The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

    We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate’er shall be,
Don’t let anyone bomb me.
Keep our Empire undismembered
    Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,
Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
    Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.
Think of what our Nation stands for,
    Books from Boots and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
    Democracy and proper drains.
Lord, put beneath Thy special care
One-eighty-nine Cadogan Square.
Although dear Lord I am a sinner,
    I have done no major crime;
Now I’ll come to Evening Service
    Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown.
And do not let my shares go down.
I will labour for Thy Kingdom,
    Help our lads to win the war,
Send white feathers to the cowards
    Join the Women’s Army Corps,
Then wash the Steps around Thy Throne
In the Eternal Safety Zone Now I feel a little better,
    What a treat to hear Thy word,
Where the bones of leading statesmen,
    Have so often been interr’d.
And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
Because I have a luncheon date.

CHAPMAN COHEN Monism and Religion

I must include one of my personal favorites: a little-known champion of the Freethought movement. Born in 1868 and self-educated, Chapman Cohen (1868–1954) became the third president of the National Secular Society in Britain: the organization founded after Charles Bradlaugh had been denied his seat in Parliament for refusing to swear a religious oath of allegiance. Cohen kept his private life close, and little is known about him apart from his refusal to join a separate secular movement for Jews. His monument is “Essays In Freethinking,” from which this selection is drawn.

It was a sound instinct that led the religious world to brand the Pantheism of Spinoza as Atheism. Equally sound was the judgment of Charles Bradlaugh in resting his Atheism upon a Monistic interpretation of nature. Every intelligible Theism involves a dualism or a pluralism, while every non-theism is as inevitably driven, sooner or later, to a monism. With an instinct sharpened by perpetual conflict, the Churches saw that, no matter the terminology in which the monism is disguised, its final outcome is Atheism. For the essence of the Atheistic position is not the establishment of any particular theory of matter, or force, or volition, but that, given a first principle as a starting- point, all else follows as a matter of the most rigid necessity. It thus dispenses with interference, or, to use a favourite mystifying expression of Sir Oliver Lodge, guidance, at any step of the cosmic process. To call the monism advocated a spiritual monism does not alter the fact; it only disguises it from superficial observers and shallow thinkers. Spiritual and material are mere words, and words, as we have been told, are the counters of wise men and the money of fools. It is the thing, the conception, that matters, and the mechanical conception of cosmic evolution is Atheism, under whatever form it may be disguised.

Monism—too much emphasis cannot be placed upon this truth—admits of no breaks, allows for no interference, no guidance, no special providence. From star mist to planet, on through protoplasm to man, it asserts the existence of an unbroken sequence. If there are any gaps they are in our knowledge, not in things themselves. The promise and potency of all subsequent phenomena is, for Monism, contained in the primitive substance, whatever its nature may be. Every advance in scientific research is based, tacitly or avowedly, upon an acceptance of this belief.

What place does the individual hold in such a conception of things? Clearly he can be no exception to the general principle of causation. The same principle that accounts for the development of the species as a biological phenomenon must also explain the individual as a sociological or psychological product. Either the individual is the necessary product of his antecedents or he is not. If he is, we have merely another phase of a general problem, only in a highly complex form. If he is not, then we have an absolute creation of something, a reintroduction of a disguised supernaturalism, and our scientific principle breaks down. The greatest genius, the most striking individual the world has ever seen, forms no exception to this universal principle of causation. Indeed, when the believer throws at the head of the Atheist the names of Shakespeare or Beethoven, and asks how can natural processes explain their existence, he is needlessly confusing the issue. First, because the problem of explaining the existence of the genius is no greater, fundamentally, than explaining the existence of the fool. Show me how to explain the complex processes that result in the existence of a penny-a-liner, and I will explain the existence of the author of Hamlet. The problem is substantially the same whichever we take. And, secondly, to take either the genius or the fool as a finished project, and study him in isolation, is emphatically not the way to set to work. We could not explain a man, or an animal, or a plant by such a method. Evolution ought to at least have taught us that the explanation of a thing is to be sought in its history. Behind the greatest musician and behind the greatest poet there lies that long history of the race leading to the rude rhythmical howlings and gutteral ejaculations of the primitive savage, without which, as a starting-point, neither poet nor musician would have existed. The greatest and the least of men are links in a chain of being, and can neither separate themselves from all that has gone before nor from that which will come after them.

I have put the claims of a Monistic conception of nature as strongly and as plainly as possible, in order to meet fairly a challenge raised by a prominent clergyman, in a recent issue of a religious weekly. We are told that the issue today lies between Monism and Christianity, and Monism is ruled out of court on account of its supposed depreciation of the individual. Even were this depreciation of the individual admitted it might still be argued that the real value of any theory depends ultimately upon its truth. The argument from consequences is only valid if it can be shown that these are in obvious conflict with facts. In that case, we should have to admit that our first principles were faulty, and revise them accordingly. Facts are facts, and sooner or later we are compelled to deal with them. Theories may ignore them, but the consequences follow just the same. It is not merely our duty to face the facts, it is to our interest to do so. All life is an adaptation of organism to environment, and all healthy mental life is the expression of a harmony between our ideas of facts and the facts themselves. And without posing as a philosophical Gradgrind, one may confidently assert that the man or the philosophy that ignores facts will sooner or later come to grief.

The article in question is headed, “Is the Individual Doomed?” and the answer is that he is if Monism prevails. With Christianity, we are told, the individual is everything; with Monism the individual is nothing. The Christian view