In practical terms, these commands are identical. Again and again the light of reason has dispelled the theistic nightmare, but poverty, misery and fear have recreated the phantoms - though whether old or new, whatever their external form, they differed little in their essence. Atheism, on the other hand, in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a super- natural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.
Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.
It is characteristic of theistic 'tolerance' that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. My parents, both born in London in 1911, were brought up in a world in which belief in a Christian God was assumed. In his late teens my father experimented with a group known as 'The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry' associated with the Quakers.