A Science of Social Control

Extract

The trouble about discussing religion is that most of us are against it. Since Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo bullied into saying that the world was flat, rational and scientific thought about man and the world has known its enemy: God and the priests and all their works, the whole black cloud of canting obscurantists who have clogged understanding and persecuted knowledge for the sake of kings, popes, proprietors or other baleful fatherfigures clinging to their privilege and comfort at other mens'expense. If the liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century did not go as far as Marx and Engels in affirming that “law, morality, religion are to (the proletarian) so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk just so many bourgeois interests,” they said much the same in their own context. They saw Christianity as a deplorable mystification, at best a mere vestige of primitive awe in face of the unknown, at worst an ingenious racket. Wrestling with it, they called for aid to “primitive religion.” There they found “a weapon which could, they thought, be used with deadly effect against Christianity,” since “if primitive religion could be explained away as an intellectual aberration, as a mirage induced by emotional stress, or by its social function,” so too could “higher religion” and the path thereby cleared to that extent of historical lumber.