Why I Am Not a Christian
excerpted from the book
Why I Am Not a Christian
and other essays on religion and
related subjects
by Bertrand Russell
Touchstone, 1957, paper
This lecture was delivered
on March 6 1927, at Battersea Town Hall under the auspices of
the South London Branch of the National Secular Society.
As your Chairman has told you, the subject
about which I am going to speak to you tonight is "Why I
Am Not a Christian." Perhaps it would be as well, first of
all, to try to make out what one means by the word Christian.
It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people.
Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live
a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians
in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper
sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the
people who are not Christians-all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans,
and so on-are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by
a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to
his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite
belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The
word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it
had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those
days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what
he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were
set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those
creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.
What Is a Christian?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have
to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think,
however, that there are two different items which are quite essential
to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a
dogmatic nature-namely, that you must believe in God and immortality.
If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that
you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than
that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about
Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and
in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians.
I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ
was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you
are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think
you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there
is another sense, which you find in Whitaker's Almanack and in
geography books, where the population of the world is said to
be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers,
and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. The geography
books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense,
which I suppose we can ignore. Therefore I take it that when I
tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different
things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality;
and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and
wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral
goodness.
But for the successful efforts of unbelievers
in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity
as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded
sense. For instance, it included the belief in hell. Belief in
eternal hell-fire was an essential item of Christian belief until
pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to
be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council,
and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop
of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled
by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able
to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a
Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must
believe in hell.
The Existence of God
To come to this question of the existence
of God: it is a large and serious question, and if I were to attempt
to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you
here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if
I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of course,
that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the
existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is
a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They
had to introduce it because at one time the freethinkers adopted
the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which
mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course
they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments
and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic
Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down
that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason
and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to
prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall
take only a few.
The First-cause Argument
Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand
is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything
we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain
of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause,
and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument,
I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because,
in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The
philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and
it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart
from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a
First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that
when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously
in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First
Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart
Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My
father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered,
since it immediately suggests the further question 'Who made God?'"
That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy
in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a
cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without
a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there
cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the
same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an
elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they
said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose
we change the subject." The argument is really no better
than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come
into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any
reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason
to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that
things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our
imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time
upon the argument about the First Cause.
The Natural-law Argument
Then there is a very common argument from
natural law. That was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth
century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and
his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun
according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God
had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular
fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a
convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble
of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation.
Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated
fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do, not propose to give
you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein,
because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer
have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system,
where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved
in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we
thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know
that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still
three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact,
but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many
things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind.
On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of
what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject
to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive
are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from
chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice
you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times,
and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice
is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came
every time we should think that there was design. The laws of
nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They
are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of
chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much
less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which
represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow,
the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a
confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests
commanding you to behave a certain way, in which way you may choose
to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are
a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere
description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there
must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing
that there were, you are then faced with the question "Why
did God issue just those natural laws and no others?" If
you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and
without any reason, you then find that there is something which
is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted.
If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws
which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather
than others-the reason, of course, being to create the best universe,
although you would never think it to look at it-if there were
a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject
to law, and there- / fore you do not get any advantage by introducing
God as an intermediary. You have really a law outside and anterior
to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because
he is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this whole argument
about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that
it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of the
arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God
change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard
intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies.
As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually
and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.
The Argument from Design
The next step in this process brings us
to the argument from design. You all know the argument from design:
everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to
live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different,
we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design.
It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is
argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot.
I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an
easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that
obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles.
That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of
the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because
since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living
creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their
environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew
to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There
is no evidence of design about it.
When you come to look into this argument
from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe
that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all
its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience
have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot
believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence
and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your
world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan
or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of
science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general
on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the
decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get
the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable
to protoplasm, and, there is life for a short time in the life
of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing
to which the earth is tending-something dead, cold, and lifeless.
I am told that that sort of view is depressing,
and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that,
they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it
is all nonsense. Nobody really worries much about what is going
to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are
worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves.
They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may
merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered
unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to
this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although
it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out-at
least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate
the things that people do with their lives 1 think it is almost
a consolation-it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely
makes you turn your attention to other things.
The Moral Arguments for Deity
Now we reach one stage further in what
I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made
in their argumentations, and we come to what are called the moral
arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course, that
there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments
for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel
Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed
of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument,
and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual
matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly
in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee. That illustrates
what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize-the immensely stronger
hold upon us that our very early associations have than those
of later times.
Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument
for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely
popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms.
One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless
God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there
is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not:
that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that,
if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and
wrong, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due
to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for
God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and
it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good.
If you are going to say, as theologians d, that God is good, you
must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is
independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not
bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are
going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only
through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they
are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of
course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who
gave orders to the God who made this world, or could take up the
line that some of the gnostics took up-a line which I often thought
was a very plausible one-that as a matter of fact this world that
we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking.
There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned
to refute it.
The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice
Then there is another very curious form
of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence
of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In
the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice,
and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one
hardly knows which of those is the, more annoying; but if you
are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have
to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on
earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be
heaven and hell in order that in the long run there may be justice.
That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from
a scientific point of view, you would say, "After all, I
know only this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe,
but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would
say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is
injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere
also." Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened,
and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not
argue, "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress
the balance." You would say, "Probably the whole lot
is a bad consignment"; and that is really what a scientific
person would argue about the universe. He would say, "Here
we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as
that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not
rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords
a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one."
Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that
I have been talking to you about are not what really moves people.
What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual
argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have
been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main
reason.
I Then I think that the next most powerful
reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is
a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound
part in influencing people's desire for a belief in God.
The Character of Christ
I now want to say a few words upon a topic
which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists,
and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest
of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree
that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good
many points upon which I -agree with Christ a great deal more
than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could
go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further
than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He
said, "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on
thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." That is not
a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-tse and Buddha
some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle
which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that
the present Prime Minister,* for instance, is a most sincere Christian,
but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one
cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended
in a figurative sense.
Then there is another point which I consider
excellent. You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not
lest ye be judged." That principle I do not think you would
find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have
known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest
Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary
to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, "Give
to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of
thee turn not thou away." That is a very good principle.
Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics,
but I cannot help observing that the last general election was
fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from
him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the
Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people
who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly
did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.
Then there is one other maxim of Christ
which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it
is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says,
"If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast,
and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but,
as I say, it is not much practiced. All these, I think, are good
maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to., I
do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all,
it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.
Defects in Christ's Teaching
Having granted the excellence of these
maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that
one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative
goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may
say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically
it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if
He did we do not know anything about Him, so that I am not concerned
with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I
am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking
the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some
things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, He certainly
thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory
before the death of all the people who were living at that time.
There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance,
"Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the
Son of Man be come." Then He says, "There are some standing
here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into
His kingdom"; and there are a lot of places where it is quite
clear that He believed that His second coming would happen during
the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of His earlier
followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching.
When He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and
things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought that
the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary
mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known
some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent.
I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling
them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they
were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees
in his garden. The early Christians did really believe it, and
they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens,
because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second
coming was imminent. In that respect, clearly He was not so wise
as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively
wise.
The Moral Problem
Then you come to moral questions. There
is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character,
and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that
any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting
punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe
in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive
fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching-an
attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does
somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for
instance find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland
and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and
it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line
than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember
the sort of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying,
and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who
did not agree with him.
You will find that in the Gospels Christ
said, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape
the damnation of hell." That was said to people who did not
like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best
tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. There
is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy
Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall
not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to
come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery
in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they
have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that
it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world
to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree
of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of
that sort into the world.
Then Christ says, "The Son of Man
shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His
kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and
shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing
and gnashing of teeth"; and He goes on about the wailing
and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and
it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure
in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would
not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the
sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide
the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats,
"Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire."
He continues, "And these shall go away into everlasting fire."
Then He says again, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off;
it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two
hands to go into hell, into, the fire that never shall be quenched;
where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." He
repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all
this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine
of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and
gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of
the Gospels, if you could take Him as His chroniclers represent
Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible
for that.
There are other things of less importance.
There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly
was not kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make
them rush down the hill to the sea. You must remember that He
was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away;
but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious
story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember
what happened about the fig tree. "He was hungry; and seeing
a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find
anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but
leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and
said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever' .
. . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig tree
which thou cursedst is withered away."' This is a very curious
story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and
you really could not blaxrie the tree. I cannot myself feel that
either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ
stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I
think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.
The Emotional Factor
As I said before, I do not think that
the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do
with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion,
because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not
noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in
Samuel Butler's book, Erewbon Revisited. You will remember that
in Erewbon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country,
and after spending some time there he escapes from that country
in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country
and finds a new religion in which he is worshiped under the name
of the "Sun Child," and it is said that he ascended
into heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about
to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say
to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they
hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion
of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them,
and he says, "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell
the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I
went up in a balloon." He was told, "You must not do
that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this
myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into heaven
they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that
and he goes quietly away.
That is the idea-that we should all be
wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems
to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most
part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, hat the more
intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound
has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty
and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called
ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion
in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures;
there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and
there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people
in the name of religion.
You find as you look around the world
that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement
in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war,
every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every
mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been
in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches
of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion,
as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal
enemy of moral progress in the world.
How the Churches Have Retarded Progress
You may think that I am going too far
when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take
one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant
fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not
pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an
inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case
the Catholic Church says, "This is an indissoluble sacrament.
You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together,
you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic
children." Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been
warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead
to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and
proper that that state of things should continue.
That is only an example. There are a great
many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its
insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon
all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And
of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still
of progress and of improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering
in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality- a certain
narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human
happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done
because it would make for human happiness, they think that has
nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness
to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people
happy."
Fear, the Foundation of Religion
Religion is based, I think, primarily
and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and
partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind
of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and
disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing-.--fear of the
mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent
of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion
have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of
those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand
things, and a little to master them by help of science, which
has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion,
against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old
precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in
which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach
us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look
around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the
sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make
this world a fit place to live in, instead of The sort of place
that the churches in all these centuries have made it.
What We Must Do
We want to stand upon our own feet and
look fair and square at the world-its good facts, its bad facts,
its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be
not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely
by being slavishly subdued by the terror-that comes from it. The
whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient
Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free
men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying
that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems
contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We
ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought
to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good
as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these
others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge,
kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering
after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the
words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook
and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking
back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will
be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
Why
I Am Not A Christian
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