Guilt and Inferiority—Feeling as Creator of Religious Experience

“Nobody becomes religious without having a bad conscience.”

—Anatole France.

The purpose of this essay is to portray the mental processes by which the internal aspect of the conflict of impulse, and a resultant feeling of guilt, of inferiority, develops into the essence of religiosity. This will be done mainly in the words of another, as quoted from an anonymous book. “An attempt at an answer to: What is Religion ?” is its title. Evidently the anonymous author is a highly cultured modernist clergyman in a good orthodox conservative Christian church. All italics are mine.

He begins by stating and answering the question: “What can it [religion] do for me?” He answers: “To—day man's end is not praise and worship of the Creator, but creation of himself. … To see, then, to the making is the best way of glorifying the Maker.” Next he goes on to show why religion should not be considered a matter of thinking—of dogma; nor of feeling; nor orderly ritual; nor organization; nor priestcraft; nor law, or moral discipline. On the contrary religion is “a matter of the whole man.” He asks: “If religion be the art of consciously relating man with God why do we invariably start out with the unknown factor?” He insists that love of facts demands that “the real beginning [of religion] for us is MAN.”

If man is the beginning, so also is he the end of religion. This is how he rationalizes his need that it shall be so. “Galileo and Copernicus have put us on a planet, and Newton has knit us to the farthest star. Lamarck and Darwin and others have bound us willy nilly to all living things; and now, lo, ‘the dead universe is alive and palpitant throughout.’ Descartes taught us to begin with the self and Kant apprised us of the limits of our own powers, and Wundt has shown the body to be all athrill with soul. Max Müller, and how many others before him and with him and since, and finally the