This postwar period is the most morally dangerous in all mankind's history. The breakdown of religious sanctions is inevitably more widespread than ever before. For evolution has brought millions of people to the point where irrational dogmas and unscientific beliefs have become hopelessly outmoded. Such an intellectual displacement need not be deplored because sooner or later it had to happen. But unfortunately the loss of these sanctions is accompanied by the breakdown of that which depends on them. And the most important single item among the latter is the ethical standard. People have no cause to practise virtue and fear evil when they come to believe that the one will go unrewarded and the other unpunished. The whole world has witnessed, in the barbarous wrong-doing of Hitler and his young fanatic followers, how lost to all decent living, how utterly without a conscience, how unguided by any valid sense of right or wrong, men may become when they give up religious faith but are unable to replace it by right mystical practice or correct metaphysical reasoning. They exist thereafter in a moral "no-man's-land." It is this interregnum in moral evolution between the standards set by religions and those set by mysticism or metaphysics, an interregnum where morality lapses altogether, that must necessarily constitute a period of the gravest ethical crisis and danger to mankind. The depths to which the Nazis sank amply illustrate this truth.
-- Notebooks Category 17: The Religious Urge > Chapter 7 : Beyond Religion As We Know It > # 6
