Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/276

274 man-made, and that their creed is similar to the worship of the savage. He looks at their gods with the vision of a civilized being; but when he looks at his own god, he forgets his civilization, he relapses centuries of time, and his mental viewpoint is that of the savage.

Christianity, with its primitive concepts, can make its adherents firm in the belief of great monstrosities. When its adherents believed that the Bible sanctioned the destruction of heretics and witches, they were certainly doing things from a Christian standpoint. It was this standpoint that justified an embittered denunciation of evolution at one time and then recanting, adopted it as a part of the, Bible teaching. When the Spaniards blotted out an entire civilization in South America, when Catholics butchered Protestants, or Protestants butchered Catholics, they were all justified from the Christian standpoint.

Man has been living on this planet some 500,000 years. Jesus appeared less than 2000 years ago to save mankind. What of those countless millions of men that died before Christ came to save the world from damnation? If the Christian creed, that except a man believes in the Lord Jesus Christ he cannot be saved, is maintained, then it must be that those millions of human beings who lived before Christ and had no chance to believe, are in hell-fire.

It is probable that one of the factors that turned primitive man's attention away from his cruel and short, earthly existence to the thought of a more lengthy and. less cruel existence in a hereafter, was the extreme uncertainty and short duration of his own life. And this primitive trend of thought that turns man's mind from the here and now to a contemplation of a mythical hereafter persists to this day, produces the same slavish