es or churches should make
them, no, not even gods in heavens.

Man would, then, have progressed much further with the superstructure of
an ideal civilization, if only in his efforts to rightly regulate his
life, he had happily searched out the laws of nature as they are
revealed through its phenomena and interpreted by experience and reason,
instead of looking for direction to the laws of the gods (Jehovah,
Allah, Buddha or even Jesus) as they are revealed through prophets and
interpreted by kings or presidents, by priests or preachers and by other
"powers that be of God" in states and churches--institutions which exist
in the interest of the capitalist class and against that of the labor
class. The world owes by far the greater part of its most poignant
sufferings to this fatal mistake of looking to gods in heavens and their
representatives on earth for direction instead of to nature and reason.

Life in the physical realm is dependent upon living in harmony with the
matter-force law. The representative of any form of life (mineral,
vegetable, animal, human) which either through ignorance, accident or
willfulness does not conform to it, is destroyed or at least injured.

Life in the moral part of the psychical realm consists in a disposition
and effort to learn the matter-force law, and to fulfill in thought,
word and deed the individual obligations to self and the social
obligations to others imposed by it when it has been humanely
interpreted by a man for himself.

Religion and Christianity are but wider extensions of one and the same
great all-inclusive virtue, morality, without which human life would not
be worth living, indeed not even a possibility, for without morality a
man is a beast, not a human.

Morality is the greatest thing in the world. Yet, paradoxical as the
representation may seem, there is one greater thing, freedom--the
liberty to think, speak and act in accordance with one's own convictions
as to what is the law and as to what are its requirements. Without this
liberty there could be no morality, and therefore, freedom is greater
than the greatest thing in the world, morality.

But liberty, the greatest and most indispensable necessity to morality,
religion and Christianity, indeed, to the existence of a human being, is
manifestly impossible on the theory that a man must be guided by the
will of a conscious, personal God in the sky as it is interpreted by the
kings and priests, presidents an