Why I Am Not A Christian
by Bertrand Russell
This lecture was delivered on March 6, 1927, at the
Battersea Town Hall under the auspices of the South London
branch of the National Secular Society.
As your chairman has told you, the subject about which I am
to speak 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 of all
sects and creeds; but I do not think 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 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 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 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 that you must have at
the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine,
at least the best and very 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 worshippers, and so on; but
in that sense we are all Christians. The geography 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 very 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.
The Existence of God
To come to this question of the existence of God: it is a
large and serious question, and if I were to attempt to deal
with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you
here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse
me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You
know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down
as 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
reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic
Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it
down as dogma 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.
The First Cause Argument
Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the
argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that
everything we see in the 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 much
weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not
quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of
science have got going on cause, and it has not anything
like the vitality it used to have; but apart from that, you
can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause
is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I
was a young man and was debating these questions very
seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the
argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of
eighteen, i read John Stuart Mill's autobiography, and I
there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the
question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it
immediately suggests the further question "Who made god'".
That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the
fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything
must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can
be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the
world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that
argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's
view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the
elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How
about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the
subject." The argument is really no better than that. There
is no reason why the world could not have come into being
without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason
why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to
suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that
things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of
our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any
more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
The Natural-Law Argument
Then there is a very common argument from Natural Law. That
was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century,
especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his
cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun
according to the law of gravitation, and the thought that
God had given a behest to these planets to move in a
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 they are much less subject
to law than people thought, and 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 says if
you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in
thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence to
the contrary 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 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
supposedly someone who told them to do that, because even
supposing there were, you are faced with the question, "Why
did god issue just those 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,
as he is not the ultimate lawgiver. 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 Argument from Design
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, 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 ominscience 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 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 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 somethin much more
mundane, or it may merely be 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 moral
arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course,
that there used to be in the old days three intelllectual
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 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
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 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 theologans 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 fact that he made them. If you are going to say that,
you will 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 a
line that some of the Gnostics took up- a line which I often
thought was a very plausible one- that as a matter of fact
this world that we know was made by the Devil at a moment
when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said
for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.
The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice
Then there is another very curious form of moral argument,
which is this: they say that the existence of God is
required 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 the often the wicked prosper, and one
hardly knows which of those is 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 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
from probabilities one would say that probably this world is
a fair sample, and if there is injustice here then the odds
are great 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 consigment";
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
this world, and therefore so far as it goes it supports 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.
The Character of Christ
I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often
think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by rationalists,
and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the
wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we
should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think
that there are a good many points upon which I agree with
Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do.
I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I
could go with Him much further than most professing
Christians can. You will remember that He said, "Resist not
evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek,
turn to him the other also." That is not a new precept or a
new principle. It was used by Lao-Tse and Buddha some 500 or
600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as
a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the
present prime minister (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 very popular in the law courts of Christian
countries. I have known in my time 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 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 not behave that way on
that occasion.
Then there is one other maxim of Christ's teaching
which I think has a great deal of good 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 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 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 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.
The Moral Problem
Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious
defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is
that He believed in Hell. I do not myself feel that any
person 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 though 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 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 shall never 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 choes to send them into the pigs.
Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which has
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 Factor
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 do 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 of
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 diminuition of
war, every step towared better treatment of the colored
races, or ever mitigation of slavery, every moral progres
that there has been in the world, has been consistently
opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite
deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in
its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of
moral progress in the world.
How the Churches Have Retarded Progress
You may think that I am going too far when I say that that
is still so, I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You
will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant
fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are
not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in
today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man;
in that case the Catholic Church says, "This is an
indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay
together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth
control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children." Nobody
whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or
whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of
suffering could maintain that it is right and proper that
this 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 better place to live
in, instead of the sort of place the churches in all these
centuries have made it.
What We Must Do
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square
at the world - its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties,
and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid
of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by
being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
The whole conception of 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 longago 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.