The Great Fear

It was not the fault of primitive man that he was ignorant, nor
that his ignorance made him a prey to dread. The traces of his
mental suffering will inspire in us only pity and sympathy; for
Nature is a grim school-mistress, and not all her lessons have
yet been learned. We have a right to scorn and anger only when we
see this dread being diverted from its true function, a stimulus
to a search for knowledge, and made into a means of clamping down
ignorance upon the mind of the race. That this has been the
deliberate policy of institutionalized Religion no candid student
can deny.

The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion,
ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed
by it--and that it cultivates the source from which its
nourishment is derived. "The fear of divine anger", says Prof.
Jastrow, "runs as an undercurrent through the entire religious
literature of Babylonia and Assyria." In the words of
Tabi-utul-Enlil, King of ancient Nippur:
Who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven?
The plan of a god is full of mystery--who can understand it?
He who is still alive at evening is dead the next morning.
In an instant he is cast into grief, in a moment he is crushed.

And that cry might be duplicated from almost any page of the
Hebrew scriptures: the only difference being that the Hebrews
combined all their fears into one Great Fear. "The fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom," we are told by Solomon of the
thousand wives; and the Psalmist repeats it. "Dominion and fear