Aldous Huxley on the Areligiosity of Absolutist Zeal

Quote

Just a Quote

This Aldous Huxley quote jumped out at me from The Devils as being very relevant to the series on analyzing belief and spirituality in the birth chart. This is just an aside and this post contains no astrological analysis of Huxley’s chart.

But looking back and up, from our vantage point on the descending road of modern history, we now see that all the evils of religion can flourish without any belief in the supernatural, that convinced materialists are ready to worship their own jerry-built creations as though they were the Absolute, and that self-styled humanists will persecute their adversaries with all the zeal of Inquisitors exterminating the devotees of a personal and transcendent Satan.  Such behavior-patterns antedate and outlive the beliefs which, at any given moment, seem to motivate them.  Few people now believe in the Devil; but very many enjoy behaving as their ancestors behaved when the Fiend was a reality as unquestionable as his Opposite Number.  In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils.  This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good.

– Aldous Huxley, from The Devils of Loudon p. 123 (Harper, NY, 1952)

 

Image attributions

Aldous Huxley (cropped, featured image): By Thierry Ehrmann [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons