Atheists From The United States

"Suppose we human beings were hunted with traps by a race of giants loo feet high, very ingenious, and absolutely without conscience so far as their treatment of us was concerned. Suppose that, in spite of all our vigilance, we were continually falling into these traps, which were hidden all about us, and compelled in order to escape to eat off our own arms or legs. Suppose that even then one out of every five of us was so ill-starred as to be caught a second time, and ended up, after hours or days of unspeakable agony, by having his head smashed into a jelly by a big club. Suppose we were absolutely helpless in the matter, and that our victimisers had no higher purpose in inflicting these fiendish outrages than to get a scalp or a jawbone to dangle about their demoniacal necks. Suppose, finally, in order to complete the analogy, that these people imagined themselves to be highly civilised and enlightened. What sort of an opinion do you think we would have in the course of ages as to the real character of these people and of their fitness to be the models and superintendents of a planet?"

"Human beings are bigots and egoists almost to a creature. They are so because their phyletic environment has fancied this disgusting cut of consciousness. And the only possible way to attain, with anything like alacrity, any other pattern is by means of an environment with an enlightened and inextinguishable dislike for the prevailing style of things. Let this truth be distinctly and profoundly realized. It is the essential spark of the illumination. If we would bloom into beings of beauty and light, we must acquire an environment which will insist on beings of beauty and light as the mammas and papas of posterity."

"For it must be remembered that there was a time when no set of beings tyrannized and terrorized the planet as do the reigning cutthroats to-day. Estimate finally, if you can, and history will help you, the amount of bloodshed and war and woe necessary to develop those unfinished Troglodytes into beings clever enough to write history and invent gin and originate the hope of heaven. Compute these totalities, and you will know what it has cost to teach you and me and the rest to talk politics and wax sarcastic with our fore limbs in the air. Question: If it has required two or three millions of species struggling for life twenty millions of years to produce a being barely above derision, how long will it take and how many millions of species to evolve a being as nearly divine as the average man thinks he is?"

"Consciousness arises with, or out of, and accompanies, these clay compounds called creatures, but it does not cause, nor in any way interfere with, their phenomena. If it were possible to construct artificial clods, chemically as accomplished as philosophers, but without any accompanying consciousness, these soulless mechanisms, without will, feeling, or conscious intelligence, simply acting out their chemical and physical affinities, would not behave otherwise in any infinitesimal particular than the real, conscious meditators on things."

"Cotton is to-day by far the most important textile used by mankind, and wool is next. And we may expect that this sartorial reform, already so far advanced, will go on, and that the more enlightened generations of the future, for both moral and economic reasons, will clothe themselves entirely in fabrics of bloodless origin."

"The twofold function of individual culture is so to develop beings that they shall be able to perceive their proper relations to the rest of the uiniverse, to the inanimate about them, and to other beings in space and time, and realizing their relations to others, to be disposed to assume them."

"The purpose of all penal schemes should be, not reciprocity, but reformation pure and simple; not the relentless and absurd infliction of misery commensurate with the crimes committed, but the achievement of the largest possible reformation with the gentlest and most strategic deprivation."

"The criminal should be considered and pitied, not despised. He simply complies with the nature with which he came into the world, modified by the environment in which he has lived, the same as does every other being who breathes. You or I, with identical heredity and environment, would do identical deeds. Measured by his ability to do otherwise, the villain is not less divine than the humanitarian. Every creature acts out the impulses which arise in his own consciousness, and the will cannot create, but simply registers, those impulses. Punishment is one of the means possessed by society for its self-culture, and its administration should not be made an opportunity for pugilistic cocks to color their spurs."

"Furs just as warm and beautiful as murderous sealskin may be made of plush; and vegetal silk as fine and lustrous as ever was spun by the oak-eating babes of Polyphemus can be made of wood. Vegetal leather has been manufactured in London with the polish and durability of calfskin. And when the demand becomes strong enough to turn human attention profitably to the task, foot-wear just as comely and lasting, and more sanitary and comfortable, will be made at even less cost from plant products."

"From the time an individual human comes into the world a sprawling, squalling, unpeepered vagrant, to the hour he goes out in tragedy and pain, life is one continuation of the very conditions which brought him into the world a confirmed egoist."

"Oh, men! You who are struggling and longing for that which is denied you and that which belongs to you—the right to live, to be free, and to enjoy your legitimate share of the only world you have access to—will you not open your hearts to this plea—this plea for beings whose lot, like yours, is a bitter one, and whose miseries spring from the same cruel sources as your own miseries? You know what it is to be despoiled, to be stung by cruel overlings, to be misunderstood, to tug and sweat day after day until your poor goaded bodies are ready to drop from weariness. You know what it means to be bossed and held up and walked on, to be insulted and despised by the very beings who rob you, to have the last drops wrung from your ravished lives by the brutal hands of pompous usurpers. Will you be indifferent to granting to others those blessings which you know from your own sad and empty existences are all that make life really worth living? Shake off your own chains! Be free! Take your inalienable rights! Is this not your world as much as anybody's? Be men, not doormats! Light the red hell of revolution, if need be! For what is life if it is but the accursed privilege of wearing yourselves out in the service of cannibals, of man-eating millionaires, of monsters who eat you up alive, you and your wives and children? But don't forget to grant to your poor broken co-sufferers in harness the same blessed measure you claim for yourselves."

"Living beings who love themselves no more ardently than they love others are prodigies, and it will never be otherwise so long as beings are born as they are and live in like conditions."

"In the ideal state, man treats the races of beings affiliated with him, not as objects of pillage, but as beings with rights and feelings and capabilities of happiness and misery, like himself."

"In short, man, when he acts ideally, treats these beings at all times as associates, not as slaves or machines, as his best friends and most faithful and valuable allies."

"[T]he belief that the bodies of other beings take a necessary part in human alimentation is more than a tradition: it is a convenience. For if human beings can hold on to the feeling that the flesh and blood of their fellows are in some way necessary to them, they are comparatively immune from those disturbances which the most cowed conscience is at times disposed to stir up."

"In The Universal Kinship, Howard Moore left to humanitarians a treasure which it will be their own fault if they do not value as it deserves. There is a tendency to forget that it is to modern evolutionary science that the ethic of humaneness owes its strongest corroboration. The physical basis of the humane philosophy rests on the biological fact that kinship is universal. Starting from this admitted truth, Moore showed, with much wealth of argument and epigram, that the supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human has no more existence, apart from the imagination of man. than the physical gulf which has now been bridged by science. The purpose of our movement was admirably stated by him: "to put science and humanitarianism in place of tradition and savagery." It was with that aim in view that our League of Humaneness had been formed."

"The Great Law of Love—the abstaining from that which we do not like when done to ourselves—Reciprocity—is the only relation to exist among associated beings of any kind."

"I wish I could say something that would move you — something that would make you miserable the rest of your days in pity for these poor, helpless, doomed things—something that would make you feel in some measure the pitiable lot, the awful, needless sufferings, of these silent martyrs of our civilization."

"Can you realize what it means to be in life-long subjection to a being who has almost no thought or care for you and no understanding of your real nature and sufferings—to be alive and sensitive and filled with desires, and yet treated always as if you were a mere inanimate lump—to be even without the power to plead for compassion, and yet be in such utter bondage as to be at the absolute mercy of every brutal whim of your overling?"

"No country is without popular heroes. America has at least one. Like young Lochinvar he "has come out of the West." He is in Chicago at present. His name is J. Howard Moore [...] He became a hero by a book. It happened this way. One day the Illinois Legislature passed a bill compelling teachers to instruct their pupils in morals, thirty minutes a week. Forthwith there was a panic. Ladies' hearts fluttered and men's lips dropped naughty words. Nobody in Illinois knew how to teach morals. Nobody? Just one. J. Howard Moore."

"Man treats those co-operating with him in the labor of life as mere means to his own selfish purposes. He feeds and shelters them for the same reason that the capitalist feeds and shelters the poor human beings who serve him—simply to make them last as long as possible. There is no equity in the matter—no brotherhood—no thought of the Golden Rule. They are to him simply lemons—things to be squeezed, nothing more. And when he has extracted from them every benefit he is able to extract, he casts them out, as the money-hog does his worn-out workmen, to rot."

"Civilization is not exclusively a human thing. It is a joint product — ^the result of the combined labors and sacrifices of many races of mammals and birds. And no one of these races has the right to take more than its share of the blessings of civilization nor to shift upon others more than their portion of life's ills."

"This is the ideal: Man takes these races from the plains, where they are exposed to hunger and thirst and cold, harassed by enemies, and victimized by their own child-like intelligence. He associates them with himself. He gives them security, shelter, regular food, intellectual surroundings, and a home. They give to him in return the benefits of their superior strength and speed, bearing man and his burdens, wielding his great machines for him, and supplementing in a thousand ways the inadequate powers of their mentor."

"If justice is such a precious and necessary thing to men, is it not reasonable to suppose that it would be highly acceptable to other like constituted beings? One of the peculiarities that has always characterised men's pursuit of justice has been the ferocity with which each class of human beings have contended that things should be levelled down as far as themselves, and the corresponding complacency with which they have allowed the process to stop there. Our fortitude in enduring misery is never so great, never so triumphant and serene, never rises to those supreme heights where the soul seems to assume complete sovereignty over sense, as when that misery falls on others."

"From the standpoint of economy alone, the diet of the fields and orchards ought to appeal successfully to every one possessed of undoubted sanity. One acre devoted to wheat will support ten times as many men as one devoted to grazing. If men would take the beautiful products of the soil fresh from Nature's hand, instead of sitting down and devouring, in the form of the accumulated residuum or ruminants^ an acre at a meal, the problems o human poverty and over-population would be immensely simplified."

"The horse, the mule, the camel, and the ox have pretty nearly made man what he is. They have contributed to human welfare and achievement to an extent that can never be estimated. They are the bone and sinew of civilization—the plodding, faithful, indispensable allies of man in almost everything he undertakes, whether of war or peace, pomp or pleasure."

"Why should we think so everlastingly of the effects of our crimes on ourselves? Why should we not lavish an occasional thought on our victims? Because we are partial instead of impartial; because we are narrow and selfish in our feelings and understanding instead of broad and altruistic; because we are a lot of fervid barbarians without any realisation of our true dimensions, and revelling in the unchallenged conceit that we are the whole thing in this world."

"Nearly every act of conduct has at least two distinct sides or aspects, depending on the point of view from which the act is inspected. If an act affects its author only, then it is to be looked at and judged from his standpoint alone. Whether it is good or bad, proper or improper, depends upon its effects, immediate and remote, which it has on him. But not many acts are of this kind : we are so closely and in so many ways related to each other. Nearly always there are, somewhere in space or time, one or more other interests that are affected by an act in addition to the author's interest, and this implies that there are one or more other points of view from which the act may be judged."

"The beings of this world have been evolved. They have all been formed according to the same general plan, and filled with similar susceptibilities. No being or set of beings is so distinctive, or special, or so pre-eminently important, as to be entitled, according to any impartial system of ethics, to consider its own convenience and welfare to the exclusion of the convenience and welfare of every one else. The highwayman may plead in extenuation of his crimes that they are short cuts to prosperity which he cannot very well get along without; but the wayfarer, however lowly or peculiar, would certainly have the right to reply, in any locality outside a community of highway-men, that these things are to him short cuts to ruin which he cannot very well get along with."

"Man has been so long accustomed to the undisputed privilege of spoliation, and has so long and so brilliantly imagined himself to be all there is in the world, that a proposition denying this privilege, however fair the proposition may be from an impartial point of view, is promptly classified as the allegation of a zany, and is supposed to be conclusively disposed of when it is shown to be capable of interfering with human convenience or pleasure."

"Every crime almost is a good thing, looked at from the exclusive standpoint of the criminal. If it were not so, it would never be committed. But from the standpoint of the one on whom the crime falls it is likely to be a very different thing—how different depends on the degree of diversity of the interests involved. The only rational method of judging conduct, and the only method that should ever be employed by beings pretending to be logical or civilised, is to balance the effects which the act on trial has on the different interests involved, and then render a verdict from the standpoint of this balance, which is the standpoint of the universe."

"Men and women who hold shares in the responsibility for the common crimes of our civilisation would do better to stop giving money for missionaries and begin on themselves; for they commit every day of their lives greater crimes and more of them than the so-called 'heathens' they are trying to 'convert' ever dream of. The gods pity this world if we have got to go on for ever as we have in the past—a globeful of lip-virtuous felons!"

"The question that arises in the mind of the ordinary man when a change in the arrangements of the world is suggested to him is not what will be the effect of the change on the universe, but what will be its effect on him—on that remarkable atom of the universe so zealously partitioned off from the rest by his own skin."

"A being who can look without weeping on the heart-rending facts that fill the cities of our so-called civilisation has a psychology granitic enough to gaze unmoved on a hellful of roasting souls."

"Our own happiness, and that of our species, are assumed to be so pre-eminent that we sacrifice without hesitancy the most sacred interests of others, in order that our own may be carefully provided for."

"[S]ince vegetal fat is identical chemically with animal fat, and vegetal protein with animal protein, since these substances are found abundantly in non-flesh products, and since the only other food substances used by man (starch and sugar) are not found except in plants and plant products, it may be asserted positively that from the standpoint of food-supply there is no reason why man should prey when he eats. The plant world contains all of the compounds necessary for human alimentation, it contains them abundantly, it contains them in forms of the highest delicacy and the greatest variety and economy, and it contains them in a much more prime condition than they are found in the diseased tissues of our mistreated servants."

"Look at the scenes to be met with in our great cities! They are sufficient to horrify any being susceptible enough to the sufferings of others to be rated as one-fifth civilized. An army of butchers standing in blood ankle-deep and plunging great knives into writhing, shrieking living beings; helpless swine swinging by their hinders with their blood gushing from their slashed jugulars; unsuspecting oxen with trustful eyes looking up at the deadly pole-ax, and a moment later lying aquiver under its relentless thud; an atmosphere in perpetual churn with the groans and screams of the dying; streets thronged with unprocessioned funerals; dead bodies dangling from sale hooks or sprawling on chopping blocks; men and women going about praying and preaching, and sitting down two or three times a day and pouncing on the uncoffined remains of some poor creature cut down for them by the callous hands of hired cutthroats—such are the sights in all our streets and stockyards, and such are the crimes inflicted day after day by Christian cannibals on the defenseless dumb ones of this world."

"But you are not overlooked by yourself, are you? nor by the other flies that wheel with you in your mazy circlings? I know how precious you are to yourself, though you cannot tell me in words, by the interest you take in yourself and the anxiety you have for your life. I know you are the most real and important being in the world—the centre of this universe, where we are all, like you, pulling and hauling for importance."

"I feel like saying over and over and over, what I have said many times before, that we do not know the world of living, longing, suffering, enjoying life in the midst of which we have evolved. The inhabitants of our own fields and dooryards are strangers to us. We are so little, and proud, and selfish, we never think it worth while to stop and look into their faces and get acquainted with them. It never occurs to us what a great favour it would be to them if we would actually get over into their places occasionally and realise what tragedies are constantly being enacted in their lives as a result of our insensate natures. We treat them with no consideration or respect because we have no understanding of them; and we do not understand them because we do not care anything at all about the matter. We are too busy tossing bouquets at ourselves to have much time or thought left for anybody else. We have grown up in the belief that all those who have a different shape from what we have were intended, not for life and happiness and immortality, as we were, but for death and wretchedness and chymification, and we are too dull-minded and selfish to make any change now."

"They preach that it is the ideal relation of associated beings for each to act toward the others in the way in which he himself would like to have others act toward him. This ideal of social rectitude was discovered two or three thousand years ago, and has been taught by the sages of the species ever since. But in the application of this rule human beings restrict it hypocritically to the members of their own species. No non-human is innocent enough, or is sufficiently sensitive, intelligent, or beautiful, to be exempt from the most frightful wrongs, if by these wrongs human comfort, curiosity, or pastime are in any way whatever catered to."

"Oh this killing, killing, killing—this awful, never-stopping, never-ending, world-wide butchery! What a world! 'Ideal'?—and 'perfect'?—and 'all-wise'? Certainly—to tigers, and highwaymen, and people who are sound asleep; but to everybody else it is simply monstrous."

"Oh, this primitive, just-born, brutal ball! How long—oh! how long—how many suffering centuries and centuries, before the simple laws of social well-being, which men have at such expense worked out for themselves, will extend their benedictions consistently over the pain-plagued races of universal life?"

"New ideas make their way into the world by generations of elbowing. They make themselves known to the eminences first, and from these upper places they spread laboriously to the lowlands. One can hardly help thinking, as he looks back over the evolution of human thought and sees the persecution and blindness through which the race has made its way, that very few human beings possess as adults that degree of sagacity that ought rightfully to have accompanied them into the world."

"The most hopeless chains are those of which we are unconscious. The darkest slavery is that which binds the human brain."

"The inhabitants of the earth are bound to each other by the ties and obligations of a common kinship. Man is simply one of a series of sentients, differing in degree, but not in kind, from the beings below, above, and around him."

"Oh this poor world, this poor, suffering, ignorant, fear-filled world! How can men be blind or deranged enough to think it is a good world? How can they be cold and satanic enough to be unmoved by the groans and anguish, the writhing and tears, that come up from its unparalleled afflictions?"

"[T]he world is growing better. And in the Future—in the long, long ages to come—! The Same spirit of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man's manacles and is to-day melting the white woman's chains will to-morrow emancipate the working man and the ox; and, as the ages bloom and the great wheels of the centuries grind on, the same spirit shall banish Selfishness from the earth, and convert the planet finally into one unbroken and unparalleled spectacle of , , and ."

"The Great Law——is a law not applicable to Aryans only, but to all men; and not to men only, but to all beings. There is the same obligation to act toward a German, a Japanese, or a Filipino, as one acts toward a part of his own organism, as there is to act in this way toward Americans or Englishmen; and, furthermore, there is the same reason for acting in this manner toward horses, cats, dogs, birds, fishes, and insects, as there is in acting so toward men."

"Act toward others as you would act toward a part of your own self."

"In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer, some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a commion mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?"