Persistence of Superstition – Dr. J.T. Bowles, 4/5/1908

Republished from the free-thought publication the Blue Grass Blade

It is the paramount duty of every good man and every good woman to labor unceasingly to drive superstition from
the brains of their fellow men. It has filled the whole world with crime and sorrow, and it still poisons all the fountains
and all the springs of life. In all the history of the ancient world, not a single government was instituted among men
that it did not destroy; and on the surface of the globe today, in the bright morning of the twentieth century, there
is not a single government controlled by the priests of superstition that is not rapidly speeding along the highway
that leads to the graveyard of nations. It has always filled the sky with monstrous gods, and it has always filled
the thrones of earth with heartless tyrants; and between these pitiless Molochs it has sacrificed and devoured the
toiling millions of the earth with fiendish glee and delight. The conspiracy between the gods of the sky and the
tyrants of the earth to enslave forever the whole human race reached its climax about two thousand years ago,
when Jesus Christ ascended the celestial throne of Jupiter, and Constantine the murderer mounted the throne
of the Caesars. During the long sojourn of the human race on this planet, extending over a period of not less than
five hundred thousand years, neither tradition nor history gives any account of a period so dark and desolate
as the thousand years which commenced when Constantine sat down in the golden chair of the Caesars and
proclaimed to the world that Jesus Christ was the god of heaven and earth. For a thousand years Rome had
been the mistress of the world, and Jupiter had been worshiped as the supreme and almighty god of the universe;
but the scepter now fell from his withered hands, and the new god, Jesus Christ, drove him from his celestial
abode. Into the hands of Constantine, now seated on the throne of the Caesars, he delivered the keys which
opened the portals of heaven and hell. From that very day and that very hour, superstition, in its most hideous
and appalling form, took complete possession of all the provinces of the mighty but now tottering Roman Empire.

Universal darkness enveloped the earth with a pall of despair, and for a thousand years, known in history as the
Dark Ages, not a single star was seen through the terrible gloom of this midnight sky. There is no tongue nor pen
that can embody in speech the ruin that was wrought, the countries that were wrecked, and the millions of lives
that were blasted during this awful chiliad of impenetrable gloom and appalling darkness. Five million men, women,
and children were killed in the wars of the Crusades to rescue the sepulcher where their new god was buried
before ascending from earth to heaven. One million men and women were murdered for refusing to believe
that the god of the universe had ever been killed and buried in Palestine. One million Albigenses, Huguenots,
Waldenses, and Netherlanders were cruelly and fiendishly put to death. One million were murdered by the Holy
Inquisition. Nine million were put to death for witchcraft. Twelve million natives in the New World were slaughtered
by the priests of superstition to satisfy their thirst for blood and for the glory of their new god. With fiendish ferocity
and malignity, nearly all the great men and noble women, as fast as they appeared in the world, were cruelly put
to death, and nearly every book containing any useful information was consumed in flames kindled by the priests
of superstition. Every nation of the earth has been cursed by this hideous monster, and all of Europe for a
thousand years was converted into a swimming Golgotha of blood. And today the priest-ridden nations of the
earth are seeking to extinguish the torch of reason and remand the whole human family into the black night
and universal vassalage of the Dark Ages. For one thousand years after Jesus Christ was invested with the
dominion of heaven and earth, and Constantine was clothed with the imperial purple of the Caesars, superstition
dominated and controlled every human being in the vast Roman Empire. Among these superstitions was a
universal belief in witchcraft, necromancy, sorcery, demons, ghosts, augury, divinations, and hundreds of like
phantasms that filled the ignorant and perverted brain of the whole human family.

In a modified form many of these idiotic and absurd superstitions still prevail all over the world, and in spite of the
growth and demonstrations of science, thousands of people in every large community and city are still to be found
who believe in such nonsense as palmistry, obsession, astral bodies, talking with God, getting religion, interpreting
dreams, obtaining knowledge by passivity, and illumination, and hundreds of similar superstitions. It will thus be
seen that the power of heredity, tradition, and vested interests still keeps alive these pernicious superstitions of
the Dark Ages, and that a stupendous work still remains to be done by science before the social atmosphere of
the world is clarified. Order and good government, peace and righteousness, will fill the earth when superstition
disappears; and the most sacred duty now devolving on the higher types of men and women is the persistent
impartation to their fellow men of the sublime truth that the universe embodies all causes and all effects, and that
a knowledge of these causes and these effects is the only path that can lead to individual and social happiness.
Long ere this, the hatreds and strifes, the discords and wars engendered by superstition would have disappeared
from the earth had it not been for heredity, tradition, and vested interests. But the bright light of science is now
flooding the world, and we can safely indulge the hope that among civilized peoples the grosser forms of superstition
will soon pass into the vast cemetery of the past. How long! O how long will it yet be before mankind will learn
that fabulous gods in the sky are the deadliest enemies of the human race?