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Updated: June 5, 2025
Religion, taken subjectively, in its loosest sense, is a man's mental and moral attitude in regard to real or imaginary superhuman beings a definition which includes pantheism, polytheism, monotheism; moral, non-moral, and immoral religions; which prescinds from materialist or spiritualist conceptions of the universe.
The "psychological view," again, explains the origin of conscience. In the course of development man comes to recognize the superiority of the higher and more representative feelings as guides to action; this form of self-restraint, however, is characteristic of the non-moral restraints as well, of the political, social, and religious controls.
On the contrary, the personality of man, with all of its intelligence and free will, is but the climax and fulfilment of a long succession of intelligible forms in nature, passing upward from the inorganic to the organic, from the unconscious to the conscious, from the non-moral to the moral, as these are at last seen in man.
It is the person whose conduct is non-moral that suffers collapse on the one hand, or becomes a bigot on the other, when criticism attacks what he held as true or right. Morality requires that men have a reason for the faith that is in them. In the second place, morality is conduct.
Looking back through the elementary types, we see the infantile images together with those non-moral origins that psychoanalysis discovers in us; looking forward we notice thoughts directed to certain goals that will be mentioned later.
In so far as we are ruled by custom, by tradition, in so far as we do as the books or the preacher says, or do as we see others do, without principles to guide us, without thinking, to that extent the conduct is likely to be non-moral. This is the characteristic reaction of the majority of people.
Science has at least given the final refutation of the devil's lie that sin is natural to man. It is the only unnatural thing in the world. It is not non-human, like the actions of animals. The age- long history of the race can never be reversed. I cannot undo the process which has made me man, and act as the non-moral animal.
Christians cowering before a being of divided power, half-god and half-devil. Indeed, I remember no religion so non-moral none that is so baldly a mere mechanical device for meeting the primitive mind's need to set its own tribe apart from all others or in the later growth to separate the sheep from the goats, by reason of the opinion formed of certain evidence.
The non-moral period, then, is characterized by the formation of habits which outwardly conform to moral law, or are contrary to it, according as his environment directs. The need to form habits that do conform, that are for the social good, is evident.
All this is unimportant. The main result of Pasquale's visit this evening is a discovery. Now, is it, after all, a discovery, or only the non-moral intellect's sinister attribution of motives? "A baby in long clothes would have seen through it," said Pasquale.
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