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Baruch Spinoza, a Jew in Amsterdam, doubted theological dogmas and wrote lines such as:
"Popular religion may be summed up as a respect for ecclesiastics."
He was excommunicated by the Dutch synagogue, and lived as a semi-outcast.
Gradually, the iron fist of religion lost its grip in the West, and disbelief became a bit safer. But there were relapses. For example, a French teen-ager was beheaded and burned in 1766 for marring a crucifix, singing irreverent songs and wearing his hat while a church procession passed. Voltaire tried to save him, but the clergy demanded death, and the French parliament decreed it.
And Denis Diderot, creator of the first encyclopedia, was jailed for skepticism, and his writings burned. And English publishers who printed Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason were jailed for blasphemy.
Despite the risks, thinkers kept on questioning, and the right to doubt gradually was established - in the West, but not in the Muslim world, where "blasphemers" still face death today.
Although the right was won, it remains partly muzzled in America. What schoolchild is taught that Thomas Jefferson wrote many sneers at "priestcraft" - that he was denounced as a "howling atheist" - and that his famous vow of "eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man", which is engraved in his memorial in Washington, was written of the clergy?
What student hears scientific explanations of religion, such as this one: Sigmund Freud said the widespread belief in a father-god arises from psychology. Each tiny child is awed by his or her father as a seemingly all-powerful protector and punisher. As maturity comes, the real father grows less awesome. But the infantile image remains hidden in the subconscious, and becomes attached to an omnipotent, magical father in an invisible heaven. Unknowingly, Freud said, believers worship the long-forgotten toddler impression of the biological father, "clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child".
Although open agnosticism is a no-no in America - and although fundamentalism is booming - supernatural religion is fading among educated people. America's mainline Protestant churches, formerly the domain of the elite, have lost millions of members since the 1960s. Intelligent people don't take miracles seriously, and realize there's no evidence of a spirit realm.
The old church "thou shalt nots" against sex, liquor, gambling, birth control, dancing, Sunday shopping, etc., have subsided in our lifetime. Fundamentalism may be rising, but so is secularism. Educated Americans are becoming like Europeans, who have mostly abandoned religion. In England, for example, only a tiny fringe attends church today.
Soon it may be acceptable to challenge the supernatural, as so many great figures have done. The tacit code of silence - the last taboo - may be near an end. I certainly hope so.
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(Sources of quotations)
Albert Einstein - New York Times commentary, Nov. 9, 1930.
Mark Twain - Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, edited by Frederick Anderson, 1979, notebook 27, August 1887-July 1888.
Thomas Paine - The Age of Reason, 1794.
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