rcion. 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 supernatural