ndividual who expects to secure what he wants thru the medium
of a celestial patron cannot conceive the God of Justice nor can he
really be a useful member of society.

Favor, propitiation, exception, protection, grace, preference,
predilection, are incompatible with what a God should be, with the
Ideal of civilization, with the supreme aspiration of humanity which
is Justice.

Disastrous Results

Those who believe in the absurd miracle (milagreria absurda), protector
of the fools, accomplice of the lazy, of the gamblers, of thieves,
of all who, thru its means, seek to secure what they desire--those
are the criminals that fill our jails and who die in the gallows;
those are the ones, who, armed with their anting-anting, talisman,
rosary, scapulary, bones of saints, or shark's teeth, fight with
the police, commit outrages, upset order, confident in their triumph
because of the protection of their celestial pintakasi. Such is the
product not of the schools without god but of god without schools,
impossible and paradoxical, whose power manifests itself in capricious
methods and in the exercise of prestidigitation. Those individuals
are in truth the natural products of that superstition preached,
diffused, and presented to the ignorance of people who have come
to the point of fearing neither God nor devil and who know that the
infernal punishment only is meted to him who does not wear a rosary
around his neck or does not confide in a pintakasi, who guarantees
eternal salvation because God does not permit that the worshiper of
one of His devotees be condemned.

What kind of citizen can an individual be in society who laughs at
punishment using the easy means of a celestial lawyer. How can terrors
of hell infuse fear in him when he knows that thru the medium of a
powerful lawyer, God finds himself obliged (forzado) to pardon him. And
when a man knows the way of evading divine justice, it is clear that,
in order for him to escape human justice, he will resort to appealing
to the mercy of the judge, to evade compliance with the law, to the
non-fulfillment of any duty, and to live only to enjoy his rights;
he will resort, in dealing with human authorities, to the use of the
same methods of propitiation, adulation, prevarication, humiliation,
and deception which dominated the same God and triumphed over the
power of the devil!

Never will it be possible for a superstitious man, especially if he is
of the type that we h