Berman, Harold

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NATURAL VERSUS REVEALED RELIGIONTheir significance in the Mexican situationBY HAROLD BERMANTWO nations, unrelated to each other in blood and ancestry, livingin two widely-separated hemispheres and professing widely-dis-parate faiths—though the both faiths are the offshoots of a commonaboriginal stem, Christianity,—are now engaged in a desperatebattle, the object of which is the shattering of the power of theirrespective churches.The Russians, ever since the Bolshevist Revolution, have beenbusily engaged in fighting the centuries-old oppressive power of theGreek Orthodox church, in closing up the sacred edifices, confiscat-ing their immense landed as well as movable properties, and incurbing the spiritual power of the clergy in general. Even now,after the initial hectic flush of battle and the melodramatic clashof steel in Russia has passed over and its place has been taken by afar less spectacular, less frenzied but none the less effective, ifsilent, grip, Mexico steps into the ring and begins to belay all abouther in the frenzied manner of the Russians of a few years ago.There is this difference between the two, however. Whereasthe Russians avowedly fought as the uncompromising enemiesof all religion, boldly declaring it to be the "the opiate of thepeople," a pernicious habit to be fought and extirpated withoutmercy or compromise, the Mexican officials profess to feel noenmity whatever towards the Christian religion as such, and noteven to the Catholic branch of it as practiced in their country eversince the coming of the white settlers in the wake of Cortez andPizzaro, but are merely trying to shatter the overwhelming politicaland economic powers exercised by the Church over the people ofNATURAL VERSUS REVEALED RELIGION 443Mexico. The struggle thus becomes, strictly speaking, not a religiouswar, a war of the kind that has darkened the skies of Europe on andoff for centuries past—a fight to the finish, between sects andcreeds, each one of them fighting for the adoption of its own inter-pretation of the Christian creed—but rather a struggle between asurviving vestige of the Mediaeval Catholic Church, with its claimsto temporal as well as spiritual powers, and the more modern sys-tem in vogue at the present time in most countries where the respec-tive functions of the two institutions—Church and State—are neverallowed to encroach upon one another.It is inevitable, and practically a foregone conclusion, that theultimate victory will be on the side of those who are fighting forfreedom,on the side of those who represent the State in the present,much belated, battle. The Church will, sooner or later, be obligedto yield, if not gracefully then shamefacedl}- and in obedience tooverwhelming force ; not so much to physical force, as to the forceof public opinion and a growing sentiment of modernism. Hut \ieldit must, its battle having been lost several centuries ago, at the timewhen the Renaissance first came knocking at the door of theChristian nations of Europe. It has been a battle of attritionbetween the two ever since. The place and the role of each in thescheme of existence simply had to be properly deniarked and clearlydefined. One must not encroach upon the other's province ordominion.One detail in this momentous drama now being enacted beforeour very eyes on that country-wide stage has, however, generallyescaped attention. The great mass of the people of ^lexico, as inmost Central and South American countries, are Indian. The mostof them are pure-bred Indians, the aboriginal heritage strongin their blood, but speaking the Spanish language and worshippingan Hispano-Catholic God. And it is these very masses—Indianalmost all of them—who have so solemnly sworn "to shed their lastdrop of blood in defense of the sacred shrine of the \'irgin ofGuadalupe," as well as all other shrines, churches and monasteriesthat dot every highway and byway of ^Mexico.When one, however, opens the books relating to the history ofthe conquest and the settlement of ^lexico by the white men, onefinds recorded in them the intensit\- and the determined obstinacy ofthe ancestors of these very Indians' resistance to the forcible adop-444 THE OPEN COURTtion of Christianity. And he learns also that they yielded only, whenat all, to the convincing arguments of the stake and faggot and thetorture chamber. In other words, we find that their ancestors wereready to shed their blood to the last drop in their fight against thatvery faith, even as their successors in the present day are ready toconsecrate it now by their Martyrdom. And then, and quite involun-tarily, a thought—a destructive thought, let us admit—enters ourmind, and we ask ourselves : "what is the nature of that, so-called.Revealed and Absolute, truth for which men of all ages stood readyto shed their own and other people's blood?" For, we must remem-ber that not only were the representatives of each and every religionready to shed the blood of the followers of all other faiths, but thateven the followers of each sect were ready to fight to the bitter endthe members of other sects within that very religion, aside from theoccasional seeking of their own martyrdom for truth's sake. Eachone of them fought for his own conviction, for his own conceptionof absolute truth. And yet we are aware that only one of them—ifany—could be true, in the dogmatic sense. Only one set ofdogmas, at the most, could be true, all others being Ipso facto afigment of the Founder's imagination, the result of a certain person'sor group's environment, early education or what not. And we mustalso remember that when people fought the bloody wars of religionthey did not most assuredly fight for ethical principles or conceptsas such, but for dogmas pure and simple. When the Missionarygoes forth to preach his faith in strange lands, it's dogma that hebrings, while ethics are only incidentals. It's faith that gives him zealto suffer and preach, "Believe this," he says in effect, "Andlive among us in peace and comfort and be molested by no one, hereand in the world to come. Believe otherwise—as you have believedyesterday and the day before—and you shall be put to the torture,handed over to the Executioner, to be tortured and perhaps alsodeprived of your life, and be accursed in this and the coming life".It was belief solely that forms the pith of the argument. AndChristianity, the faith that boasted a greater body of dogma—and afar more difficult one to accept—than any other revealed faith withthe sole possible exception of Buddhism, perforce had to become thepersecuting religion par excellence—the religion of fire and sword,foreign missionary bodies and so forth—in order to carry its gospelto the confines of the earth, bring it to those who didn't receive itNATURAL VERSUS REVEALED RELIGION 445as the inheritance of their fathers, and therefore to be accepted as amatter of course and without any further ado, speculation or inquiry.A dogmaless, or near dogmaless, rehgion, the teachings of Confuciusor Zoroaster for instance, or such as is preached by Gandhi today,saying that "each man, according to his own right manifests thetruth, yet no one manifests the truth completely," needs no Mission-aries and surely no stake and faggots to enforce its belief, allsuch accessories to faith being unthinkable in its case, luhics,and rules of conduct generally, are best inoculated in the young inthe quiet of the schoolroom, by the calm and reasoned discourse, orby the example of one's conduct. There is none of the heat, passionand violence engendered by supernaturalism about it and its content.Not even in the, abstractl}-ixjetical lip-worship rendererl to thespirits of the departed dead, or the homage tendered to the sun orthe sacred fire that characterize either of these religions.The Japanese, it is related, drove the Christian Missionaries, andChristians generally, out of the land a few years after they gavethem permission to come and settle in their land—in the 17thcentury—when they discovered that these soon fell to quarrellingamong themselves on matters of faith, aside from trying to con-vert the natives. Such a procedure having been unknown in Ja|)ansince the coming, many centuries previously, of the early Buddhistpriests, who converted some of the natives to their faith and leftall the rest alone to cultivate their own ancient faith. And theycertainly were right. A belief should either be accepted as a con-vention, as one of the many inherited institutions incidental to thestate of Society in which one is born, bestowed no thought on orspeculation about at all, but taken as a matter of course, as thevery air that one breathes, as one's digestion or blood circulation,and never therefore, forced upon any one who has been bred to otherconventions and forms, or should be discarded altogether when,upon mature deliberation and research, it has been found deficientor senseless, in one or another sense. But to fight over it, andto seek to enforce its practice upon others who have been broughtup to follow and venerate some other convention is about as sensi-ble as to employ the "Holy office" methods in the matter of thepreference of rice to corn-bread or the superior virtue of a chairto a mat for sitting upon, all of these respective customs and prac-tices being rooted in the age-old habit of the jieople that practice446 THE OPEN COURTthem, and, without involving any principle or creed, have becomemore acceptable to them than any other practice, and no more needbe said about it. The theology of a people grew out of its ownpeculiar genius and tveltansshauiing just as its literature, art, food,dress and domestic life did. Either is indigenous to its genius, andtherefore fitting to its peculiar mental and physical make-up.In this connection it is perhaps worth while to recall Hegel'sdefinition of religion as "the knowledge of the divine spirit (inHimself) through the medium of the finite mind" and his divisionof same into several categories, the positive or definite, and theindefinite groups.The classic argument employed on behalf of religious toleranceis the one advanced by Lessing, adapted by him in turn from one ofthe tales of Boccaccio. It tells the story of the man who, on hisdeath-bed, bequeathed to his three sons three rings, all the three ofthem looking alike, the one made of gold, the other two made ofsome base counterfeit metal. The advice implicitly given them bytheir father was not to go to the Jeweler, who, by assaying themand subjecting them to his tests, would render two of the threesons unhappy for life, aside from proving the death-bed deceit oftheir father. But the sons soon fall to quarreling about the re-spective merits of their rings and when they do finally bring theirmutual complaints to Nathan the Wise, being uneasy in mind asto which of them is in possession of the genuine gold ring, he alsoadvises them not to put their rings to the test, but to let doubtpersist for ever. As in the Eighteenth Century, the sceptical,Laisscz Faire Century, this is excellent advice. Let w^ell enoughalone, and do not pry into things that may, and would, makeyou unhappy. Keep your doubts to yourself, and trouble no oneabout them—not even yourself overmuch. The scientific or crit-ical spirit of the Nineteenth Century would ask, "is it honest?"Is it even courageous ? Why should one want to hold on and tocherish a thing about the genuiness of which the worm of doubtis forever gnawing at his heart? And why bequeath such a baubleto one's children, with the injunction to cherish it above all in theworld and to bequeath the same in turn to his own children afterhim? From the standpoint of logic and clear thinking, of intellectualhonesty and courage, this is pure bosh and mental ostrich-play.Man should have the courage to seek out the metaphorical jewelerXATURAL VERSUS REVEALED RELIGION 447and force him, at the point of a gun virtually, to tell one whetherhis ring be gold or some base metal, especially after he had beenrepeatedly told by his mentors for ages and centuries that his veryhappiness and salvation depend upon its being genuine.We are aware, of course, that the wearer of each ring—thepractitioner of each one of the three dominant religions—is sincerelyconvinced in his heart, or at least hopes, that he, and he alone, isin possession of the golden ring (else he would not wear it, andthe religionist would not practice his faith J. But supposing that theirfather had altogether lost the genuine gold ring and persuaded theclever artificer to manufacture three counterfeits in the very image ofthe original ring made by him sometime before and since then becomelost? Supposing that each one of the three brothers was cherishinga base bauble, as the case seems most likely to be with all dogmaticreligions whose root is to be found in man's fear of the supernaturaland the Great Unknown, what then? One hates to think indeed ofthe result of such consistent, and destructive, thought, or of thedeluge of misery that it would bring in its train—if but for a while—to a struggling, squirming humanity after it had waged all the bloodywars on behalf of dogma as well as between the various religioussystems ! The strongest emotion, as well as the one most potent ofgood and evil, would then be gone from the heart of man. And manwould lose his dearest as well as his most cherished hope and illusion.And yet, even as \\m. James has sought to find a more rationalsubstitute for the stimulation and the quickening of the national andindividual pulse furnished by war, so must we find a rational curefor the dogmatic psychosis ; something that is based on a rationalemotion, but on an emotion nevertheless. A purely ethical religion,one based upon the duty of man to his fellow-man and the collectivewelfare of all beings that compose a State, group of states, a nation,or nations could, in due course of time, be brought to that stage ofperfection where it would possess a sufficienc_\- of emotional powerto sway the heart of man, and even to supply that mild opiate thatall religions and national emotions have exerted upon the heart andimagination of man since time immemorial. The only appreciabledifference between the two would be that, whereas the old emotionleads to hatreds and to wars, the new one would bring in its trainthe love of one's neighbor as well as international peace and con-cord, aside from ridding us of quite a parcel of brass rings that448 THE OPEN COURTmasquerade as pure gold. The basic ethical conception and practicesare universal and one the world over, though they may vary some-what in detailed local expression and interpretation. They are oneand indivisible for the entire human race.Could one visualize, if but for a moment, a warless, hatredlessworld, a world freed from all prejudice, from all religious strife,from all fanaticism and misunderstanding and all the evils that theybring in their train, what a glimpse of Paradise would be his ! Yetsuch a paradise could be brought many steps nearer to us if notrealized at once by the weakening of the power of the several dog-matic religions that rule the world today.Rational thought and duty, minus supernaturalism, wouldundoubtedly have hard sailing for a while among the average, amongthe generality of people. Its fight for recognition would be consider-ably augmented by the fact that we live under a Alachine system andCommercial age. The Machine Age, in its initial stages an invaluableaid in developing a negative scepticism in the few superior minds,became in due course of time the constable of "things as they are".It's a Sheriff standing guard with a primed and loaded gun over thedelicate machinery of this great and complex system. The statusquo is its chief aid in being as in growth. But the recognitionwould be bound to come once the greatest and most irksome shackles—Supernaturalism, and tradition in their more deleterious forms-have been thrown off. The human mind would then be far betterequipped to cope with the other evils : the racial and economic bar-riers between man and man and between nation and nation.

Natural Versus Revealed Religion.

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Natural Versus Revealed Religion.

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