Down the Yellow Brick Road

In the second part of his book (see first) DZP considers the view that, having put religion aside, man must make his own rules unaided.

Religion is now it seems on the defensive. It is no longer respectable to believe in God, for man is the measure of all things. Religious belief is more likely to be equated with superstition than seen as a false hypothesis. Atheism and belief are not simply contradictory. More often, for the atheist, when someone tries to say that God exists, he is not saying something false, but something meaningless.

But how did meaningless beliefs come to have such a hold on people? One popular answer is in terms of primitive man, fearful of nature, seeking influence, by prayer and ritual, over a hostile environment. On this view religion is a childish practice which has been superseded by science. Religious believers have simply never grown up. They are like children who have gone on believing in magic.

The human cry for God is, on this view, like a child's cry in the dark, a desire for comfort from 'somewhere over the rainbow'. Primitive man creates a 'something over the rainbow' to fulfil his unfulfilled wishes - a product of projection (Feuerbach). But we must remember Dorothy's last words in 'The Wizard of Oz', "There's no place like home."

In the story the Wizard himself turns out to be a fraud, the Scarecrow is shown to have a brain, the Tin Man a heart, and the lion to have had courage all along. The message appears to be that we must develop our own abilities and not look for supernatural help. Whatever its harsh realities, Kansas is at least real, whereas Oz is pure fantasy.

"There's no place like home" could be the motto of atheistic humanism. Instead of the Yellow Brick Road we must follow the way of human science and philosophy to bring us back to this our one and only world. We must learn to live as Freud's 'honest smallholders', cultivating our plot in such a way that it supports us.