Christianity picked up tremendous momentum when it lowered the price tag on salvation by abrogating Jewish ceremonial law. “Come on over to our side,” it told the Jews. Enjoy your ham. No more circumcision. No more silly Sabbath regulations. Here you can eat your cake and have it too.”

Seeing the multitude of Jewish Christians, the gentiles asked timidly, “Must we be circumcised – or eat like Jews?” [Alternatives?]

“Not at all! Religion is through with all that.”

Mohammed lowered the price to the ground. To follow him, all you need do is proclaim “Great is Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.” To replace an abstract heaven where virgins remained virgins, he preached sempiternal orgasm. It had an attraction for half the world.

But the newly converted Northern barbarians took to civilization reluctantly and chafed under the Christian religion until a Luther arose [eight centuries later] and cried, “To hell with these rules and regulations. Nothing we can ever do is right anyway. So just close your eyes and throw yourselves into the arms of Jesus, and you’ll be saved!” Protestantism went like a house afire. [Greedy arsonists!]

The lesson is obvious. If we neo-Catholics want success, we must lower the price tag – first of all, on sex. We must allow several wives, one at a time at first. We want copulation, unlimited by babies or disease. That means condoms, the Pill, and abortion when needed. We will have free sex among the youngsters, starting with sinless masturbation, going through necking and petting, and ending in full intercourse, “provided the parties really love each other,” or some other equally meaningless stipulation. No vice is hard to rationalize if enough people want it badly enough. Only be sure it is rationalized in polysyllables.

It passes understanding how the Catholic Church should have got stuck on sex. It is such an indelicate subject, so undignified, dealing as it does with pretty close to lavatory subjects. It could so easily have been avoided. Nevertheless, the Church gets down to the nitty-gritty, marking off the human body into “dangerous” and “safe” zones to be exposed or explored, weighing each single ejaculation as to object, end, and circumstances.

The way to success is never to mention sex. Leave the people to find their own way and they will wind up doing what they want. Then don’t hinder them!

Talk about everything but sex. Try the Golden Rule, for instance. That provides a positive rather than negative approach to morality. Here is the Christian Commitment Series, now studied by thousands of our teen-agers:

“Situations are different, and so are people. What works with one person does not necessarily work with another. Can you think when a strict application of the Golden Rule aided some one in doing what is right? Can you think when applying the Golden Rule made matters worse? The first thing we face in Christian ethics is that rules do not work very well. We must look further than rules to find the sources of Christian ethics.” This does double duty. It teaches the adolescent relativism and at the same time encourages him to challenge and scorn one of Jesus’ teachings: the Golden Rule.

WE MUST INSIST on the relativity of all human values and ideals. We sternly criticize all pretended moral absolutes, and we thus assimilate the wisdom of our scientific philosophies of human experience. By interpreting Christian doctrines not literally but as myths with symbolic value, we maintain nothing such philosophies would reject. There are three main conceptions of human nature: the naturalistic, the humanistic, and the Christian. The third is naturalism with a vision of the Eternal. Sex is natural. We’ll go along with nature.

And still our striving toward the unattainable must lead to pessimism. One who indulges in unlimited sex is bound to have a few bad moments. He can comfort himself with the thought that his pessimism ultimately is unreasonable, both practically and intellectually. The myths of religion are symbolic expressions, but of truths so high that they transcend human science and reason. Human discourse is simply incapable of dealing with God and human destiny. On such themes one can speak only in dialectical paradoxes. Whatever one says is true, yet it is not true because its contradictory can also be uttered. The knowledge that while human we possess knowledge, however dim and paradoxical, of absolute standards properly reserved to angels tends to reconcile us with the supposed necessity of acting like the Devil.

It will be objected that neo-Catholics will achieve salvation on easier terms than their forebears. In reply, we refer to parables of the Prodigal Son and the Workers in the Vineyard, given full pay for only a few hours work. If “souls” have been “lost” that would have been saved at our reduced rate, we must borrow the quaint language of an earlier day: They obviously resisted sufficient grace.

Hell – sin – evil: all are artificially contrived problems and sentiments that vanish in the clear white light of pure reason.

THIS WHOLE QUESTION of morality is up in the air anyway. No one can make head or tail of it. Quot homines, tot sententiae.

“What is good? All that heightens in man the feeling of power, the desire for power, power itself. What is bad? All that comes from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that our strength grows, that an obstacle is overcome.” Thus Nietzsche.

Must we have penance, mortification, self-denial? Let us rather preach Omar:

Come, fill the cup and in the fire of Spring

Your winter-garment of repentance fling;

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To flutter – and the Bird is on the wing.

Then to the lip of this poor earthen urn

I lean’d, the secret my life to learn:

And lip to lip it murmured – “While you live,

Drink! – for, once dead, you shall never return.”

We are weak today in ideal matters, because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The bare force of circumstance compels us onward in the daily detail of our beliefs and acts. But our deeper thoughts and desires turn backward. When philosophy shall have co-operated with the force of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flower of life. To further this articulation and revelation of the meanings of the current course of events is the task and problem of theology in our day.

“To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things – this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship,” said the late Bertrand Russell.

Let me conclude with a sonnet by George Santayana:

Sweet are the days we wander with no hope

Along life’s labyrinthine trodden way,

With no impatience at the sleep’s delay,

No sorrow at the swift-descended slope.

Why this inane curiosity to grope

In the dim dust for gems’ unmeaning ray?

Why this proud piety, that dares to pray

For a world wider than the heavens’ cope?

Farewell, my burden! No more will I bear

The foolish load of my fond faith’s despair,

But trip the idle race with careless feet.

The crown of olive let another wear;

It is my crown to mock the runner’s heat

With gentle wonder and with laughter sweet.