Now I believe that the current attacks upon religion contain much that is metaphysically sound and morally healthily together with much that is fallacious ands deplorable. but quite apart from their logical validity the antireligious arguments possess a psychological strength that is due to their profound congruity with modern moods and tempers. It is because of this congruity with the general spirit of the time that the movement against religion is steadily and rapidly increasing in influence….

There is, it seems to me, a quite different way of meeting the situation, a way that involves a revolutionary reorientation of religion and a radical reinterpretation of the supernatural and of its relation to us. And there is a possibility that by such a revolution the decline of religion may be checked and the idea of God be given a new and more secure place in the lives of men.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 1-2, 1

More important than the diminishing numbers of the divinities is their improvement in character. Each new grace and virtue disclosed by the maturing human conscience is conferred upon the gods above. They cease to be merely capricious and demonic and become repositories of human values, embodiments of goodness and righteousness.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 4, 1

Religion as we shall conceive it is the acceptance neither of a primitive absurdity nor of a sophisticated truism, but of a momentous possibility—the possibility namely that what is highest in spirit is also deepest in nature, that the ideal and the real are at least to some extent identified, not merely evanescently in our lives but enduringly in the universe itself. If this possibility were an actuality, if there truly were at the heart of nature something akin to us, a conserver and increaser of values, and if we could not only know this and act upon it, but really feel it, life would suddenly become radiant. For not longer should we be alien accidents in an indifferent world, uncharacteristic by-products of the blindly whirling atoms; and no longer would the things that matter most be at the mercy of the things that matter least.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 6-7, 1

When affection or disaffection for words is permitted to override their meanings, the wells of discourse are muddled and there ensues no advantage either ethical or logical

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 7-8, 1

There thus ensues a strange phenomenon, perhaps the strangest and the most retrogressive in all human culture, which consists in the translation of the crude hypotheses of our ignorant ancestors into dogmas proclaimed by divine omniscience. When a folkway or hypothesis once becomes promoted to the status of a dogma, it becomes sacrosanct, unamendable, and immune to all criticism. The men of later generations must live under the dead hand of their ancestral past, and no matter what new discoveries are made about the nature of the world, and no matter to what extent changes in the conditions of life may cray out for changes in the rules of living, the supposedly divince dispensation must not be altered.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 9-10, 1

The other evil product of the authoritarian spirit is its implicit yet thoroughgoing subordination of what ought to be to what is, of value to fact, of right to might, of ethics to religion. It gives us a morality of commands and taboos, instead of a morality of ideals; it makes goodness consist in conforming to the powers that be rather than in adapting those powers to the requirements of ideal beauty and human needs. The result of this phase of authoritarianism is to put all values on one dead level, those that are enduringly important, along with those that are trivial, transitory, or totally irrelevant. If duty is obedience to what is commanded, then Adam’s eating of an apple is as bad as Cain’s murder of abel–and conformity to ritual and its details is as good as love and courage. The rivers of conscience are poisoned at their source and the faculties of moral discrimination and taste are vulgarized.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 11, 1

All morality begins with self-control.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 13, 1

Abandonment of this world and preoccupation with the world to come, mortification of the flesh and exaltation of all that negates life and the will to live, are made into ideals of righteousness, with the result that the religion thus tainted by asceticism defends and enjoins in the name of morality a complete inversion of moral values.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 13, 1

When I turn from that Latin community to the more familiar Anglo-Saxon scene in which Puritanism expresses itself in blue Laws, Purity Leagues, Censorship, and Prohibition, with all the allied forms of persecution, repression, and gloom, I can feel only disgust that the professed followers of Christ should so betray his teaching of the more abundant life.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 14-1, 1

The notion of a God loving the world enough to suffer and die for it put the whole conception of Divinity in a new light. The irresponsible and often cruel Jehovah was himself in a very real sense redeemed by his identification with Christ.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 19-2, 1

If…religion is taken to mean the faith, theoretical, practical, and emotional, in something in nature that is making for the values that we cherish, then religion in that sense is at least important. It may be as false as as bad as the militant atheists of the Soviet Union believe. Or it may be as true and essential to human good as the Christian Fundamentalists, Catholic or Protestant, hot it to be. It is at any rate a thing to discuss.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 26, 1

All bodies are both agents and patients. They initiate changes and suffer them. Living bodies differ from others in that their agency exceeds their patience. They give to their environment more alteration than they receive from it,

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 28, 2

Every body has its history but a living body is its history. Its pasts is not only past but also present and operative.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 28, 2

Habit…is the narrowest and most stubborn of all orthodoxies.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 38, 2

For language is the savior of thought, and without it our ideas and ideals would lapse back and be lost in the flux of sensations from which they emerged.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 40, 2

It is by means of words that the conceptions enshrined in them can be organized as a culture, and transmitted, enduring and growing, from generation to generation.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 40, 2

Obedience to authority and conformity to custom are of a necessity the first things in a child’s education, but an ethics that continues to interpet value in terms of obedience and conformity is an ethics that is childish. The human race as a whole cannot attain rationality and maturity until it puts away the attitudes suited to the first prerational years of its individual members.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 41

Interest in perfecting one’s life and the lives of others by quickening and intensifying existing potentialities, extending their number and scope, organizing them so that their conflicts will be harmonized, and then mobilizing all the energies of will and intellect to bring them to actuality, and thus add cubits to the stature of our being, that, as I see it, is the whole field of duty.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 45

I want, in short, a degree of liberty that will permit me not just to do what I desire, but to do what I desire to desire, what I know that I ought to desire.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 52-5

William James was right when he said that the higher motives are not the stronger motives, and that it is necessary for us to throw the weight of our free will into the scales if we would make higher win over lower.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 53

Heterodoxy must have a modicum of orthodoxy in order to preserve itself from being crushed by the environment against which it contends. The living being must stoop to conquer. He must make his ideas conform to the facts of the world as a means of using his ideals to transform those facts.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 55

Life is essentially an adventure; it informs it’s environment and thus transforms it.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 55

The extent to which the aspiration of a living being are adjusted to its environment and made to conform to the world of things as they are, is not a measure of its degree of life, but rather of the degree to which it is already dead. Piety to the actual is impiety to the ideal.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 55-5

Any regime which would subordinate the individual and his liberties to that most insensate of all idols, the idol of the mass, whether political nation or economic class, goes directly counter to the whole nisus and genius of life. It is not Communism or Fascism, but pure cooperative Anarchism that will characterize the golden age of the future, the loving and beloved community of completely free spirits.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 56-7

This increasing differentiation of life that attends its increase in power, implies the relativity to individuals of all values, so far as their content or substance is concerned. One man’s meat is another man’s poison, and rules and customs that minister to progress at one phase of social development, may be criminally inappropriate and regressive at another. That is good, and that only, which helps any life in any situation, to actualize its potentialities.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 57

When we say that nothing can dictate to life, we must be understood to mean nothing except life itself. The ideal of a maximum life emerges as the internal and autonomous absolute that replaces the exrnal and heteronymous standards that we have rejected. Life seeks its own maximum, and the summum bonum, or supreme regulation criterion for values, is maximum abundance of life….[I]t is the law that there shall never be law, but always a departure from law, a maximum of variation, innovation, and adventure. Life as thus conceived prescribes its own invariants, two absolute virtues that shine steadily down upon the flux of changing goods. They are invariant because they mark the road of maximum variation. These two virtues are Love and Enthusiasm; they are respectively the extensive and intensive coefficients of life when most abundant; they are the two primary dimensions of righteousness.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 57-8

Love, taken in its most inclusive sense, means breadth and number of interests. The life that embodied it to the full would include in itself, through sympathy, the desires, interests, and aims, the potentialities, in short, of all lives, present and future, including its own. It would be at one with them in their joys and pains and hopes and fears.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 58

Love is the “formal” cause of righteousness; the capacity to behold the ideals; the “efficient” cause is enthusiasm, the energy to consummate them.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 59

For better or worse life is utterly committed to going forward. It is too late to retreat. The spirit of man and his culture must win depth and beauty and structural unity not by checking it’s multitudinous potencies but by organizing them around a single supreme devotion, the devotion to securing a maximum pace of living for all who live.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 63

Unless the ideal of goodness is for God as for us, eternal in its own right, irrespective of anything in the world of existence, morality can have no ultimate significance.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 64

Taking religion as [the belief in a power greater than ourselves that makes for good], we see at once that it is neither certainly and obviously true nor certainly and obviously false, but possibly true, and, if true, tremendously exciting. The question of its truth or falsity is exciting and momentous because it is a question, not of the validity of this or that theory as to the nature of the physical world or as to the origin and destiny of the human race, but because it is the question whether the things we care for most are at the mercy of the things we care for least.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 66

Atheism leads not to badness but only to an incurable sadness and loneliness.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 67

For it is the nature of life everywhere to outgrow its present and its past, and, in the life of man, the spirit has outgrown the body on which it depends and seeks an expansion which no finite fulfillment can satisfy. It is this yearning for the infinite and the sense of desolation attending the prospect of its frustration that constitutes the motive to seek religion and to make wistful and diligent inquiry as to the possibility of its truth.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 67

If evil is really nothing, it is nothing to avoid; while if it is some disguised or indirect form of good, it is a duty to abet it, not oppose it. If the Vessels of Wrath, like the Vessels of Grace, contribute to the divine happiness, why should we care which sort of vessels our brothers and ourselves become? We should not only be “wiling to be damned for the glory of God,” we should strive for it. Surely no such vicious nonsense as that perpetrated by these defenders of God’s unlimited power would ever have blackened the history of religious apologetics had it not been for man’s ignoble and masochistic craving to have at any price a monarch or master, no matter how evil in the light of his own conscience such a master might be.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 69

If our analysis of the Problem of Evil is valid, there can exist no omnipotent God. Possibly an omnipotent It, conceivably an omnipotent Demon, but not an omnipotent Goodness.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 70

And so we are confronted with a God, or something very like a God, that exists, not as an omnipotent monarch, a giver of laws and punishments, but as an ascending force, a nisus, a thrust toward concentration, organization, and life. This poer appears to labor slowly and under difficulties. We can liken it to a yeast that, through the aeons, pervades the chaos of matter and slowly leavens it with spirit.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 74

Now, however perishing the parts of the universe may be, the whole itself is enduring, and nothing happens without leaving its trace.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 82

Now, the real things of the read world are things in their own right, active and obstreperous entities, constituting a modified mechanism which, with respect to values, is a good deal of a chaos. This chaos, however, as we have seen, appears to be undergoing an amelioration genuine though painfully slow, and the leaven that works in it, and by which its evolution is wrought, we called the finite God.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 84

Life’s own and only goal is infinite and unending increase.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 85

It was this Modern Temper that was the theme of our opening discussion. We considered its indictment of religion both on the ground of its alleged historic, scientific, and metaphysical falsities, and on the ground of its alleged evil and reactionary philosophy of morals. But there is a third indictment which we did not consider but which is perhaps the most dangerous because the most practically influential of all. It is the indictment based on the increasing irrelevance of religion to the needs and interests of modern life. That this challenge, though less vocal than the others, is more deadly, will be apparent when we remember that true things can survive the charge of falsity and good things can survive the charge of evil, but nothing however good or true can endure as a living force in an atmosphere of indifference and neglect.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 86

Religion has been a defense against fear and a flight from sorrow. To the extent that men see a prospect of abolishing, or radically mitigating, these enemies of their happiness, they will reject the technique of escape and it’s mode of defeatism. Religion will be outmoded, and it’s tidings of escape to another and better world will ring cold in the ears of those who love this.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 89

The myth of Prometheus was made in Hellas, distiller from the purest and best in the souls of the Greeks. Though its setting is local and temporal, it’s lesson is universal and eternal; and among all the allegories of all the people it stands supreme.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 89-9

Prometheus endures the tyrant’s torture and keeps his spirit free, proclaiming to gods and me. Alike the claim of the ideal to outrank the power of Heaven itself.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 90

Prometheus not only defied the real in the interest of the ideal, but the ideal for which he suffered was that of progress on earth for men. Progress not by submission, but by intelligence; secular progress which, like the knowledge of good and evil, had. Been the prerogative of the gods alone. The fire that Prometheus stole from Heaven to give to men was the symbol of just that priceless thing. And one must suppose that when, after a long season, Plato was born, it was Prometheus and not Apollo who was his real father. For as Prometheus was first among immortals to proclaim the two great truths, supremacy of the ideal and the power of free intelligence, so was the Philosopher who has no peer, the first among mortals to proclaim those same two truths; a realm of eternal ideals whose beauty no fact can dim and no force subdue, and to whose validity the gods themselves must bow, and secondly, the duty and the power of men to make over their own institutional life by the revolutionary use of reason to build an ideal Republic.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 90-9

There is a desperate need to adapt our religion to the spirit and mood of the Promethean myth, and to make of it in a very real sense a Promethean religion.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 91

Fortunately, the task is not so difficult as it might seem, for it is tradition only, and not truth, that stands in the way. If God is, as I believe he is, an infinite, and-inclusive cosmic life, whose will to good is single, pure, and finite, one force among many in that chaos of existence which God finds within himself a d which is the world he would perfect—if God is that, then Zeus and his cousin of old Judea never were at all except as nightmare dreams in the minds of their worshipers. It was Prometheus himself, not Zeus, who all along was really God, or the Hellenic symbol of what Christians name the Holy Ghost.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 91

The prerequisite to any genuine revival of religion is not therapy but surgery, not evolution but revolution. Authoritarianism and Asceticism are the twin cancers of Puritanism. They have poisoned religion even in its ministry to failure and pain, and on that account alone they should be cut out with all their roots and ramifications. If these things can once be made to go, I believe that there is hope. For that which tainted the old religion is also the chief obstacle to the continuance of any form of religion in the future.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 94-5

And let us remember here the Promethean conception of God that was defended. If that conception is valid it means that the holy spirit of God, could one but feel it, would not only be courage to hearten us in weakness, and solace to comfort us in sorrow (perhaps in Utopia we are not eve weak or sad), but power and light and glory beyond what we had, however much we had. No one would knowingly refuse that, even in Utopia. For though life may lose its negations and evils, so long as life continues as life, it will never lose its yearning to be more than it is. The Promethean God, unlike the old God of evil tradition, would be life-affirming, not life-negating; he would not pull us back from our interests and recall us from the world. We should be lifted up and carried forward, as by a wave, further into the world and its life than before, our interests broadened and deepened and our souls miraculously quickened.

Belief Unbound: A Promethean Religion for the Modern World, p. 96-7

<D-s>Religion is the faith that the things that matter most will not ultimately be at the mercy of the things that matter least. (This might be a paraphrase from Lowell Bennion)

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