Page:Psychology of Religion.djvu/38

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The next fallacy that we have to dismiss is the very common idea of writers on religion that there is a special urge or instinct or sense in the human breast which compels men and women to be religious. So frivolous are some of these serious and profound writers on religion that they only invented or discovered this religious instinct at a time when the general experience of the world entirely refuted it. No one heard of the religious instinct in the days when everybody was religious. It was invented when tens of millions of people in every advanced civilization abandoned all religion.

It was invented for the plain reason that the old type of argument for religion was being increasingly discredited. Deism shot to pieces the old arguments for Christianity in particular, which are based upon totally false historical statements. Then science and Agnosticism shattered the arguments for God and immortality. Apologists were reduced to the use of ancient