Both Protestantism and Catholicism are systems built on essentially the same foundation. Remove any of these stones, and the systems will have to be rebuilt. If there is no special revelation, there is no special scheme of salvation. If there is no vengeful, blood-seeking God, there is no theological reconciliation. If there was no fall, there is no hopeless depravity. If there was no immaculate conception, there is no Redeemer in a special ecclesiastical sense. If there is no total depravity, there is no lost world. If there is no lost world, there is no yawning Hell. One and all, these fictions have their only ground for continuance in a _selfish_ and unreasoning priesthood and clergy, and a credulous people.
In the place of the "fall," science has put the "rise" of man. It finds the Garden of Eden to have been a jungle. It finds the mythical perfect Adam to have been a savage. It finds the Biblical "origin of evil" to have been a puerile legend. It finds that sin and evil are made by the seeing of higher states. It finds that there was no bad until the better was reached. It finds that it is the advancing good which makes the existing bad. It finds that among the worst of sinners are those who live in and propagate outworn doctrines upon their own and others' credulity.
In the olden times, God was made a king--the world was his kingdom. His powers, virtues and vices were simply those of earthly kings exaggerated. Jewish and Christian liturgies are full of expressions showing the attitude of slaves and serfs to a tyrant. Sin has been manufactured as heresy and disobedience to the so-called orthodox system instead of to the laws of Nature.
Science has shown that the bottomless pit did not even have a top. Columbus sailed over the Western edge of the flat Christian world on which all this Christian system depended, and found that the material Heaven and Hell were unfounded myths; but the preachers and priests still threaten _hell_ to the most ignorant and credulous, but they tell some of us that there is a _final judgment_.
In the old days, we used to hear a great deal about judgments. A certain honest, good-natured, old farmer in New Hampshire, who was a freethinker, but had a very pious wife, lost many cattle when the black tongue was an epidemic in the State.