This is a very entertaining and logically sound read- unlike our
Thread Starter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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
[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.
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.
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 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.
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, 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.
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 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."
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 better 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 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.
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