Theological essays Author:Charles Bradlaugh Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SUPERNATURAL AND RATIONAL MORALITY, By CHARLES BKADLAUGH. The essential of all religion is supernaturalism, and every religious system therefore involves a... more »t least dualism; as creator and created, ruler and ruled. This definition would, of course, exclude Pantheism from consideration as a religion. Supernaturalism is for a rationalist a word of self-contradiction. Nature to him means all phenomena, and all that is necessary to the happening of every phenomenon; that is, nature is the equivalent of everything. To the rationalist there can be nothing supernatural. He is a Monist. There is, he affirms, one existence ; he knows only its phenomena. These phenomena he distinguishes in thought by their varying characteristics. To the rationalist the word "create" in the sense of absolute origin of substance is a word without meaning. He cannot think totality of existence increased or non-existent. "Substance," "existence," "matter," is to him the totality: known, and, as far as he can yet think, knowable only in its pheenomena. It has been assumed so generally by religious advocates that some theologic dogma is necessary to every system of morality that the assumption needs direct traverse. It is put to-day by many of those who are attacking secular education for the young that without religious teaching there is no morality possible. This inaccuracy of speech is the result of centuries of supernaturalistic bias. Buckle considers Charron's " Treatise on Wisdom " as the first " attempt made in a modern language to construct a systemof morals without the aid of theology". Charron Bays (Book II., chap. 5, sec. 4) that moral duties " are purely the result of a reasonable and thinking mind ". It will be contended here that every system of " supernatural " morality is necessarily un...« less