Lecture: A Postulate Out of a Golden Age
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1956, 6 December
Document title: A Postulate Out of a Golden Age
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Organization Series
Location: Washington, DC
Document ID: Org Series-16
Description: Hubbard says that "Be free" and not "Love thy Neighbor" has been the civilizing influence; says that freedom of religion is what destroyed religion.
A fabulous thing to observe: We think “Love thy Neighbor” has been the civilizing influence. It has not been. “Be free” has been.
The religious world may have dominated, at one time or another, the Middle Ages, but the religious world consisted in itself of a tyranny and was itself antipathetic to this very thing called freedom. Where we could have the word of one man saying, “All must now believe; all must now worship; you must keep your hand in your upper breast pocket while quoting Psalm 66 and in no other place,” we did not have freedom. We had slavery.
And we also never taught very much about Greece until the day of the Scholastic. And it was an unhappy day that they reached into the tombs below the Vatican where they have kept all the books which were salvaged from the old Greek and Roman libraries, and brought out and gave to the world, like a little tidbit, the works of Aristotle as a scientific work, and
formed the basis of what we called Scholasticism. And people read a little bit further and they found the rest of them. They found people like Plato. They found this fellow Socrates. They found these other chaps who had a lot to say. And all these chaps were talking about was freedom and there went the church. Boom!You can recognize the truth of this. There was no stronger force on the face of earth, in 1400 and something, when Cesare Borgia was letting his sister poison some fellows so his uncle the pope could sell a few more seats in a few more monasteries. This was a tight, capitalistic, highly profitable tyranny, and it blew up in their faces. And it did an awful lot of very violent blowing up before we begin to hear about anything like freedom. Things started to blow up in sections, and they blew up in the face of religion.
We had such oddities as the entirety of Holland in revolt against tyranny. We had the oddity of Philip of Spain coming up to Holland and burning people in the streets for heresy. We had the people of Holland being butchered and run into the dikes, and we had them fighting down to the last man. With their preachers, they considered their first freedom, freedom of religion. And their preachers went about in the fields on a Sunday reading from a forbidden book called the Bible. And because Philip ran out of troops before Holland ran out of population, the yoke was overthrown. And that was the end of that particular regime.
And from there we had blowups the length and width of Europe. They were first striking for freedom for religion and out of that crew came the Puritan Fathers. It’s very interesting, very interesting to trace it back, not as something speculative and not as something that you or I would then guess about, but to trace it back with such heavy-heeled strides straight back to the Age of Pericles.
Religion became free. And when it became entirely free, it itself, as a last tyranny, began to blow up. Freedom of religion destroyed religion.
Hubbard, L. R. (1956, 6 December). A Postulate Out of a Golden Age. Organization Series, (Org Series-16). Lecture conducted from Washington, DC.