The Soul of an Honest Man – James Armstrong, 6/6/1907

Republished from our predecessor publication Lucifer the Light Bearer

We are living in a world in which nothing thrives so vigorously as rascality. By rascality I mean every
word, look, gesture, and action which has for its object the deception of others for the purpose of
robbing them. It is for this reason that I regard ecclesiasticism as robbery reduced to a science, and
the votaries of every religion as hypocrites pretending to believe things which they not only do not
believe, but which they cannot believe. The average human mind is not so foolish as it seems to be,
or as we for the most part think it is. The world has had millions of philosophers besides the few who
have written books—millions of thinkers who were wise enough to worship when it was dangerous
to scoff, and keen-witted enough to conform when it was disastrous to dissent. Ask anyone if he
believes in the fairy tales of his childhood and he will tell you no; ask him why and he will look at you
in a wondering way as if he thought you regarded him as a fool. But ask the same person if he believes
in Christianity—a system of superstition whose doctrines and miracles are even more absurd than the
wildest extravaganzas of fairy lore—and he will say yes, and much more emphatically than he has just
said no. In a world in which nothing happens by accident, there is a reason for this. Men’s religious
beliefs, both pretended and real, have a cause. Pious rascality and genuine devotion do not proceed
out of nothing. They are capable of scientifically exact explanation, and the person who does not think
so is as chaotic intellectually as he who believes that in the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth. Genuine piety, whenever it exists, is always found in minds of low development, just as pretended
piety is always found in minds of high development. The sincere Christian is a full-grown child who
believes in the Santa Claus called God, who is going to fill his stockings with harps and crowns and
life everlasting in the sweet by-and-by.

The make-believe Christian is simply a rascal who chooses to live off the sweat of others rather than
the sweat of his own. The public men of every age have, for the most part, pretended to believe in the
prevailing superstition. Cicero, one of the greatest of Romans, was a high priest of paganism, for such
was the road to the political preferment to which he aspired. Cicero, however, did not believe in the
superstition whose robes he wore and whose mummery he mouthed, for it was he who said that he
did not understand how two priests could pass each other without smiling. Long before Cicero was
born, Lucretius had written his poem On the Nature of Things; and even before Lucretius, the wisest
of the Greeks had torn the current religion to shreds—in spite of which, however, Jupiter and Venus
were worshiped for thousands of years by people who knew they did not exist. Wherein, then, is to be
found the marvelous vitality of all superstition? In omnipresent and omnipotent rascality! In the general
tendency of everyone to live at the expense of someone else, the accomplishment of which is secured
by nothing so easily and so certainly as religion. All actual or would-be thieves are solemn, and their
victims solemnly submit, in the vain hope that they, too, will get some of the spoils—the form of thievery
becoming outlawed or extinct only when a majority of mankind realize there is nothing in it for them.
Thus primitive man is historically revealed as a solemn cannibal, which he outgrew to become a pious
plunderer and, in our own times, a Christian slave-driver. In fact, everything the human race has done
was done religiously—except discover truth.

There is no possible crime that has not been deified and worshiped as a god. Even highway robbery had
its god in Hercules, and the votaries of lust thronged the temples of Venus and Aphrodite. Greece, in the
golden age of its glory, had thousands of temples dedicated to prostitution, and when her soldiers went
forth to murder their millions they did so in the name of Bellona and Mars. Look at such peoples as the
Aztecs and their bloodthirsty divinities, victims of which were as eager to die on their altars as their priests
were to sacrifice them. Look at the Jagannath cars of India and the child-eating crocodiles of their sacred
rivers, the burning of wives alive with the bodies of their dead husbands—to say nothing of the millions
of others whom superstition actually devoured in countless ways. Not, however, have all these things
—monstrously diabolical though they are—happened because the masses of men did not know it was
foolish. Rascality, indeed, teaches us to say—not to think—that they were honestly mistaken; but intellectuality,
which has no cause to serve but its own, teaches us to say as well as to think that the votaries of superstition
are the victims of their own duplicity. The evidence is abundant and the proof simple. Take your own daily life
and examine it a little. Someone calls you a liar, sincerely designating you perhaps as that which you really are.
But whether you are a liar or not, the prevailing superstition concerning personal honor and dignity compels
you to strike or kill. It even compels you to assail a physical giant whom you know in advance is likely to kill
you. Thus an insult will force cowards “Who inward searched have livers white as milk” to conduct themselves,
and frequently to their own loss of limb or life, as if “They wore the beard of Hercules or frowning Mars.”

Public opinion thus makes many a weakling strut like a giant cock and bluster and blow as a make-believe
fighter, while in his heart he knows he deserves all the insults that have been offered him and is scared out
of his wits at having to resent them. And so rascality—insulted rascality—pretends to respect and reverence
public opinion in barrooms and streets: the identical rascality that makes so much noise with its “Glory to
God” in the church and “Hurrah for the Flag” on the rostrum. Again, you have seen hundreds of convicts at
work under less than a dozen guards. All of them could not be shot if they attempted to escape, but since
any one of them may be shot, they work on submissively—each awaiting occasion when a break for liberty
may be made with little or no personal danger. At times there is a rare spirit who will break for liberty under any
and all circumstances, his rarity as a rule promptly effecting his extermination. As in the convict camp, so in
the church camp. Nearly all of its mental prisoners—for prisoners they are as truly as galley slaves chained to
the oar—would break for rationalism if everyone were certain he would not be hurt or exterminated in so doing.

And like convicts, when someone begins to talk of escape there are many to warn the guards—the clergy
—of his plot (heresy), that they, too cowardly to try to escape, may make prison life easier for themselves.
Such is the source of the marvelous vitality of superstition: multitudinous and irrepressible rascality, which
is, after all, the bulwark of all tyrannies—ecclesiastical or political—ancient, medieval, and modern despotisms,
regardless of whether they manifest themselves as conquering armies, Christian inquisitions, Russian
czardoms, or American plutocracies. Such social monstrosities do not flourish—and have never flourished
—because the masses believe in them or have believed in them, but because their victims pretend to
believe in them, as well as pretend to believe that their fellow pretenders are not pretenders. And so rascality
—omnipresent and irrepressible rascality, most virulent in its religious phase—like a world-embracing
pestilence, rages unchecked and uncheckable. How often, O Reader, have you heard—and continue
to hear—the ominous hypocritical wind whistling through rascally teeth, accompanied by shoulder shrugs,
dilation of eyes, and furtive glancings about, and the Truth you were about to utter slinks away into the
soul-depths whence it came! Thus thrive all lies, great and little, and thus fattens all superstition until,
grown so vast, it falls of its own weight—to be swept utterly and forever away by sudden volcanic truth
-upheavals from universal soul-depths: inevitable cataclysmic annihilation of whole systems of lies.
Every lie, big or little, has a life to live, and it will not be abandoned to perish until it ceases to yield
tithes, Peter’s pence, or revenue of some kind. And so Truth, like poverty-stricken bastardy left on
doorsteps, must struggle against nameless difficulties to make its way in the world; nor will men
doff their hats until its victorious banner is seen flying over the field of Error.