Book Description

Where is the necessity for imposing our personal views upon others who must be allowed to possess as good a faculty of discrimination and judgment as we believe ourselves to be endowed with? It is difficult to obliterate innate differences of mental perceptions and faculties, let alone to reconcile them by bringing under one standard the endless varieties of human nature and thought. No attempt toward engrafting our views and beliefs on individuals, whose mental and intellectual capacities differ from ours as one variety or species of plants differs from another, will ever be successful. Nor we will ever be able prove our love to our fellow man by depriving him of his divine prerogatives — those of an untrammelled liberty of reason, right of conscience, and self-reliance. The religion of love and charity is built upon the gigantic holocaust of the faithful, fuelled by the illegitimate desire to impose a universal belief in Christ. Where is that creed that has ever surpassed it in bloodthirstiness and cruelty, in intolerance, in papal bulls, and the damnation of all other religions? Genuine morality does not rest with the profession of any particular creed or faith, least of all with belief in gods or a God. No matter how sincere and ardent the faith of a theist, unless he gives precedence in his thoughts first to the benefit that accrues from a moral course of action to his brother, and then only thinks of himself (if at all), he will remain at best a pious egotist. Theism and atheism grow and develop together our reasoning powers, and become either fortified or weakened by reflection or deduction of evidence. Why should not men imagine that they can drink of the cup of vice with impunity when one half of the population is offered to purchase absolution for its sins for a paltry sum of money? The more a child feels sure of his parents love for him, the easier he feels to break his father’s commands. One ought to despise that virtue which prudence and fear alone direct. We have therefore no right to be influencing our neighbours’ opinions upon purely transcendental and unprovable questions, which are speculations of our emotional nature, for none of us is infallible. Opinions are never static: they are amenable to change by reason and experience. By stirring up religious hatred, propagandism and conversion are the fertile seeds of cruelty and crimes against humanity. Where is that wise and infallible man who can show to another man what, or who, should be his ideal? The most fragrant rose has often the sharpest thorns. And it is the flowers of the thistle, when pounded and made up into an ointment, that will cure the wounds made by her cruel thorns the best. For all its beauty, it is an ungrateful task to seek to engraft the rose upon the thistle, since the rose will lose its fragrance, both plants will be deformed, and become a monstrous hybrid. Theosophy is Religion itself. Loyalty to Truth is its creed. Virtue, morality, brotherly love, and kind sympathy with every living creature are its noble objectives. Godless Buddhism ennobled the least philosophical of the dissenting sects of his religion, the Lamaism of the nomadic Kalmyks.