Religion for Infidels

Description

The first part of this book is devoted to a detailed analysis of why, as the author titled many of the chapters, Christianity is “not the thoughtful man’s religion” and actually harmful to European racial interests. As he says in the introduction:

“When examining the answers Christianity gives to the questions man incessantly asks about himself, life and the Universe, it is essential to remember that these answers were made for a remote generation of men whose knowledge, credulity, capacity for criticism and tendency to superstition, bear little resemblance to those of modern civilized people.

“A generation that no longer believes in devils, demons and the demoniacal etiology of disease; cannot see any sense in vicarious punishment, and is therefore unable to take on trust the story of an Omnipotent Deity who could feel appeased and propitiated for the sins committed by beings he has himself created, by the death in agony of his own beloved and only-begotten son — to such a generation, hardly one aspect of the Christian mythology and the supernatural events it includes appears to have even tolerable plausibility, let alone cogency.”

He then moves on in the second section to spell out the desirable virtues of what he sees as a realistic religious approach: a true religion for infidels:

“In view of the harmony of many of its features and of its methods of contacting and of turning to its own account the formative and improvisatory powers of the life forces, it might perhaps be properly termed a ‘natural’ religion; except that, in its observance by humanity, there is a provision in the moral code consistent with its cosmology, that amounts to an unnatural factor, or a factor not found operative in Nature (except possibly precariously, as we have seen, in the influence, of the will to power). The wise and thoughtful infidel will hold the sensible view, now established by scientific psychology, that children are more asocial, more evil, than their seniors, that only when they have been purged of their asocial impulses and appetites can they be regarded as “good” or fit for their place in the community, and, therefore, that man cannot be regarded as born good.. . . the whole of the duties of man in society [is] to promote and defend all those influences and points of view which favour superior and flourishing, and to resist and condemn all those influences and points of view which favour decadent and degenerate, human life. Everything eke denotes a misunderstanding of the proper function of compassion and is a crime against both justice, sanity, good taste and — posterity.