of the fantastic
inventions which terror and longing have wrung out of the tortured
soul of man. Here are mysteries and solemnities, charms and spells,
illuminations and transmigrations, angels and demons, guides, controls
and masters--all of which it is permissible to refuse to support with
gifts. Let the reader then go to James Freeman Clarke's "Ten Great
Religions", and realize how many billions of humans have lived and
died in the solemn certainty that their welfare on earth and in heaven
depended upon their accepting certain ideas and practicing certain
rites, all mutually exclusive and incompatible, each damning the
others and the followers of the others. So gradually the realization
will come to him that the test of a doctrine about life and its
welfare must be something else than the fact that one was born to it.

#The Great Fear#

It was not the fault of primitive man that he was ignorant, nor that
his ignorance made him a prey to dread. The traces of his mental
suffering will inspire in us only pity and sympathy; for Nature is a
grim school-mistress, and not all her lessons have yet been learned.
We have a right to scorn and anger only when we see this dread being
diverted from its true function, a stimulus to a search for knowledge,
and made into a means of clamping down ignorance upon the mind of the
race. That this has been the deliberate policy of institutionalized
Religion no candid student can deny.

The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or
modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it--and that
it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived. "The
fear of divine anger", says Prof. Jastrow, "runs as an undercurrent
through the entire religious literature of Babylonia and Assyria." In
the words of Tabi-utul-Enlil, King of ancient Nippur:

Who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven?
The plan of a god is full of mystery--who can understand it?
He who is still alive at evening is dead the next morning.
In an instant he is cast into grief, in a moment he is crushed.

And that cry might be duplicated from almost any page of the Hebrew
scriptures: the only difference being that the Hebrews combined all
their fears into one Great Fear. "The fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom," we are told by Solomon of the thousand wives;
and the Psalmist repeats it. "Dominion and fear are with Him," cries
Job. "How then can any ma