Since there is no secular way to resolve the primal mystery of life and death, all secular societies are lies. And since there is no sure human answer to such a mystery, all religious integrations are mystifications. This is the sober conclusion to which we seem to be led. Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death. But no mortal, nor even a group of as many as 700 million clean revolutionary mortals, can keep such a promise: no matter how loudly or how artfully he protests or they protest, it is not within man's means to triumph over evil and death. For secular societies the thing is ridiculous: what can "victory" mean secularly? And for religious societies victory is part of a blind and trusting belief in another dimension of reality. Each historical society, then, is a hopeful mystification or a determined lie.
Many religionists have lamented the great toll that the Hitlers and the Stalins have taken in order to give their followers the equivalent of religious expiation and immortality; it seemed that when man lost the frank religious dimension of experience, he became even more desperate and wild; when he tried to make the earth alone a pure paradise, he had to become even more demonic and devilish. But when one looks at the toll of scapegoats that religious integrations have taken, one can agree with Duncan that religious mystifications have so far been as dangerous as any other. No world view has a claim on secure truth, must less on greater purity—at least as it has been practiced historically in the social world. Harrington, as usual, sums it up very colorfully:
"The plotters of earthly and heavenly paradise have fought, slandered and sabotaged one another for hundreds of years. One stands accused of unbridled hubris (risking divine retaliation, jeopardizing everybody's chances); the other of superstition (cringing before mystery); and each finds the other obstructing the road to eternal life."