lel with your richest
development; I still lead your highest thought; none of my teachings
shock your sense of justice." Not one.

It is faith in "revelation" that makes a mother tear from her arms a
tender, helpless child and throw it in the Ganges--to appease the gods!
It is a religion of faith that teaches the despicable principle of
caste--and that religion was invented by those who profited by caste. It
was our religion of faith that sustained the institution of slavery--and
it had for its originators dealers in human flesh. It is the Mormon's
religion of faith, his belief in the Bible and in the wisdom of Solomon
and David, that enables the monster of polygamy to flaunt its power and
its filth in the face of the morality of the nineteenth century, which
has outgrown the Jehovah of the Jews.

Every religion must be tried at the bar of human justice, and stand or
fall by the verdict there. It has no right to crouch behind the theory
of "inspiration" and demand immunity from criticism; and yet that is
just what every one of them does. They all claim that we have no right
to use our reason on their inventions. But evil cannot be made good by
revelation, and good cannot be made evil by persecution.

A "revelation" that teaches us to trample on purity, or bids us despise
beauty--that gives power to vice or crushes the weak--is an evil. The
dogma that leads us to ignore our humanity, that asks us to throw away
our pleasures, that tells us to be miserable here in order that we may
be happy hereafter, is a doctrine built upon a false philosophy, cruel
in its premises and false in its promises. And the religion that teaches
us that believing Vice is holier than unbelieving Virtue is a grievous
wrong. Credulity is not a substitute for morality. Belief is not a
question of right or wrong, it is a question of mental organization. Man
cannot believe what he will, he must believe what he must. If his brain
tells him one thing and his catechism tells him another, his brain ought
to win. You don't leave your umbrella at home during a storm, simply
because the almanac calls for a clear day.

A religion that teaches a mother that she can be happy in heaven, with
her children in hell--in everlasting torment--strikes at the very roots
of family affection. It makes the human heart a stone. Love that means
no more than that, is not love at all. No heart that has ever loved can
see the object of its affection in pain and itself be hap