They have thrown overboard, she reflected, all the spiritual anchorages which gave them security in the past and made them strong. Religion had failed them, for they had made of religion an outer form useful only when it served their own selfish purposes.
Men, as always, prayed to a God of their own creation, a Divinity which only mirrored the petty minds of its worshippers. This man, avid of wealth and power, prayed devoutly and absentmindedly to his conception of God, a being of unlimited wealth, plastered with diamonds, fat, vulgar and, through his wealth, able to dictate the lives of countless millions of creatures scattered throughout a boundless universe.
Another man prayed to a God of vengeance, a God who had wisely taken counsel of man and decreed that this race or that one should be crowned as the chosen people. Blindly by obsessions of superiority, unbelievable cruelties were prayed over and asked of God by these molelike creatures who fancied their own infinitesimal wisdom superior to that of any other beings, human or divine. One thing and another they asked for, Gods of varying stature were sought and found, in no wise differing from the reflection that the humans caught from their bedroom mirrors. Above all, they demonstrated through their prayers that they believed only in themselves and they were unable to accomplish the miracles they sought.
Morality meant merely the observance, usually in the breach, of certain man-made rules and regulations. It seemed to her there was a far greater amount of immorality practised by certain married couples she knew between whom all love had died than in relationships which she could easily imagine but which conventions would condemn with