Although he was a collaborator with the radical Fanny Wright (and her partner, socialist Robert Owen), and had veered strongly toward agnosticism himself, Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) quickly found their anti-religion stance intellectually clumsy. The radicals taught that religion/superstition (the two are synonymous for radicals) were coeval with the human race, which was pock-marked with imperfections and suffering. Get rid of religion, the radicals reasoned, and mankind's sufferings would diminish or disappear altogether. This, Brownson figured out, was awfully wrongheaded. If religion had been with mankind from the beginning, then it must be natural to man or imposed by the supernatural. If it's natural to man, it's useless to resist it; if it's supernatural, it's folly to resist it.
