• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“And, also, every religion begins to die then, at that moment When the Emperor Constantine accepted Christianity because it won a battle for him and made it the Roman State religion, he also at the same moment decreed the inevitable decline and death of Christianity.

“The stronger the religion, the longer it takes to triumph, and the longer it takes to die, and the more illegitimate offspring it has. But they all follow the same step-by-step logical process.

“They are prophesied, they come up, they triumph, they are accepted, they degenerate, and they decline. A religion that has done its work and made its point and taught its lesson has no other place to go but down. It must crack up and begins its degeneration to make room for its successor, that will take the old one’s lesson and elaborate it and evolve it—just as Christianity once did for Judaism.

“Look,” he said excitedly, “what was Judaism? Judaism taught that God was fixed as the earth around which the universe revolved, unchangeable, a God of perpetual punishment and vengeance; Judaism taught the Ten Commandments.

“Okay.

“What did Christianity do? Christianity took Judaism and changed it a little. It still taught that God was fixed, unchangeable, but fixed as the sun around which the earth and universe revolved, further away but still unchangeable, a less personal Center. It changed the God of perpetual punishment and vengeance to a God of perpetual love and forgiveness that only punished evil when He absolutely had to. Christianity replaced the Ten Commandments with the Sermon on the Mount.

“Okay, what would be the next step, the next logical evolvement? Mightnt it be a religion that would teach that God was not fixed at all? A religion that would teach that God was nothing at all if He was not eternally Changeable? That neither the earth nor the sun is the fixed unchangeable center, but that instead there is no center, as Einstein says the universe is a circle in time where both the earth and sun are small minor parts and everything is in constant flux and forever changing. Mightnt the new religion teach that instead of being permanently fixed God is growth and evolution, a God which is never the same twice?”

When he had gone that far with it, he was no longer talking to Prew to take Prew’s mind off of Angelo. He was caught up and expounding the theory that had grown to obsess his whole life. The unabashed-dreamer’s eyes did not recognize Prew as Prew or remember a person named Angelo. And, curiously, it was at those times and only those times when Prew was able to lose himself in listening sufficiently to forget there was a Maggio, as the dreamer’s eyes dominated him and the soft gentle voice spun on and on.

“You see what that implies? If God is Instability rather than Fixity, if God is Growth and Evolution, then there is no need for the concept of forgiveness. The mere concept of forgiveness implies the doing of something wrong, Original Sin. But if evolution is growth by trial and error, how can errors be wrong? since they contribute to growth? Does a mother feel called upon to forgive her child for eating green apples or putting his hand on the stove? Did you ever truly love some body, or some thing? A woman; did you ever love a woman? If you ever really truly loved a thing, you never even considered forgiving it something, did you? Anything it did was all right with you, wasnt it? No matter how much it hurt you. You dont have to forgive something you love. You forgive the ones you dont love.

“If you love someone,” Jack Malloy said, “you never even think of forgiving them. You may fight them like hell over something, and use every pressure to change them. But when the brawl is all over and you havent changed them one bit, you go right on accepting them. You’re never so smug, or so righteous, or so superior, to tell yourself—or tell them—you forgive them.”

And with that Jack Malloy’s philosophy was expounded, his religion preached, his credo stated. All the years of the Wobblies, the fights with