Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.

Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life.

Owing to the identification of religion with virtue, together with the fact that the most religious men are not the most intelligent, a religious education gives courage to the stupid to resist the authority of educated men, as has happened, for example, where the teaching of evolution has been made illegal. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance — and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism.

We must not infer from [the decline of religion] that rationalistic or scientific education has made any great progress in the lower classes. A person may not only question the truth of religious doctrines — he may also be convinced that all religions are historical phenomena born of innate and profound needs of the human spirit, and that attitude may be arrived at through a realistic mental training based on comprehensive studies that have gradually accustomed the mind not to accept as true anything that is not scientifically proved. In such a case, on losing one system of illusions, the individual is left so well balanced that he will not be inclined to embrace another, and certainly not the first that comes along. But the mass of lower-class unbelievers that we have in nations of European civilization today — and also, it must be confessed, the great majority of unbelievers who are not exactly lower-class, do not arrive at rationalism over any such road. They disbelieve, and they scoff, simply because they have grown up in environments in which they have been taught to disbelieve and to scoff. Under those circumstances, the mind that rejects Christianity because it is based on the supernatural is quite ready to accept other beliefs, and beliefs that may well be cruder and more vulgar. [...] Instead of believing blindly in the priest they believe blindly in the revolutionary agitator. They pride themselves on being in the vanguard of civilization, and their minds are open to all sorts of superstitions and sophistries. The moral and intellectual status which they have attained, far from being an enlightened positivism, is just a vulgar, sensuous, degrading materialism — it is “‘indifferentism,” if one prefers to call it that.

One always feels that a merely educated man holds his philosophical views as if they were so many pennies in his pocket. They are separate from his life. Whereas with a cultured man there is no gap or lacuna between his opinions and his life. Both are dominated by the same organic, inevitable fatality. They are what he is.

and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.