British activist & theosophist (1847-1933)
Thought is power -- real, objective power. Moreover, the thoughts we create have a life of their own. They have a kind of material reality that affects other people for good or ill -- hence our responsibility to chose.
ANNIE BESANT
The Power of Thought
Persons of delicacy and virtue, unhappily united to those whom they find it impossible to love, spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts to appear otherwise than they are, for the sake of the feelings of their partner, or the welfare of their mutual offspring; those of less generosity and refinement openly avow their disappointment, and linger out the remnant of that union, which only death can dissolve, in a state of incurable bickering and hostility. The early education of the children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents; they are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence and falsehood. Had they been suffered to part at the moment when indifference rendered their union irksome, they would have been spared many years of misery: they would have connected themselves more suitably, and would have found that happiness in the society of more congenial partners which is for ever denied them by the despotism of marriage. They would have been separately useful and happy members of society, who, whilst united, were miserable, and rendered misanthropical by misery. The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble, holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse; they indulge without restraint in acrimony, and all the little tyrannies of domestic life, when they know that their victim is without appeal.
ANNIE BESANT
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be
If, therefore, Atheism is true, all controversy about miracles is useless. They are simply impossible, and to inquire whether an impossible event has happened is absurd.
ANNIE BESANT
The Freethinker's Text-book
What is the constitution of the universe? The universe is the manifestation of the divine thought; the thought of God embodies itself in the thought-forms that we call worlds.
ANNIE BESANT
The Immediate Future
No durable things are built on violent passion. Nature grows her plants in silence and in darkness, and only when they have become strong do they put their heads above the ground.
ANNIE BESANT
Essays and Addresses
So long as you feel yourself separate from others, so long are you shut out from the realisation of the unity; so long as you say "my" and "mine," so long the realisation of the Spirit is not yet possible for you.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
There appears, also, to be a possibility of a mind in Nature, although we have seen that intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be perception, memory, comparison, or judgment; but may there not be a perfect mind, unchanging, calm, and still?
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge.
ANNIE BESANT
Esoteric Christianity
Marriage differs from all ordinary contracts in the extreme difficulty of dissolving it—a difficulty arising from the ecclesiastical character which has been imposed upon it, and from the fact that it has been looked upon as a religious bond instead of as a civil contract.
ANNIE BESANT
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be
The path from Christianity to Atheism is a long one, and its first steps are very rough and very painful; the feet tread on the ruins of the broken faith, and the sharp edges cut into the bleeding flesh; but further on the path grows smoother, and presently at its side begins to peep forth the humble daisy of hope that heralds the springtide, and further on the roadside is fragrant with all the flowers of summer, sweet and brilliant and gorgeous, and in the distance we see the promise of the autumn, the harvest that shall be reaped for the feeding of man.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
To the savage everything is divine; he hears one God's voice in the clap of the thunder, another's in the roar of the earthquake, he sees a divinity in the trees, a deity smiles at him from the clear depths of the river and the lake; every natural phenomenon is the abode of a god; every event is controlled by a god; divine volition is at the root of every incident. To him the rule of the gods is a stern reality; if he offends them they turn the forces of nature against him; the flood, the famine, the pestilence, are the ministers of the avenging anger of the gods.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Anyone who has reached a certain stage of intellectual knowledge will recognise the unity of mankind.... That intellectual recognition of the unity is practically universal among educated people; but very few are prepared to carry out the intellectual recognition into practical life and practical training.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
It may be hoped that when divorce is more easily obtainable, the majority of marriages will be far happier than they are now. Half the unhappiness of married life arises from the too great feeling of security which grows out of the indissoluble character of the tie. The husband is very different from the lover; the wife from the betrothed; the ready attention, the desire to please, the eager courtesy, which characterised the lover disappear when possession has become certain; the daintiness, the gaiety, the attractiveness which marked the betrothed, are no longer to be seen in the wife whose position is secure; in society a lover may be known by his attention to his betrothed, a husband by his indifference to his wife.
ANNIE BESANT
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be
The Atonement is not only doubly unjust, but it is perfectly futile. We are told that Christ took away the sins of the world; we have a right to ask, "how?" So far as we can judge, we bear our sins in our own bodies still, and the Atonement helps us not at all. Has he borne the physical consequences of sin, such as the loss of health caused by intemperance of all kinds? Not at all, this penalty remains, and, from the nature of things, cannot be transferred. Has he borne the social consequences, shame, loss of credit, and so on? They remain still to hinder us as we strive to rise after our fall. Has he at least borne the pangs of remorse for us, the stings of conscience? By no means; the tears of sorrow are no less bitter, the prickings of repentance no less keen. Perhaps he has struck at the root of evil, and has put away sin itself out of a redeemed world? Alas! the wailing that goes up to heaven from a world oppressed with sin weeps out a sorrowfully emphatic, "no, this he has not done." What has he then borne for us? Nothing, save the phantom wrath of a phantom tyrant; all that is real exists the same as before. We turn away, then, from the offered atonement with a feeling that would be impatience at such trifling, were it not all too sorrowful, and leave the Christians to impose on their imagined sacrifice, the imagined burden of the guilt of the accursed race.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
The various classes of orthodox Christian doctrines should be attacked in very different styles by the champions of the great army of free-thinkers, who are at the present day besieging the venerable superstitions of the past. Around the Deity of Jesus cluster many hallowed memories and fond associations; the worship of centuries has shed around his figure a halo of light, and he has been made into the ideal of Humanity; the noblest conceptions of morality, the highest flights of enlightened minds, have been enshrined in a human personality and called by the name of Christ; the Christ-idea has risen and expanded with every development of human progress, and the Christ of the highest Christianity of the day is far other than the Christ of Augustine, of Thomas à Kempis, of Luther, or Knox; the strivings after light, after knowledge, after holiness, of the noblest sons of men have been called by them a following of Jesus; Jesus is baptized in human tears, crucified in human pains, glorified in human hopes. Because of all this, because he is dear to human hearts and identified with human struggles, therefore he should be gently spoken of by all who feel the bonds of the brotherhood of man; the dogma of his Deity must be assailed, must be overthrown, because it is false, because it destroys the unity of God, because it veils from us the Eternal Spirit, the source of all things, but he himself should be reverently spoken of, so far as truthfulness permits, and this dogma, although persistently battled against, should be attacked without anger and without scorn.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
But there is worse than physical torture in the picture of hell; pain is not its darkest aspect. Of all the thoughts with which the heart of man has outraged the Eternal Righteousness, there is none so appalling, none so blasphemous, as that which declares that even one soul, made by the Supreme Good, shall remain during all eternity, under the power of sin. Divines have wearied themselves in describing the horrors of the Christian hell; but it is not the furnace of flames, not the undying worm, not the fire which never may be quenched, that revolt us most; hideous as are these images, they are not the worst terror of hell. Who does not know how St. Francis, believing himself ordained to be lost everlastingly, fell on his knees and cried, "O my God, if I am indeed doomed to hate thee during eternity, at least suffer me to love thee while I live here." To the righteous heart the agony of hell is a far worse one than physical torture could inflict: it is the existence of men and women who might have been saints, shut out from hope of holiness for evermore; God's children, the work of his hands, gnashing their teeth at a Father who has cast them down for ever from the life he might have given; it is Love everlastingly hated; good everlastingly trampled under foot; God everlastingly baffled and defied; worst of all, it is a room in the Father's house where his children may hunger and thirst after righteousness, but never, never, can be filled.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
True religion consists not only in feelings towards God, but also in duties towards men.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
There is a deep truth in the idea of Pantheism, that "Nature is an apparition of the Deity, God in a mask;" that "He is the light of the morning, the beauty of the noon, and the strength of the sun. He is the One, the All... The soul of all; more moving than motion, more stable than rest; fairer than beauty, and stronger than strength. The power of Nature is God... He is the All; the Reality of all phenomena." The child fed on this food will have scarcely anything to unlearn, even when he begins to believe that God is something more than Nature; "the created All is the symbol of God," and he will pass easily and naturally on from seeing God in Nature to see Him in a higher form.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
But happily many, even among Christians, are beginning to shrink from this idea of salvation from the God in whom they say they place all their hopes. They put aside the doctrine, they gloss it over, they prefer not to speak of it. Free thought is leavening Christianity, and is moulding the old faith against its will. Christianity now hides its own cruel side, and only where the bold opponents of its creeds have not yet spread, does it dare to show itself in its real colours; in Spain, in Mexico, we see Christianity unveiled; here, in England, liberty is too strong for it, and it is forced into a semblance of liberality. The old wine is being poured into new bottles; what will be the result? We may, however, rejoice that nobler thoughts about God are beginning to prevail, and are driving out the old wicked notions about Him and His revenge. The Face of the Father is beginning, however dimly, to shine out from His world, and before the Beauty of that Face all hard thoughts about Him are fading away. Nature is too fair to be slandered for ever, and when men perceive that God and Nature are One, all that is ghastly and horrible must die and drop into forgetfulness. The popular Christian ideas of mediation and salvation must soon pass away into the limbo of rejected creeds which is being filled so fast; they are already dead, and their pale ghosts shall soon flit no longer to vex and harass the souls of living men.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
The whole Christian scheme turns on the assumption of the inherent necessity of some one standing between the Creator and the creature, and shielding the all-weak from the power of the All-mighty.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism