

“ That many antagonistic forms of religious faith, some the most degraded, others the most exalted, should live on the same soil, among the same people, is indeed a disheartening truth, enough almost to shake one’s belief in the common origin and the common destinies of the human race. ”

“ The natural course would be for the individual to form his own views and principles, make his own rules of conduct, and, according to his powers, search for the truth with his own brains; but instead of this, in modern society the individual finds a ready-made religion, a different one in each country, the religion of his parents, with which he is inoculated long before he is capable of religious thought or feeling. ”

“ When, however, we turn to those conditions of social life that are beyond the purview of common sense, such as the preservation of tribal tradition and solidarity, and future prosperity, loyalty [343] to the king and obedience to his officers, it is plain that something else than common sense was needed to reinforce the interest of the whole against the tendency of the individual’s self-assertion to overcome his social dispositions, and that this control was found chiefly in Religion. ”

“ In fact, if there does exist a Being superior to Humanity, there must also exist a system of the relations between this Being and Humanity. What then is this system? The search for the best religion is the second step that the human mind takes in reason and in faith. ”

“ If the social structure, including the whole body of customs and opinions, is associated intimately with religious belief and is supposed to be under divine patronage, criticism of the social order savours of impiety, while criticism of the religious belief is a direct challenge to the wrath of supernatural powers. ”

“ Such movements are never comprehended by those who imagine that their origin is rational. Political or religious, the beliefs which have moved the world possess a common origin and follow the same laws. They are formed, not by the reason, but more often contrary to reason. Buddhism, Christianity, Islamism, the Reformation, sorcery, Jacobinism, socialism, spiritualism, &c., seem very different forms of belief, but they have, I repeat, identical mystic and affective bases, and obey forms of logic which have no affinity with rational logic. ”

“ With the principles of Christianity, the principles of religious philosophy—the only true policy, to which mankind must come at last, by which alone all the remediable ills of humanity are to be remedied, and for which you are taught to pray when you entreat that your Father’s kingdom may come—with those principles slavery is inconsistent, and therefore not to be tolerated, even in speculation. ”

“ From the question of the support which Christian faith and doctrine give to the social consciousness, we turn now to the second part of our inquiry: How does this growing social consciousness, not by any means always consciously religious, naturally react upon and affect our conceptions of religion and of theological doctrines? ”

“ That the people have an equal, natural, and unalienable right freely and peaceably to exercise their religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that no religious sect or society ought to be favored or established by law in preference to others. ”

“ Abraham announced teachings founded upon reality, Moses proclaimed reality, Christ established reality and Bahá’u’lláh was the Messenger and Herald of reality. But humanity, having forsaken the one essential and fundamental reality which underlies the religion of God, and holding blindly to imitations of ancestral forms and interpretations of belief, is separated and divided in the strife, contention and bigotry of various sects and religious factions. ”

“ It is, however, at the fifteenth proposition that the framers of the Syllabus emerge into their natural element. In it the opinion condemned is that every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which he may esteem true, following the light of reason. This, with the few other propositions under the head of Indifferentism and Latitudinarianism, prepare the way for a section, in which communism, clandestine societies, and Bible societies are bound into one bundle. This again introduces the two great sections, that on the Church, and that on the State. ”