The New Gospel

Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. 

The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father.  Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by signs of their remorse.  The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life … Its [religion’s] technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner — which presupposes an intimidation of intelligence.  At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis.

When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom toward those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence.

I can muster no sympathy whatever for the misguided piety that makes a national religion from a piece of the wall of Herod, and for its sake challenges the feelings of the local natives.

The past, the tradition of the race and of the people, lives on in ideologies of the super-ego, and yields only slowly to the influences of the present and to new changes; and so long as it operates through the super-ego it plays a powerful part in human life, independently of economic conditions.  

One of these exceptional few calls himself my friend [Romain Rolland] in his letters to me.  I had sent him my small book that treats religion as an illusion, and he answered that he entirely agreed with my judgment upon religion, but that he was sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of religious sentiments.  This, he says, consists of a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people.  It is a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic.”  This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems … 

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness … Many highly respected individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them … It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and a cruelty, too.