Prayr article continued:
It is necessary that this distinction be clarified at this point, so that no ground is left on which to base the charge that our critique constitutes an attack on one of the most
sacred aspects of religious nature. It is hardly likely that
any soul of deep sincerity, or any mind sensitive to the more
exalted mystical values, will register a protest against the high
rating, the genuine evaluation of the near-divine character of
the run of spiritual experiences that have been enjoyed by saintly
souls from Buddhist monks through medieval contemplatives like
Tauler, John of the Cross, Ruysbroeck, St. Martin, Madame Guyon,
Jacob Boehme down to modern devotees of Yoga, whether Eastern
or Western. Such edifying and sanctifying experiences are phenomena
occurring to many individuals in the higher stages of their ascent
toward their divinization. For is it not said that we are all
to become gods? No single word shall find utterance in this treatise
derogatory to whatever mystic capabilities manifest themselves
in man's progressive unfoldment of his divine nature. Those who
are susceptible of such upliftments of consciousness record them
as yielding the most real experience of man's communion with the
soul of deity. To those blessed by their incidence they present
their own unmistakable credentials of authenticity and they therefore
carry their own certification of real value. This essay makes
no attack on man's higher intimations of his own soul's identity
with the divine soul of the world.But what is contended here is that it is quite wrong
to expand or stretch the definition of the word "prayer"
to include these lofty ranges of experience. For this word has
long since lost the right to be considered generically as their
proper designation. It must be insisted that generations of common
usage have fastened irrevocably upon the term "prayer"
the connotation of a pleading with deity for objects of human
desire, gifts, favors, salvation, blessings. Let mystical raptures
bear their own appropriate descriptive nomenclature. By dictionary
definition prayer denotes the suppliant's humble solicitation
of benison from deity. Only by an outrageous and unwarranted stretching
of its meaning can it be made to include the sanctified enchantments
of a true communion with inner deity.
So it is to be set forth at the outset that the dissertation
on prayer here presented deals with the word in complete disseverance
from its claimed reference to high mystical communion with God
and strictly in its common definition as an asking of good things
from a cosmic power conceived as the giver of all good things
to man. As taken in this sense and so accepted in the common under-
standing of the word, the treatise here undertaken
will advance the case against prayer as perhaps the most fatal
and crushing thraldom of the human mind by a fatuous hallucination
in all the long cycle of history. The first and most forthright count in the accusation
against prayer is that it is infinitely degrading to the human
ego. As it springs out of the ego's profound sense of his inferior
and dependent status, out of the recognition of his base and helpless
nature in relation to the power prayed to, these basic assumptions
in the case and the posture and habit of mind bent to conformity
with them inevitably tend to strengthen and more deeply ingrain
on the subconscious life of the individual so conditioned the
dominant obsession of one's lowness and unworthiness. The prayer
consciousness thus endlessly renews and sharpens the self-infliction
of a most injurious psychological trauma upon the human psyche.
In the simplest form of statement prayer thus constantly beats
down the human spirit. It throws over it a heavy pall of depression,
of negative cast of consciousness, of self-accusation and self-depreciation.
It in effect pleads with God to accept man's rating of his own
abject and wretched nature and condition. In a mood that it incessantly
re-emphasizes it even begs of God to certify to himself this condign
misery of the pleader, as the latter's only justification for
presuming to address the purity and majesty of God at all. Not
the least modicum of worthiness can it urge, but only the complete
unworthiness of the suppliant; and this alone provides the presumptive
right of the sinning human soul to bring its lamentable plight
to the notice of deity. In the paroxysms of this self-condemning
mood it is expressly stipulated that the suppliant asks not for
justice. For a sinister theology has beaten the human spirit into
the persuasion that if God were to deal justly with the miserable
worm groveling at his feet, the case of the latter is lost from
the start, his best righteousness being as "filthy rags"
in the sight of God. The self-damned soul in effect expostulates:
O Lord, I can not face justice; I am irremediably stained with
sin; my only hope of escape from the deserved fate of sinners
is your boundless mercy. If you insist on strict judgment, I am
undone. Unless my pitiable condition touch your heart with infinite
compassion, I am lost. Have mercy on me, a miserable sinner!
And then follows the droning chant of the litany:
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord--as if there was not too
much certainty that God was even listening It has been the eternally reiterated claim of Christianity,
advanced at every opportune juncture, that it has presented a
code of principles and a humanizing influence that have operated
to enhance the "dignity of the human individual" beyond
any other faith in the world. It bolsters the claim by the specious
logic of intimating that out of its benign influence in this respect
democracy was born, and that in democracy the individual has come
into a position of freedom to express his personal prerogatives
to a fuller degree than was the case under all antecedent religions.
It claims to have liberated the spirit of men from previous bondage
to priestcraft and sacerdotal tyrannies, so that now under its
beneficent aegis the human ego is able to approach God boldly
and present its credentials to full sonship with God, the eternal
Father. No doubt some influence stimulating a sense of the
dignity of the human ego has come from the historical working
of the elements constituting Christianity. In two thousand years
it was inevitable that Western humanity would have made progress
toward more liberal mores under whatever religion might have dominated
it. Yet the advance in this regard has undeniably at the same
time been counterbalanced and rendered weak and often been completely
nullified by the endless reiterations of the abject spirit of
the prayer strain. So that as a matter of simple factuality, the
Christian system has done more to beat down that very dignity
of the individual which it claims to have so immeasurably elevated
than any other faith on earth. It will be hard to find in any
other religion's literature expressions so unconscionably deprecatory
of the status and the cosmic worth of the human soul as are to
be found prolifically advanced in Christianity. As long as it
sends that soul groveling on its knees at the feet of deity, abjectly
pleading to be considered entirely devoid of merit in its own
right, and brow-beaten to the point of making a virtue of its
own destitution, its own poverty, its own forlorn and hopeless
condition, so long it is gross impertinence, an outrageous falsity,
for Christianity to go on flaunting its arrant claim that it above
all other religions exalts the dignity of the human soul. No other
faith could possibly trample it down to more supine and humiliating
degradation. Not even is it content to have hounded the soul of
its people to shameful self-degradation; it will not let it rest
there, but drives it on to the further and deeper humiliation
of proclaiming its own outright and complete depravity. It shouts
its own total sinfulness and its inveterate and unmitigated obduracy in error
and evil. "We have continually done evil in thy sight, O
Lord, and our hearts are continually evil. In us there is no soundness
nor health. If thou shouldst deal with us according to our deserts,
O Lord, who should stand? Nay, not one." So runs the professional
testimony of the Christian faith to the actual depravity of the
Christian mind, under the influence of a prayer habit generated
out of the twisted mentality of sixty generations of a frightfully
perverted theology, itself based on a disastrously contorted literal
and historical interpretation of its so-called "sacred Scriptures."
That this perversion of human sanity and unsettling
of human balance has dismally stultified the human mind that was
subverted under its influence is shockingly attested by over fifteen
centuries of a record of man's grossest inhumanity to man ever
chronicled, a record of idiocy, bigotry, superstition, hatred,
war, persecution and red-handed butchery that stain the pages
of Christian history with the black horror of inhuman savagery
let loose from the right hands of warriors whose left hands carried
the cross. With the sweet love of the Christ on its lips, Christianity
carried in its hands the bloody sword, or the consuming firebrand,
and sought fatuously to advance the one by the power of the other.
And ever does it bend the knee to its God in sycophantic pleadings
to increase its zeal for conquest, the gentler restraints of love
being lost in the fury of its zest for worldly wealth and power.
All this gives the world ample ground to bring against
Christianity an authentic indictment of the most serious character.
It can be charged with thus having exalted to the dignity and
nobility of a sacred science two of the meanest and most ignoble
traits of human nature, never in their own character recognized
or rated as virtuous. These two low expressions of base character
are begging and wishful thinking. One must confront Christianity--as
well as all religion that exalts the prayer motif--with the stern
challenge: when has begging ever been held to be noble or sanctified
in ordinary human society? Is it not, on the contrary, universally
regarded as base and degrading, beneath the accepted standard
of common good breeding and social ethics? The beggar has always
been looked down upon with pity, as having failed to measure up
to the standards of social competence and self-respect. Beggary
is looked upon as the unfortunate necessity of people of low grade,
either the unlucky victims of hard circumstance, or so improvident
that dire destitution has driven them to the sad state of dependence
upon charity. The beggar is the subject of pity and contempt.
To the beggar one tosses a coin in a momentary spirit of bartering
for the appeasement of one's own half-guilty conscience. |
