Why I Am Not A Christian by Bertrand Russell Introductory note:
Russell delivered this lecture on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular
Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall. Published in
pamphlet form in that same year, the essay subsequently achieved new
fame with Paul Edwards' edition of Russell's book, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays ... (1957).
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 he 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 GodTo
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 ArgumentPerhaps
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 ArgumentThen
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 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 therefore you do not get any advantage by
introducing God as an intermediary. You really have 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 DesignThe
next step in the 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
about 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 I 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 DeityNow
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 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, then you are 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 do, 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 that 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 InjusticeThen
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 only know 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. 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 ChristI
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
[Stanley Baldwin], 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 practised. 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 TeachingHaving
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 ProblemThen
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 sorts 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 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 asHis 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 very kind to the pigs to put
the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into 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 blame 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 FactorAs
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, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon 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, that 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 all 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 ProgressYou
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 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 ReligionReligion
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 better place to live in, instead of the sort
of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it. What We Must DoWe
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. |