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Title: The Philosophy of Atheism Author: Emma Goldman Date: 1916 Language: en Topics: atheist, religion Source: Retrieved on March 15th, 2009 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/goldman/philosophyatheism.html][dwardmac.pitzer.edu]]. Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=639, retrieved on July 4, 2020. Notes: First published in February 1916 in the Mother Earth journal.
To give an adequate exposition of the Philosophy of Atheism, it would be
necessary to go into the historical changes of the belief in a Deity,
from its earliest beginning to the present day. But that is not within
the scope of the present paper. However, it is not out of place to
mention, in passing, that the concept God, Supernatural Power, Spirit,
Deity, or in whatever other term the essence of Theism may have found
expression, has become more indefinite and obscure in the course of time
and progress. In other words, the God idea is growing more impersonal
and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand
natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively
correlates human and social events.
God, today, no longer represents the same forces as in the beginning of
His existence; neither does He direct human destiny with the same Iron
hand as of yore. Rather does the God idea express a sort of
spiritualistic stimulus to satisfy the fads and fancies of every shade
of human weakness. In the course of human development the God idea has
been forced to adapt itself to every phase of human affairs, which is
perfectly consistent with the origin of the idea itself.
The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man,
unable to understand the phenomena of nature and harassed by them, saw
in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed
against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all
superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.
Very aptly, the world-renowned atheist and anarchist, Michael Bakunin,
says in his great work God and the State: “All religions, with their
gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their
saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained
the full development and full possession of their faculties.
Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but the mirage in which
man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovered his own image, but
enlarged and reversed — that is divinised. The history of religions, of
the birth, grandeur, and the decline of the gods who had succeeded one
another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of
the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind. As fast as they
discovered, in the course of their historically progressive advance,
either in themselves or in external nature, a quality, or even any great
defect whatever, they attributed it to their gods, after having
exaggerated and enlarged it beyond measure, after the manner of
children, by an act of their religious fancy... With all due respect,
then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers,
politicians or poets: the idea of God implies the abdication of human
reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty,
and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and
practice.”
Thus the God idea, revived, readjusted, and enlarged or narrowed,
according to the necessity of the time, has dominated humanity and will
continue to do so until man will raise his head to the sunlit day,
unafraid and with an awakened will to himself. In proportion as man
learns to realize himself and mold his own destiny theism becomes
superfluous. How far man will be able to find his relation to his
fellows will depend entirely upon how much he can outgrow his dependence
upon God.
Already there are indications that theism, which is the theory of
speculation, is being replaced by Atheism, the science of demonstration;
the one hangs in the metaphysical clouds of the Beyond, while the other
has its roots firmly in the soil. It is the earth, not heaven, which man
must rescue if he is truly to be saved.
The decline of theism is a most interesting spectacle, especially as
manifested in the anxiety of the theists, whatever their particular
brand. They realize, much to their distress, that the masses are growing
daily more atheistic, more anti-religious; that they are quite willing
to leave the Great Beyond and its heavenly domain to the angels and
sparrows; because more and more the masses are becoming engrossed in the
problems of their immediate existence.
How to bring the masses back to the God idea, the spirit, the First
Cause, etc. — that is the most pressing question to all theists.
Metaphysical as all these questions seem to be, they yet have a very
marked physical background. Inasmuch as religion, “Divine Truth,”
rewards and punishments are the trade-marks of the largest, the most
corrupt and pernicious, the most powerful and lucrative industry in the
world, not excepting the industry of manufacturing guns and munitions.
It is the industry of befogging the human mind and stifling the human
heart. Necessity knows no law; hence the majority of theists are
compelled to take up every subject, even if it has no bearing upon a
deity or revelation or the Great Beyond. Perhaps they sense the fact
that humanity is growing weary of the hundred and one brands of God.
How to raise this dead level of theistic belief is really a matter of
life and death for all denominations. Therefore their tolerance; but it
is a tolerance not of understanding; but of weakness. Perhaps that
explains the efforts fostered in all religious publications to combine
variegated religious philosophies and conflicting theistic theories into
one denominational trust. More and more, the various concepts “of the
only tree God, the only pure spirit, — the only true religion” are
tolerantly glossed over in the frantic effort to establish a common
ground to rescue the modern mass from the “pernicious” influence of
atheistic ideas.
It is characteristic of theistic “tolerance” that no one really cares
what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.
To accomplish this end, the crudest and vulgarest methods are being
used. Religious endeavor meetings and revivals with Billy Sunday as
their champion-methods which must outrage every refined sense, and which
in their effect upon the ignorant and curious often tend to create a
mild state of insanity not infrequently coupled with eroto-mania. All
these frantic efforts find approval and support from the earthly powers;
from the Russian despot to the American President; from Rockefeller and
Wanamaker down to the pettiest business man. They blow that capital
invested in Billy Sunday, the Y.M.C.A., Christian Science, and various
other religious institutions will return enormous profits from the
subdued, tamed, and dull masses.
Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils,
heaven and hell; reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into
obedience, meekness and contentment. The truth is that theism would have
lost its footing long before this but for the combined support of Mammon
and power. How thoroughly bankrupt it really is, is being demonstrated
in the trenches and battlefields of Europe today.
Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and
goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods
remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the
poverty, squalor and misery of people of China. Buddha remains
undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and
starvation of outraged Hindus; Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of
Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians
who are butchering each other.
The burden of all song and praise “unto the Highest” has been that God
stands for justice and mercy. Yet injustice among men is ever on the
increase; the outrages committed against the masses in this country
alone would seem enough to overflow the very heavens. But where are the
gods to make an end to all these horrors, these wrongs, this inhumanity
to man? No, not the gods, but MAN must rise in his mighty wrath. He,
deceived by all the deities, betrayed by their emissaries, he, himself,
must undertake to usher in justice upon the earth.
The philosophy of Atheism expresses the expansion and growth of the
human mind. The philosophy of theism, if we can call it philosophy, is
static and fixed. Even the mere attempt to pierce these mysteries
represents, from the theistic point of view, non-belief in the
all-embracing omnipotence, and even a denial of the wisdom of the divine
powers outside of man. Fortunately, however, the human mind never was,
and never can be, bound by fixities. Hence it is forging ahead in its
restless march towards knowledge and life. The human mind is realizing
“that the universe is not the result of a creative fiat by some divine
intelligence, out of nothing, producing a masterpiece chaotic in perfect
operation,” but that it is the product of chaotic forces operating
through aeons of time, of clashes and cataclysms, of repulsion and
attraction crystalizing through the principle of selection into what the
theists call, “the universe guided into order and beauty.” As Joseph
McCabe well points out in his Existence of God: “a law of nature is not
a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed
facts — a ‘bundle of facts.’ Things do not act in a particular way
because there is a law, but we state the ‘law’ because they act in that
way.”
The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any
metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual,
real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities,
as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean
contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
It may seem a wild paradox, and yet it is pathetically true, that this
real, visible world and our life should have been so long under the
influence of metaphysical speculation, rather than of physical
demonstrable forces. Under the lash of the theistic idea, this earth has
served no other purpose than as a temporary station to test man’s
capacity for immolation to the will of God. But the moment man attempted
to ascertain the nature of that will, he was told that it was utterly
futile for “finite human intelligence” to get beyond the all-powerful
infinite will. Under the terrific weight of this omnipotence, man has
been bowed into the dust — a will-less creature, broken and sweating in
the dark. The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from
the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the
beyond. Again and again the light of reason has dispelled the theistic
nightmare, but poverty, misery and fear have recreated the phantoms —
though whether old or new, whatever their external form, they differed
little in their essence. Atheism, on the other hand, in its philosophic
aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but
it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic
principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as
pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a
supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon
it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon
humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism
is fighting with all its power.
The philosophy of Atheism has its root in the earth, in this life; its
aim is the emancipation of the human race from all God-heads, be they
Judaic, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhistic, Brahministic, or what not.
Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods;
nothing but pain and persecution have been man’s lot since gods began.
There is but one way out of this blunder: Man must break his fetters
which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can
begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new
world upon earth.
Only after the triumph of the Atheistic philosophy in the minds and
hearts of man will freedom and beauty be realized. Beauty as a gift from
heaven has proved useless. It will, however, become the essence and
impetus of life when man learns to see in the earth the only heaven fit
for man. Atheism is already helping to free man from his dependence upon
punishment and reward as the heavenly bargain-counter for the poor in
spirit.
Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice,
honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon
fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued
partly with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth,
justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring
proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived,
fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity
are not, conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and
interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and
material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating,
even as life itself. To what heights the philosophy of Atheism may yet
attain, no one can prophesy. But this much can already be predicted:
only by its regenerating fire will human relations be purged from the
horrors of the past
Thoughtful people are beginning to realize that moral precepts, imposed
upon humanity through religious terror, have become stereotyped and have
therefore lost all vitality. A glance at life today, at its
disintegrating character, its conflicting interests with their hatreds,
crimes, and greed, suffices to prove the sterility of theistic morality.
Man must get back to himself before he can learn his relation to his
fellows. Prometheus chained to the Rock of Ages is doomed to remain the
prey of the vultures of darkness. Unbind Prometheus, and you dispel the
night and its horrors.
Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest
affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose,
and beauty.