Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
That religion is the belief in and worship of gods ignores the belief in immortality. That man's mind survives the body as a spirit is the oldest of all religious beliefs. Gods were spirits elevated into princes. The Almighty was the king of the spirit world. What if the aristocracy of the spirit world were overthrown and a republic instituted—a religion without God!
One would expect men to cling more desperately to the belief in immortality than to the belief in God. Did men ever profoundly believe in their immortality?
If we are to live three score years and ten on earth, and an eternity in some other sphere, it matters vitally how we prepare for that larger life. The majority of people have always behaved as if they did not really believe the story. They were concerned for the flesh and its impulses and pleasures.
Everyone who believes in God has reasons for doing so. God made the world or order and beauty or laid down moral law. Ask why anyone believes they are immortal. Not one believer in a thousand has a single definite reason for thinking that they are immortal.
The reason they come up with is that they believe in immortality because the Bible promises it. To accept such authority with any confidence in the truth of their belief, they must first be quite convinced, by solid proof, that there is a God to make the promise, and that He actually did inspire the Bible.
People forget that religion is a series of statements of fact, and the boldest and most tremendous statements imaginable. It is hard enough if not impossible to prove the existence of the material world. Yet religion claims there is another world beyond and greater than the material world. How can they prove that? How can they prove that humans are immortal?
Death is the law of the universe. In the days when Plato worked out the first rational arguments for immortality, as distinct from mere religious tradition, the claim was not so exorbitant. The stars themselves, the Greeks thought, were immortal. They were small, undying fires set in the firmament. Plants and animals died, of course, but these stars made men familiar with things which never died.
Now we know that the stars are born and grow and die just like us, except that their life is immeasurably longer. There is a time when each is a shapeless cloud of star-dust. There will be a time when the most brilliant star in the heavens will fade from the eyes of whatever mortals there may then be. They are made of the same atoms as our bodies. They obey the great cosmic law that things which come together shall in the end go asunder—shall die.
What of the atoms themselves, then? They are immortal! Not so. They were formed and will die either during the lifetime of the universe or at its end, for the cosmos itself is not immortal. It will either disappear in a big crunch or will cool down to absolute zero as an empty shell devoid of matter. There is a chance equivalent to tossing a coin and it landing on a smooth surface on its edge, that the universe is everlasting. If so, it will be the only eternal thing, all its constituents having a finite life. The fundamental law of nature seems to be death.
Nature gives a chance to countless things to enjoy their hour of life. The matter of which the brontosaurs and cycads were compacted in the earth's Middle Ages is now moulded into horses and palms. We humans have our chance because the living things of long ago died and left the matter of their bodies to be used in new forms. This is the only immortality. The day dies, and will never return. The law of the universe is death.
The Christian protests that their souls are not made matter and will not be dissolved into elements. But they have no proof. As Henry James said, explaining why believed in personal immortality: Because I choose to.
What is the basis of choosing to believe? To believe means to accept something as true but how can something be accepted as true when it is belied by every example available in the world? The law of the universe is death yet Christians believes that they will not die!
Mankind is apparently different from everything else in the universe. Mankind builds cities, writes poems, measures the universe. Does any other creature in the world even remotely approach him in his powers and his nature? Well not all mankind is so obviously noble. Some are simple, some drunks, some are disabled, some are maniacs and some are politicians.
At one time, no one could write poems or measure the universe, no one could make a house or even a hut, no one could write or even draw the simplest symbols. The utmost that anyone could do was to chip a piece of flint. Before, no one could even do that. Were these ancestors of mankind members of the same race?
You see the fallacy. A few people can do wonderful things and everyone claims the credit. Though most of us are not obviously spiritual and immortal, we evolved from even less spiritual and immortal beings. Ultimately we find an ancestor who was plainly animal—still spiritual and immortal? The reason most people have in their minds for claiming immortality is unsound.
Many branches of science—anatomy, physiology, psychology, archaeology, anthropology—show that man was evolved from a common ancestor with the apes. Science teaches, without a single dissenting voice today, that mankind, body and mind, was evolved.
On the accepted and unanimous teaching of science man took several million years to evolve from the ape to the ape-man stage. He then took a few hundred thousand years to evolve from the ape-man to the savage-man stage. A child could see the bearing of this on the belief that man has a spiritual and immortal soul. If the ape has no spiritual soul, at what stage in this long and gradual evolution was an immortal soul infused into the developing body. And, if at some stage the creature acquired a soul, why then did it impel it to start fighting with its neighbours?
The Fundamentalist attitude is to deny the facts. Why should all the experts in the world should be wrong and the Fundamentalist right?
Millions of stone implements, representing several hundred thousand years of human life, put the gradual evolution of the human mind beyond question..
Evolution makes the belief in an immortal soul improbable. It does not disprove it. We do not attempt to prove negative statements. But, clearly, we now, in face of the general law of death and man's continuity with the animals, demand very strong and clear proof of the religious claim.
The brain is merely the organ, the piano, the violin, the harp. The soul is the musician. A genius or an idiot is a man with an abnormal brain. The mind, a believer might say, can express itself only according to the quality of its organ or instrument. The spiritual and immortal soul was there all the time, but it could not express itself until the organ was perfectly developed.
It is conceivable that mind is a spiritual artist using a material instrument. The mind may be the same, all the time, in everybody. It may be merely the brain that differs, from age to age, and in different individuals now.
Why create the soul millions of years before it can act? Why go on creating souls—for the only plausible theological theory is that the soul has to be created in each individual human being—during those millions of years of the lowest savagery?
This musical instrument idea assumes the point to be proved. That point is whether the mind is a spirit, and the action of the musician's mind on the piano does not help us in the least unless we suppose, to begin with, that it is a spirit. If, as many hold, the mind is only a function of the brain, then it is a question of the action of matter (brain and muscle) on matter
In religious terms, the mind does not play on the body. It is one with the body. There is not the least analogy with the musician, who can close his piano and leave it when he likes. The analogy is a superficial substitute for thought.
An insoluble problem in religious philosophy is how a spirit can act on or through matter. Anyone inclined to think that God and soul explain things ought to be reminded of it. No one has given us the least plausible idea how spirit can act on or with matter. It merely introduces new mysteries.
This a third reason for demanding that the proofs of the spirituality of the soul shall be particularly strong. There is a strong presumption against it:
Practically all philosophers hold that the mind is a spirit. Why? Half these philosophers say that the natural world does not exist. Are they correct in that? Few of them believe in personal immortality.
What do we mean by spirit? How does it differ from matter? Scarcely ever is there a coherent answer. Nine-tenths of the preachers, who predict the future of us all and seek to cultivate the spiritual in this materialist world, could not tell you what spirit is. Spiritual books forget to define it.
The religious philosophy was clear enough on the point. Matter is extended or quantitative substance. It has dimensions. It consists of parts, and so it can be dissolved. Spirit has no parts, no dimensions, no quantity, no extension. It has only qualities.
Body is quantitative, and can dissolve into its parts. Mind is not quantitative and so cannot dissolve into parts, or die. So said the learned Aristotle. Modern definitions of matter do not improve on his. It is generally said to be that which occupies space, which is the same thing. Spirit is like a mathematical point. It has no magnitude.
It may not sound so warm and thrilling to say that your soul is a non-quantitative substance, but on this point depends entirely your hope of immortality. You have to prove that your mind is immaterial or unextended. What are the proofs?
The Roman Catholic philosophy, which prides itself on being the severest and most logical, while it is merely the most medieval, is very confident about the matter. I have ideas of things: pictures of them in my mind. Let us say that I have a mental picture of a beautiful woman; that I see one before me. I am conscious of the picture as a whole. I may fasten my attention on her hands, her feet, or her bosom, but I may also contemplate her as a whole. Now if consciousness is a function of the brain, how can I see such a picture as a whole? Each cell in the brain is composed of innumerable atoms, and each atom is composed of tens or hundreds of protons and electrons, at an appreciable distance from each other. Each atom, nay, each electron, ought to have its own fraction of the brain-picture, on the Materialist hypothesis. The unifying principle at the back of matter must, surely, be a spiritual substance, a soul, which has no atoms or parts.
Take a sleep-walker. He has no consciousness. On the spiritual hypothesis, his soul is switched off from his body. The soul, the supposed seat of consciousness, is switched off for the time being. The body acts mechanically and automatically. Yet objects are seen as a whole, as the conduct of the somnambulist shows. He avoids every obstacle. Put a table in his path, and he goes round it.
The truth is that those who use this and similar arguments are simply building on the temporary ignorance of science, just as they do when they try to prove the existence of God. Candidly, we do not know how we see objects as a whole. That is precisely why many philosophers deny the existence of material objects. There are, they say, only images in the mind, and from these you may more or less riskly infer that there are objects corresponding to them outside the mind.
The whole mental world is still obscure in the last degree. Psychology is largely a matter of verbiage, and it declines entirely to speculate on the nature of mind or consciousness. The human brain is immeasurably the most complicated structure in the universe (as far as our knowledge goes). It consists of hundreds of millions of cells put together in a structure which we as yet very imperfectly understand.
Or take it this way. You see a tree. Some sort of image of it is impressed on your retina by the waves of light. This is no more a picture of it than a phonograph record is a tune. Then this impression on the retina is converted into some kind of movement along your optic nerve. It is now still less like a picture of the tree. The nerve-movement is converted into something else in the optic center of the brain, and finally you see a tree. To say that there is a little picture of a green tree with yellow oranges in your brain is absurd.
We do not know what the machinery of perception is and cannot build any argument on it, We do not know where and how we are conscious of the objects we see. We know very, very little about mind.
It may be a spirit, though there is good reason for thinking it is not. But religion asserts it is a spirit, with no proof whatever. It may be merely a function of the brain.
A hundred things suggest it is merely a function of the brain. Mind varies with every minute alteration of the brain. A fever or an opiate speeds up the mental activity. A heavy meal or a dose of alcohol benumbs it. During the first world war the Germans gave their shock-troops a drug which made them giants in spirit. How a spirit can act on the brain is impossible to understand but chemicals act on the mind easily.
People assume that the mind is a spirit because mind is so very different from matter. The force of the impression is powerful. But it is only the imagination that is impressed. The intellect waits upon the advance of science. Not in our time—not, possibly, for centuries—will science unravel the mysteries of mind and brain. Mind ought to be far more wonderful than anything else in the universe. Its organ, the brain, is the most wonderfully intricate material structure that exists. When we understand that structure, we shall know whether or not consciousness is merely a function of it. Until then there is no logic whatever in pretending to say what can, and what cannot, be a function of the brain. There is no force in saying that something must be a spirit until you know positively that it cannot be material.
What science cannot explain today it may explain tomorrow, and the man who builds on its ignorance today will retreat tomorrow. For the last hundred years the theologian has been engaged in retreating.
In the very early days of science temperaments or characters were divided into four main types: the lymphatic (sluggish), choleric, bilious and sanguineous. This was crude psychology, but it expressed the well-known fact that a very great deal of a man's personality depends upon his bodily qualities. Nerve and brain, stomach and liver and pancreas, blood and muscular tone, all have their respective influences on what we call character..
What sort of a thing will the soul be even if we suppose it to be immortal? Philosophers assume that the mind is a spirit. It is singular how little they think of proving this. However, philosophers rarely believe in personal immortality. Psychologists still more rarely accept it. There are very few real experts on the subject in the world who do.
Whether the soul could or could not think when it is disembodied, it certainly cannot have anything like the personality it had on earth.
Think of every little trait or feature of the child or the woman you love. The golden curls or fine glossy hair, the soft blue or fine brown eyes, the round limbs and graceful carriage these things, of course, go down into the grave forever. But even the features of character depend entirely on the body. The vitality, the sweetness or quaintness of disposition, the warm affection, the reserve or the spontaneous effusiveness—all depend on bodily organs. What will this disembodied soul of wife or mother, whom you hope to meet again, be like? What will even memory be without the brain? For whatever be its nature, it depends vitally on the brain.
This doctrine of immortality begins to look very far from simple and satisfactory when you examine it. The pagan Romans, whose cold and vague attitude towards a future life was so much derided by the new Christians, were nearer the truth. The view of the future life which Christianity brought was, with its eternal torment for the majority of the race, the most repulsive yet formulated. The Roman, like the Babylonian, believed that the soul survived the grave, but it was a pale, thin shade that survived. He had little interest in it.
In psychology the idea of soul has long since been surrendered. It became the science of the mind, not of the soul.
Religious ideas not only melt into mysteries and unintelligibilities when you analyze them, but they are decidedly in conflict with our new knowledge. And it is not a question of evolution only. The science of psychology itself must have a deadly effect on belief when hardly one in ten of our psychologists believes in personal immortality.
Yet, the Agnostic attitude does not mean that it is equally probable whether the mind is or is not a spirit. The chances are not even. Buddha and Confucius came to the conclusion that religious speculation was a waste of time several centuries before the great thinkers of Athens appeared, and the earliest Greek thinkers seem to have been of the same opinion.
Has anything now, three thousand years later, been settled on the religious side? Nothing. We are no wiser. We rule out the proofs of immortality given by Plato and St. Augustine, and we have no better to offer.
The weight of knowledge is against immortality. Evolution proved a deadly weight against the belief. Psychology, as it evolved, turned against it. Physiology throws all its weight into the Materialistic scale. Not a single fact has been discovered in the last hundred years that favours the view that the mind is a spirit.
What are the proofs which modern theologians attempt to give of the immortality of the soul? The more learned of them frankly give it up. Immortality is, they say, a matter of faith. An infinite God can make us immortal, and the Bible says that He will.
This is to prop up a feeble and tottering belief by means of two other feeble and tottering beliefs. What comfort can this give to anybody.
Other religious writers prefer to say that, while they cannot prove the spirituality and immortality of the soul, they can suggest reasons for believing in it. For instance, some of them say, science has discovered that the conservation of energy is a law of the universe. No energy is ever destroyed or annihilated. So the mental energy must persist. The soul must survive.
Energy is never annihilated, it is true, but energy is constantly changing its form, and when the energy is associated with a complex material structure, and that structure breaks up, it is bound to change its form very considerably. The law of the conservation of energy does not say that the energy is conserved in the same form.
An old automobile that is condemned to the scrap-heap does not continue to exist. It is broken into parts and is recycled.
Why are some scientists on the side of religion? Few of them accept a single doctrine of the Christian religion but some hybrid of their own. Often they are duped by mediums for scientists, especially physicists, are singularly careless in excluding fraud from experiments away from their own benches.
The body goes on existing in some form, but its functions do not.
If man is free, if his will can act without compulsion or coercion from any power or motive, then man does stand out from all the rest of the universe, and the law of death may not be for him. His mind must be an indissoluble spirit.
Psychologists have been analyzing and disputing about this apparent consciousness of freedom for a century. And they are now generally agreed that it is an illusion. Surely that has some significance.
In the ordinary acts of life you behave automatically. You don your clothes and shave and eat and walk, and even work, in a mechanical way. The motive arises, by routine, at the proper moment, and the action follows. It is only in graver things that you use your freedom. It is only when two or more motives seem to have about equal force that you are conscious of your freedom. If one motive, if the reason for doing one action, is palpably stronger than the reason for doing the alternative, you do not hesitate. The will follows or acts on the stronger motive.
You may be surprised to know that your will is only a theory. What you are really conscious of is a series of acts. It is just a theory of yours that there is a thing you call your will behind them.
When you hesitate between two courses, do you for a moment doubt that your will eventually follows the one which seems to you wiser or more profitable? Just to prove your freedom you may choose the less wise course. But in that case you merely have a new motive thrown into the scale. Your will always follows the weightier motive. How, then, is it free? All that you are conscious of is the hesitation of your mind, because for a time one motive balances the other. They may remain so balanced that you do nothing, or leave it to others to decide. But if you do decide, you are merely conscious that the battle of motives is over and the stronger carries your will.
But, you ask, what about moral responsibility? What about praising and blaming people for their conduct? What about crime and its punishment? Is not our whole social and moral system based upon the theory that a man is responsible for his actions?
In the United States crime is abnormally high. But this is no reflection on the normal character of the American, which is finer than it ever was before, and is as fine as any in the world. The very large figures of crime are due to Political conditions. In England and other normal civilizations, where there is at least an equal amount of unbelief, crime is less.
You will say, we cannot logically blame the criminal if he has no free will.
The practical point is that you can make unsocial conduct or crime very unattractive to the man who may be disposed to indulge in it. The sentence inflicted today is a deterrent rather than a punishment.
The cat which steals your chop or your chicken has no free will. So, do you take it in your arms and say: you only acted according to your nature or do you thrash it, to teach it a lesson? When you pat on the head the dog or the horse that has done good service, and so encourage it to repeat its performance, are you acting foolishly? You know better. Good feeling as a reward of good conduct is a new motive to the will. The frown or the stroke of society is a deterrent.
Determinism, or the theory that denies free will, has no social consequences whatever, except good ones. When we grasp the real nature of the criminal, we treat him more wisely. When you have a social practice founded upon thousands of years of wrong ideas the readjustment is not easy. But it is really only a question of reading a new shade of meaning into the words.
We can still imprison or inconvenience people who act criminally, without intending to punish them. A man is responsible to his fellows for any evil consequences of his acts, and, since the moral law is social law, he has moral responsibility. Society has just as much right to protect itself from breaches of those laws which we call moral—such real moral laws as truthfulness and justice—as it has against breaches of common law. To do so it can use the system of reward and punishment which we call praise and blame. We praise or blame the act, because of its consequences. We know quite well that there was no free will in it.
Society has every right to smile encouragement or frown its disapproval.
The third, developed phase of sacrificial worship which, in the form of the Eucharist, Christians consider the epitome of an advanced religion, was already old at the time of Christ. The ancient Egyptians annually celebrated the death and resurrection of their god and saviour Osiris by eating the consecrated wafer which had become flesh of his flesh—the body of Osiris—symbolically eating their god as the Christians do. Bread and wine were brought to the temples as offerings.
The ancient Greeks from at least 600 BC had similar mysteries of their own, the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein they celebrated the death and resurrection of the goddess Kore and partook of certain sacraments. These were offered by the pagan Athenians in honour of Ceres, the goddess of corn. She was supposed to have given her flesh to eat, and Iacchus, the god of wine, his blood to drink.
The Essenes, or Therapeutae, whose Jewish God had many features of Mithras, the Persian Sun-god, yielding the characteristics of the second person in the Trinity, took into the Christian church the idea of the Eucharist along with baptism and other pagan rites. Introduced into Rome separately by the Persian magi, Mithraic eucharistic mysteries were celebrated in a cave. According to the Rev R Taylor: Many of the forms of expression in the Christian solemnity are precisely the same as those that appertained to the pagan rite. The pagan priest dismissed his congregation with the blessing: The Lord be with you—which was retained by the medieval Catholic church as the Latin Dominus vobiscum and is still sufficiently universally familiar today that it could be mocked in the film Star Wars as The Force be with you.
Surely though we have now moved beyond the stage of having to offer sacrifice, however stylised, to a selfish god for selfish reasons. Once the idea of an anthropomorphic god is rejected the need for lip-worship disappears—there is no longer any jealousy or vindictiveness to placate because anything of a cosmic scale must be far beyond such petty emotions.
Instead, let us behold the magnificence of the universe, contemplate the beauty and marvels of Nature, inspect the harmony of her laws, consider the miracle of life and our own existence and we are rightly filled with wonder and awe. Our devotion to Nature is the only worship that can be offered to a power that is greater than ourselves. As far as we know it is not sentient but it lives, it evolves, it nurtures, it dies. It deserves our respect and it is our own best interests to harvest the resources it provides us with care. H Spencer wrote: Worship is not a mere respect, but a respect proved by the sacrifice of time, thought, and labour… not a mere lip homage, but a homage expressed in actions. Time, thought, labour and actions have to be sacrificed not to tear the world apart in seeking a precious jewel, but to ensure that the world is preserved while the jewel is being sought.
Surely we can now see that the Christian religion has deluded us into thinking we are akin to gods when we are simply sophisticated beasts, simply another of Nature's creations and a parasitic one. We can destroy this little corner of the universe if we wish and ourselves with it, but nature can replace us. Time is no object. Let us reject the old god which dehumanises us with symbolic human sacrifice and cannibalism and embrace Nature in a partnership which might allow us to build heaven on earth truly.
Baptism by immersion or sprinkling, for the remission of sin, is found in widely separated countries on the face of the earth and was yet another pagan rite adopted by Christians. With both pagans and Christians, the ordinance gave full expiation from original sin, restoring the initiate instantly to original purity.
Baptism was practised by the Brahmans, Buddhists, the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans. The Zoroastrians and Mithraists of Persia and, it seems, the Essenes marked the sign of the cross on the forehead of the initiates. Adults, initiated in the sacred rites of Bacchus, were regenerated by baptism. Fire was used in many instances as well as water, the Romans using both, and baptism by fire is still practised in the East. This might be the implication of Matthew 3:11, where John says: I baptize you with water; but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.
If we lack something in our daily lives which we cannot provide by the means available to us, we have no reason to believe, and no right to expect, that the laws of Nature will, or can, be upset in our favour, to the possible detriment and inconvenience of others. All supposed response to prayer can be traced to happenstance or probability and the inner strength that we can find within ourselves when it becomes essential to tap it. Nevertheless this seems to have been enough to make prayer a superstitious practice which has survived from ancient times.
Prayer to a superior power, requires the belief that it possesses the human attributes of hearing, love and compassion, in short, in it having a personality. The planets were thought to influence events and it was natural that primitive people should appeal to them to solve their problems. Consequently the planets became gods with different personalities of their own, and different traits to command. Chief of all the planets were the sun and the moon and in most mythologies the sun became the material face of the chief god and the moon the material face of the chief goddess.
Later the idea of monotheism was preferred, god becoming the absolute God with no material face, inscrutable, omniscient and infinite. Unfortunately since human beings are finite creatures it follows that whatever we do is infinitesimal to an infinite being. The truth is that an infinite God simply would not notice what humans were doing. It seems, no relations can exist between the finite and the infinite.
Furthermore, though Christians have immense belief in the power of praying to their invisible God, their Bible refutes it: all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing, and that He doeth according to His will among them, and none can stay His hand (Daniel 4:35), and For I the Lord change not (Malachi 3:6). The Bible says God does just as he likes and nothing can change him. Like the laws of Nature, He is immutable. What then can possibly be the use praying to Him? Nothing except to strengthen the power of the priesthood over their flocks. Though Christians seem to believe that God can hear their own private prayers, they believe also that He can hear better if prayers are metaphorically shouted by being said en masse, and that He can hear better still when the prayer comes from or is conducted by one of His vicars on earth, the priests.
Yet deliberately trying to attract almighty God's attention through prayer should be unnecessary. An infinitely aware being already knows your needs as Psalm 44:21 confirms: God knows the secrets of the heart. So the Christian Holy Book, the word of God himself, tells us clearly that your needs and woes are already known to God and nothing you do can change His mind. So, why pray to Him? If you are praying, you are praying to try to change God's mind about something He has already decided, otherwise he will have already responded and there would have been no need for prayer.
Those who are prayed for most are people in the public eye, sovereigns and other heads of States, nobility and clergy who are prayed for publicly. Are our nobility and statesmen endowed with greater divine grace, wisdom, or understanding for the prayers that go up to this effect? Are the clergy of the State church, who are supposed to be called to the ministry by the Holy Ghost, protected more than anyone else against temptation, immorality, infectious diseases, sickness, pollution or drowning? Any benefits they have come from better medical attention procured by their wealth not from the Sunday prayers of the congregations.
Does prayer protect us from calamitous floods? Is it not proverbial that prayers for rain, in seasons of drought, have no effect? Were the lives of Presidents Lincoln or Kennedy, saved because of the national prayers that went up for them? No, they died because they had been pierced by bullets.
Does the history of earthquakes and other misfortunes due to natural phenomena, show that praying people are saved from danger, while the non-praying ones suffer? When earthquakes occur are churches less likely to be flattened than whorehouses because lots of good people prayed from them often?
When people pray for a sick loved one who recovers, they thank God for answering their prayers. When the sick person does not recover but dies, the relatives and friends pray for solace and again find comfort in God answering their prayers. There are only two possible outcomes, recovery or death and in each case Christians see the beneficent hand of god. No wonder the priests have always enjoyed such power!
Furthermore, this life is to Christians a vale of woe, from which people are glad to depart and see the face of God at death. What then is the purpose of praying to God that anyone should be prevented in joining their maker when they are ill? Prayer for sick people to recover from illness when the bliss of paradise awaits them is difficult to comprehend.