Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph McCabe

McCabe turns atheism from a mere absence of belief into a badge of modernity: not a void, but a product. “The making” is doing a lot of work here. It implies process, discipline, and a kind of intellectual apprenticeship, the opposite of the caricature of atheism as knee-jerk contrarianism. By framing atheism as something you arrive at through “mental stimulation and training,” he’s really making a claim about what religion represents in his world: a default setting, socially inherited, and therefore intellectually unearned.

The phrase “primary factors of social progress” is the quiet provocation. McCabe isn’t just defending nonbelief; he’s attaching it to the machinery of history. In the early 20th century, when freethought circles tangled with church power over education, sexual ethics, and public policy, “progress” wasn’t a neutral word. It was a political flag. McCabe, an ex-Catholic priest turned prolific rationalist writer, is arguing that a secular mind is not only freer but civically useful: trained skepticism becomes social reform.

Subtextually, the quote flatters the convert. It offers atheism as an achievement unlocked by rigor, not a lapse in faith. That’s persuasive rhetoric aimed at readers who feel hemmed in by religious authority and want their doubt to register as virtue. It also risks sounding elitist, as if belief is merely intellectual laziness. McCabe knows the trade-off and takes it anyway, because he’s selling a cultural identity: reason as a moral engine, and unbelief as a public good.