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Content of the book

There are no problems related to human progress and happiness in this age which any theology can solve, and which the teachings of freethought cannot do better and without the aid of encumbrances. Havelock Ellis has stated that "The man who has never wrestled with his early faith, the faith that he was brought up with and that yet is not truly his own for no faith is our own that we have not arduously won has missed not only a moral but an intellectual discipline.The absence of that discipline may mark a man for life and render all his work ineffective. He has missed training in criticism, in analysis, in open-mindedness, in the resolutely impersonal treatment of personal problems, which no other training can compensate. He is, for the most part, condemned to live in a mental jungle where his arm will soon be too feeble to clear away the growths that enclose him, and his eyes too weak to find the light." The man who has allowed his mental capacities to clear his way through the dense underbrush of religious dogma finds that he has emerged into a purer and healthier atmosphere.In the bright light of this mental emancipation, a man perceives the falsities of all religions in their historic, scientific, and metaphysical aspects. The healthier mental viewpoint holds up to scorn and discards the reactionary religious philosophy of morals, and the sum total of his conclusions must be that religion is doomed, and doomed in this modern-day by its absolute irrelevance to the needs and interests of modern life. And this not only by the steadily increasing army of freethinkers but by the indifference and neglect of those who still cling to the fast slipping folds of religious creeds the future freethinkers. It was Spinoza who remarked that "The proper study of a wise man is not how to die but how to live." Religious creeds can but teach how a man should live, so that when he dies, he may be assured of salvation; and the important thing is not what he does to help his fellow men while he is living, but how closely he lives in conformity to a reactionary code of dogmas. Religion has always aimed to smooth the sufferer's passage to the next world, not to save him for this world.