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| Bertrand Arthur William Russell
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Today is the birthday
of a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic
Bertrand Arthur William Russell. At various
points in his life Bertrand Russell (18 May 1872
– 2 February 1970) considered himself
a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never
been any of these in any profound sense. Russell led the British "revolt
against idealism" in the early 20th century. He is
considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his
predecessor Gottlob Frege and his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is widely
held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. His
work has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory,
linguistics, computer science, and philosophy, especially philosophy of
language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Russell was a prominent anti-war
activist; he championed free trade and anti-imperialism and went to prison for
his pacifism during World War I. A prolific commentator on religion,
Russell—along with others such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich
Nietzsche—advanced a "new school of thought" that Greg Epstein calls
"antagonistic atheism", which was "the view that religion was a
thing of the past and ought to be brought hastily toward a point of declining
influence". In 1950 Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature,
"in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he
champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought." Here presenting the
lecture; was delivered at the Battersea Town Hall under the auspices of the
South London Branch of the National Secular Society, England : Being Poet
Why I Am Not a Christian
An Examination of the God-Idea and Christianity
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 in 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.
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 anyone 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 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 that 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; but in that
sense we are all Christians. The geography books counts 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 the 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.
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. This 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.
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 that 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.
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 any explanation 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 depth 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 that 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 to a great many of them. They are statistical averages
such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes the 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 law-giver 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 was 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 law-giver.
In short, this whole argument from natural law no longer has anything like the
strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of these
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 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, the Fascisti, and Mr. Winston Churchill? Really I am not much
impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid
product that there must have been design in the universe." I am not very
much impressed by the splendor of those people. 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 merely a flash in the
pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of
decay you get the sort of conditions and 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
in 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 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 psycho-analysts 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 and 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 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 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 who made this world, or could
take up the line that some of the agnostics ["Gnostics" -- CW] 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 the universe that we know there is a 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, and so they say that there must be a God, and that 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 then 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
is not really what 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.
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
they 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 thou not away." This 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, I am not by way of doing so, and 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 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 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 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 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 really did 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 this respect clearly He was not
so wise as some other people have been, and he certainly was not superlatively
wise.
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 that 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 this 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 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.
As I said
before, I do not think that the real reason that 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 worshipped 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 of 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
ever 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 stay together for life,"
and no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from
giving birth to syphilitic children. This is what the Catholic church says. I
say that that is fiendish cruelty, and 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 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 the 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.
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 a 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.
(source : www.positiveatheism.org )
