The Necessity of Atheism

weapons. The supernaturalist's armamentarium of God, Bible, Heaven,
Hell, Soul, Immortality, Sin, The Fall and Redemption of Man, Prayer,
Creed, and Dogma, leave as much impression on the mind of intelligent
man as would an arrow against a battleship. And the comparison is apt,
the supernaturalists have made full use of force, be it in physical
warfare or in mental coercion. The freethinker has as much use for
physical force and war as he has for mental coercion; both are abhorrent
to him.

_Supernaturalism vs. Secularism_--that, and that alone is the field of
argument. The supernaturalist, be he the fundamentalist of whatever
denomination, or the more advanced modernist, is as tenaciously clinging
to the transcendental, to revelation, to the infallibility of the Bible,
if not in all respects at least in some (although this is a
contradiction _per se_), to the interdisposition of a deity in the
affairs of mankind, as were his ancestors of five hundred years ago. In
these aspects as well as in the armamentarium enumerated above, the
supernaturalists are agreed and are making their last stand.

The secularists, the opinion of the theists to the contrary, are also
agreed. It matters not what a man calls his mental process; be he
infidel, sceptic, rationalist, agnostic, or atheist; he is firm in the
conviction that religions of all varieties are rapidly sinking into the
limbo of all other ancient superstitions. To him it is but a matter of
time for the inevitable crumbling and disappearance of these
superstitions, and the time involved is directly proportional to the
ease and rapidity with which scientific knowledge is disseminated to men
who have the mental capacity to understand the value of this knowledge
and its utter destruction of all forms of supernaturalism. When man
becomes fully cognizant of the fact that all the knowledge acquired by
the human race has been the result of human inquiry, the result of
reasoning processes, and the exercise of mind alone, then secularism
will have overcome the long night of supernaturalism. And it is this
mental attitude of securalism that proceeds with an ever accelerated
rapidity to overcome the problems that confront humanity by substituting
human inquiry for divine revelation. Thus this attitude of man to
proceed through life dependent only on his own resources will expand and
strengthen his mentality by doing away with the inferiority complex of
the God-idea. This vision of man, the master of his own destinies, the
searcher for truth and the shaper of a better life for the only
existence that he knows anything about, this reliance of _man upon man_,
and without the supposed interference of any god, constitutes atheism in
its broadest and true sense.

Science and reason, the constituents of secularism, are the mortal
enemies of supernaturalism. Secularism, however, is at a disadvantage at
this stage of our mental development, since it is approached only by the
calm light of the intellect. And intellect can but make an appeal to
reason. If the seeds of these appeals fall on the fertile minds of
mentally advanced humanity, they will flourish; if they fall on the
barren ground of creed-bound minds, they take no root. Recognition of
facts and honest deductions are not natural to the human mind. As far as
religious matters are concerned, the vast majority of men have not
reached a mental maturity; they are still in the infantile state where
they have not as yet learned that the sequences of events are not to be
interrupted by their desires. The easier path lies in the giving way to
the unstable emotions. The primitive instincts are for emotion and for
loose imaginings, and these are the provinces of supernaturalism.

Supernaturalism arouses the stupid interests and the brutish passions,
and from these are born the bitter fruits of ignorance and hatred. The
secularist is one in whom the intellect is passionate, and the passions
cold. The supernaturalist on the other hand reverses the order, and in
him the passions are active and the intellect inert. In each man there
dwells a tyrant who creates for him a deity materialized out of these
factors of ignorance and fear. It is science and reason which must
destroy for him this monstrous apparition. But, as yet, there is no
indication that our mental development in relation to social progress
has made the great strides that our purely material progress has made.
The twentieth century man utilizes and enjoys the material benefits of
his century, but his mental progress lies bound and drugged by the
viewpoints of 2000 years ago.

Sir Leslie Stephen has declared, "How much intellect and zeal runs to
waste in the spasmodic efforts of good men to cling to the last fragment
of decaying systems, to galvanize dead formulae into some dim semblance
of life! Society will not improve as it might when those who should be
leaders of progress are staggering backward and forward with their eyes
passionately reverted to the past. Nay, we shall never be duly sensitive
to the miseries and cruelties which make the world a place of torture
for so many, so long as men are encouraged in the name of religion to
look for a remedy, not in fighting against surrounding evils, but in
cultivating aimless contemplations of an imaginary ideal. Much of our
popular religion seems to be expressly directed to deaden our sympathies
with our fellow men by encouraging an indolent optimism; our thoughts of
the other world are used in many forms as an opiate to drug our minds
with indifference to the evils of this; and the last word of half of our
preachers is, 'dream rather than work.'"

There is always a great deal of discrepancy between that which is best
for the gods and that which is best for the individual and for society
in general. One cannot serve man perfectly and the traditional gods as
well. It is, therefore, the contention of freethinkers that if man had
given to the service of man all that he had given to the gods in the
past, our present stage of civilization would be much in advance of
where it is today.

If there is anything in the discussion to follow that may seem
irreverent to the reader, the author wishes to call attention that he
has but presented well substantiated facts. It is not only his opinion