The New Gospel

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others.  Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty.  At the crossroads of the choice between “I know” and “They say,” he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think.  Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.  … From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings.  His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness …

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed it belongs to your neighbors — between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth.  And no one came to you to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.  Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force.  Both sides agreed that no rational morality it possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason — that in reason there is no reason to be moral.

I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. 

They [Christian evangelists] point at the torture rack to which they’ve tied him [man], the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.  They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other.  They have taught him that his body and consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other.

Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean they are willing to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. … Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence.  They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect.  They make their emotions a tool for perceiving reality.  They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts.  An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire.  He says: “It is, therefore I want it.”  They say: “I want it, therefore it is.”

Accept the fact that you are not omniscient … that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.  In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.

Whatever he was — that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love — he was not a man.

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.  If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral.  To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality.  To hold a man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature.  To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice.  To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason.  To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched.  Yet that is the root of your code.

Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end.  Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice.  It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof.  It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good; the good is that which he is not … his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts … The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin. 

If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking. … If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. 

So you think money is the root of all evil? … Have you ever asked what is the root of money?  Money is a tool of exchange which can’t exist unless there are goods produced by men able to produce them.  Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value … So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another — their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.