Some of the foregoing examples, together with earlier passages in this book, will have suggested one of the main directions from which hostility towards Bentham has often been voiced. To many religiously minded people, he has seemed a very sinister figure; and this is easily intelligible in view of the fact that, although he was cautious for most of his life about how he expressed himself publicly on the subject, his own dislike of religion was never hard to divine. His special antagonism towards the established Church derived initially from his being induced, against his inclination, to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles while a student at Oxford. Many of the articles appeared on examination to be either meaningless or contrary to reason, and the requirement that students should subscribe to them before graduating seemed to him calculated to foster a 'prostration to authority' and an 'indifference to truth' (UC xcvi 287). Similar points about the Church's reliance on authority and obfuscation in propagating its doctrines, and about the damaging effects this had on sincerity and intellectual independence, were made by Bentham in his first published work on religion, Church of Englandism (1818).
The reasons for his animosity towards the established Church in the post-war period were partly political; but he was also very critical of religion in general, partly on moral and partly on epistemological grounds. He believed that the fear of punishment after death was largely ineffective as a means of deterring people from misconduct, but that religion none the less produced a great deal of repression and unhappiness, as well as intense dissension between the adherents of different faiths and sects. The philosophical reasons for his rejection of religion were never fully stated; but he maintained that all human knowledge was either positive or inferential, that inferential knowledge was inherently uncertain, and that the grounds for believing in the existence of God as a 'superhuman inferential entity' were so weak or non-existent that he ought rather to be regarded as a 'non-entity' (B viii 195-6).
(John Dinwiddy, Bentham, Past Masters, ed. Keith Thomas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 112-3)
