Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, 29 June 2002

Introduction

In 1927, Betrand Russell gave a lecture at Battersea Town Hall to the South London Branch of the National Secular Society entitled, Why I am not a Christian. The quaker, Mr H G Wood, wrote a book in response in which he said:

The main reason why he is not a Christian is that he simply does not know what religion is.

Russell replied to this common insult that Mr Wood could equally be said not to be an atheist because he did not know what atheism was, but that all of us in the west were indoctrinated in Christianity from an early age, but no one was ever indoctrinated in atheism. In short, Wood was special pleading. For Christians, no one knows what their religion is, whatever the level of propaganda, unless they become one. They freely admit that the immediate followers of their Christ were idiots but cannot admit of any such judgement in their own cases.

What Russell presented is timeless because theologians have long ago run out of arguments, and here it is used as a basis for this essay. The lecture can be found in its entirety from a search of the website of the Internet Infidels.

Being a Christian

A tendency today is to consider that it does not much matter whether religious teaching is true or not, so long as it is useful. For Christians, especially Christian clergymen, what is useful is true. Others will not see it as useful at all, and so it is false on this utilitarian criterion. However, the attitude that one ought to believe propositions based on utility, independently of truth—whether it is upheld by evidence—is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to what does not suit us.

To decide whether religion does good needs the answer to the question of whether it is true. To Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews the most fundamental question involved in the truth of religion is the existence of God. In the days when religion was still triumphant the word “God” had a perfectly definite meaning, but the onslaughts of the Rationalists made the word paler and paler, until it is difficult to see what people mean when they assert that they believe in God. Let us take, for purposes of argument, Matthew Arnold’s definition: “A power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” Perhaps we might make this even more vague and ask ourselves whether we have any evidence of purpose in this universe apart from the purposes of living beings on the surface of this planet.

The usual argument of Christians for God is:

We Christians have amazing intelligence and virtue. So much intelligence and virtue could not have come about by chance. There must, therefore, be someone at least as intelligent and virtuous as we are who set the cosmic machinery in motion with a view to producing us.

So far, no signals or signs have been noticed by cosmologists that suggest there is any other lifeform in the universe as intelligent and as virtuous as Christians. Neverthless, scientists think the universe is so vast that it is impossible to believe that there are no such lifeforms, and they have arisen by circumstances from the laws of Nature and not by any act of God. If God actually controls the universe and made Christians, it becomes a puzzle why He should have only made such intellectual and virtuous creatures in this single place in the whole of the cosmos.

Then again, considered as the climax to such a vast process, Christians do not seem sufficiently marvellous. Many divines perhaps are marvellous—too marvellous for ordinary observers to appreciate—but even after making allowances, the omnipotent God operating through all eternity ought to have produced something better.

Many people mean no more by “Christian” than someone who tries to live a good life. Christians in this sense could be of any religion or none. It might be a popular meaning but it is not right. A Christian must have some definite belief to be able to use the name. Now, the beliefs of a Christian are less distinct than they used to be when the Christian accepted with the whole strength of their convictions every syllable of a collection of creeds precisely set out. Russell used to tell this story:

I was recently on a boat going to America, and a minister of religion on the boat invited me to speak to his congregation about my views on religion. I said: “Yours must be a very broad-minded congregation;” and this minister of religion, somewhat to my surprise, replied: “Oh, of course, I do not believe in God.” I met other ministers of religion in America who took the same line.

Most Christians would not knowingly have accepted these ministers as being Christians. What then must a Christian believe? Two different beliefs are essential to those calling themselves Christians. They must believe:

1. in God,
2. in immortality.

These two are really connected because the personal reward of Christians was immortality, but that necessitated a big immortal to control it all. The ones who were not rewarded were punished on death. Indeed death was the initial punishment. Before sin was introduced into the world, everyone was immortal. So human death is the sign of human wickedness.

No one treats a TV set as foolishly as Chritians treat human beings. When the TV will not go, they do not attribute its annoying behaviour to its sin. They does not say, “You are a wicked TV.” They do not even see the need for giving the TV a soul, though how its death is conceptually different from that of a human’s is not clear.

Last, Christians must have some belief about Christ. Moslems believe in God and immortality, but are not Christians. Christians believe that Christ was either divine, or an unsurpassed man. So, to argue against Christianity, belief in god, immortality and that Christ was divine or a semi-divine man are the beliefs that must be addressed.

Belief in eternal hell fire was also an essential item of Christian belief until recent times. The established religion of the UK, like that of Pagan Rome, is settled by law—by Act of Parliament. The Privy Council, although opposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York, decided it was not essential to Christians to believe in hell. So, they do not have to, in the UK at any rate.

Belief in One God

Whether there is a God is decided on different grounds by different communities and individuals. Most of mankind accept what their own community believes. Once everybody believed in many gods, and no one has ever believed in only one god. A single God in an eternity of time and an infinity of space must be insane. Living for an eternity without the solitude would drive anyone mad. People who say they are monotheists and believe in one God only, also contrive to believe in the Devil, archangels, millions of angels and demons, myriads of saints, and billions of spirits of the dead whether good or bad, all supernatural entities able to interfere with reality when they want, but these are apparently not gods. It shows that gods are whatever you define them as. Many ancient religions had a high god, but he was rarely the one to whom people appealed, just as now people normally appeal to Jesus Christ not to God. Zoroastrians first believed in one god much more powerful than others, and they taught it to the Jews.

They set down, in the fifth century BC, laws or commandments that the Jews had to obey. The first commandment was that they should believe in only one god above all the others. It was difficult to obey because the Hebrews had believed that Baal and Ashtaroth, and Dagon and Moloch, and others gods and goddesses were real. Some were wicked because they were the gods of their enemies. To concentrate the minds of the people on the one god, the others were categorized as demons, and had to be feared and hated, as did the people they helped. However, they were reduced in size and power relative to the Almighty God, who could therefore control them for the people as long as they obeyed Him. The laws were really those that suited the Persian suzerain.

Monotheism was adopted from Zoroastrianism via Judaism by Christianity, and later by Islam, and so became dominant throughout the whole of the world west of India. If the truth of a religion is to be judged by its worldly success, the argument in favor of monotheism is a strong one—it has had the largest armies, the largest navies, the most wealth and the biggest liars.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, some people have not been content to accept passively the religious opinions of others, but tried to consider what reason and philosophy might have to say about it. In the commercial cities of Ionia, where philosophy was invented, there were free-thinkers in the sixth century BC. They were confronted not by the Greek gods of mythology but by Orphism (to which Christianity owes much) and later, philosophically, by Plato, from whom the Greeks derived a philosophical monotheism very different from the political and nationalistic monotheism of the Jews. When the Greek world became converted to Christianity it combined the new creed with Platonic metaphysics and so gave birth to theology, and philosophy died.

Catholic theologians, from the time of S Augustine to the present day, have believed that the existence of one God could be proved by reason alone. They had to introduce this article of faith because opponents of the church were using reason to show that God did not exist. These sterile arguments of the theologians dominated intellect for a millennium and were put into final form by S Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. When philosophy was resurrected from its Christian tomb in the seventeenth century, Descartes and Leibniz took over theological arguments, powdered and polished them, and kept piety intellectually respectable. Descartes wanted to bring his beliefs down to something which was absolutely certain to be a safe foundation upon which to build. He concluded:

I think, therefore I am.

Today the desperate apologist argues: “Some voice or power or sense can say with equal authority within me, ‘God exists.’ ” The apologist enters the Cartesian Circle but can get no further than Descartes. My own thought proves that “I am,” but my own thought cannot prove that “God is.” There is no proof that any thought that enters my head is any other than my own. “God exists,” entering my head as a refrain therefore merely tells me of a conviction that I have, but not that it is true. God or a demon could have distorted it. That it is in my head only proves that I am thinking about it, and therefore “I am.” Locke, although himself a convinced Christian, undermined the theoretical basis of the old arguments, and many of his followers, especially in France, became atheists.

The First Cause Argument

Only one philosophical argument for the existence of God still has weight with philosophers, and that is the argument of the First Cause. If everything in the world has a cause, at some point in time there must have been a First Cause. It is called God. The defect of this argument is that of the elephant and the tortoise. An eastern theologian told his disciples the earth rested on an elephant. A disciple asked the guru what the elephant stood on. He replied that it stood on a tortoise. Another disciple asked what the tortoise stood on. Whereupon, the guru replied, “I am tired of this. Let’s change the subject.” The First-Cause argument is unsatisfactory in the same way, and indeed any appeals to a Creator. John Stuart Mill expresses it succinctly in his Autobiography:

My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?

“Who created the creator?” is the obvious refutation of any such argument. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If the idea that God is unique and appeared without a cause is an acceptable answer, then there is no reason why initially the world uniquely came into being without a cause, but thereafter causes were a part of it. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God. Nor is there any reason why the universe should not have always existed and had no beginning at all. Time having a beginning might be an illusion like perspective. The surface of a globe is boundless yet things seem able to recede until they become a point at the horizon, and then disappear over it. The big-bang might be simply our horizon of time. Yet some US textbooks on physics use the “Big-Bang” as proof of God as the First Cause.

The Natural-Law Argument

God ordained the laws of nature just as the government enacts laws to control human behaviour. Many people are particularly impressed by this because they do not understand what is natural and what is not. They think it is remarkable that water freezes precisely at 0 C and boils precisely at 100 C. God must have ordained it. It is like Christians being amazed to learn that “Jesus” means “Yehouah Saves.” It shows the bible is inspired by God! Many Natural Laws are really human conventions. The actual laws of nature at the level of particles and molecules are found to be peculiarly ill-defined laws which require statistical methods to enumerate them. These laws turn out to be statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance.

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 people to behave a certain way. Not everyone wants to obey them and often they do not, explaining why the jails are full and the courts overused. Natural laws are a description of how things in Nature do in fact behave. If that is how they actually behave, no one has a choice of denying it or choosing to overlook the law.

Laws of Nature are simply summary rules of how things actually behave allowing us to predict what they will do in given circumstances. They are quite different from legislated laws of human conduct, but Christians think they are the same. Often religious people say that God is the legislator of natural laws and has made the best natural laws possible for the type of world needed to support human life. They do not notice that such an explanation gives God no choice. He is obliged by the superlatives to provide a particular set of laws to suit us best, and therefore he is subject to the laws he is supposedly legislating. What is the point then of God as a legislator? You really have a law outside and preceding the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate law-giver.

The Argument From Design

The world is made so that we can live in it, and if it was different we could not live in it. It is an easy argument to parody. Rabbits have white tails to be easy to shoot. The nose was designed for people to wear spectacles. But such parodies have turned out to contain elements of truth, ever since Darwin explained how living creatures adapt to their environment through the reproduction of the fittest in evolution. They evolved to fit their environment. There is no conscious design in it.

What is astonishing about this argument from design is that believers can accept that this world, with all its defects, should be the best that the omnipotence and omniscience of God could have produced in millions of years. Imagine you were God, granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect the world. Could you produce nothing better than fundamental religionists whether George Bush, Osama Bin Laden or Ariel Sharon? If these are the best people that God can produce after fifteen billion years of trying, then He is a God not worth worshipping, whether you do it in the Christian, the Moslem or the Jewish fashion.

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 Moral Arguments For Deity

Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason disposed of previous rational arguments for God, then he invented a new one, a moral argument, that convinced him, and was popular during the nineteenth century. William James popularized this moralistic argument for belief in God—by believing in God we behave better. There would be no right and wrong unless God existed. If there is a difference between right and wrong, is that difference due to God or not? If it is due to God, then God himself has introduced bad into the world, as indeed he claims in the Jewish scriptures, and so God cannot be good.

If God is good, then right and wrong have some meaning independent of God, because a good God could only do good, and right and wrong must logically precede God. There is a good deal to be said for the notion that this world was made by the Devil at a moment when God was not looking! This was the Gnostic idea. Even earlier, the Zoroastrians had two gods, differing little in power but the good God would ultimately prevail from having foresight like Promethus whereas the wicked god did not like Epimetheus.

It is in any case not an argument for God but merely for belief in Him as a utilitarian virtue. It says that politicians and educators ought to make people think there is a God for reasons of law and order. This is indeed the purpose of believing in God and is the practical reason for encouraging the false belief that there really is one, but it is a political matter not a theological one. It reduces theology to its real function—control. Few people will be satisfied to just believe in God whether He really exists or not, although ultimately that is what believers do. Believers want to be convinced that their belief is not merely illusion, but they convince themselves, because there is no other proof.

It is doubtful anyway whether the proposition is true without the practical measures of the police to uphold God’s wrath. Many of the best men known in history have not been Christians, and many of the worst men known to history have been Christians, or sometimes trained by Christians. Upholding opinions for their utility rather than for their truth is usually a disastrous policy for governments, although politicians rarely learn from history. Once a false policy is adopted, censorship is required to keep the truth from the young, and to discourage people from questioning the policy.

Christians will always decry such practices when it suits them, such as when they are employed against Christianity or reported in whichever “evil empire” is in vogue. But they are equally bad when used in defence of what Christians think is good. Freedom of thought and the habit of giving weight to evidence are matters of far greater moral importance than the belief in this or that theological dogma. Theological or political beliefs should not be upheld without regard to their truth.

The Argument For Justice

Another form of moral argument is that the existence of God is required to bring justice into the world. Often the good suffer, and the wicked prosper. Justice can only be brought to them if a future life can redress the injustice of life here on earth. So there must be a God, and there must be Heaven and Hell for there to be justice.

That is a curious argument which assumes that justice must ultimately prevail, but why should it? This world is the only one that we know, and, as this argument says, it is not necessarily just. That would suggest that there is no God, or that God is not good. To uphold the false assumption that justice must prevail, the theologians propose a false conclusion—that there must be another life after death, and a God to manage it all. The theologians are breaking the rules of the Schoolmen, but they are at least consistent—consistently deceitful.

The Opiate of the People

People say that without the consolations of Christianity they would be intolerably unhappy. This is the opiate of which Marx spoke.

Life is intolerable but can be made barely tolerable with an appropriate drug. Life is made tolerable by suppressing part of it in partial suicide—a withdrawal into a dream world. The importance of Christianity in contributing to individual happiness is exaggerated. Consciously choosing to live in a fantasy is not making life better. Given enough to eat, good physical health and mental health, the good opinion of society and the affection of their intimates, most people will be happy whatever their theology. Without them, most people will be unhappy, whatever their theology. Psychological studies show that some profoundly religious people are happier than most people, but many less religious ones are actually unhappier, Christianity giving them more doubts and fears than it can compensate for.

The Argument from Evolution

The scholastic arguments for the existence of a Supreme Being were genuine efforts of thought which could have proved something had they been true. They scholastic arguments are now rejected by most Protestant theologians in favor of new arguments which are no improvement. One of the favourite arguments is from evolution.

The world was once lifeless, and when life began it was a poor sort of life consisting of slime and snot. Gradually by evolution, it yielded plants and animals and at last humanity. Man is so splendid a being that he is the culmination to which the long ages of slime and snot were a prelude. Theologians do not seem to give due weight to Hitler, Bin Laden or the Beast of Jenin. Almighty God, in the fulness of eternity, thought it worth while to use millions of years of evolution to generate men such as these, whose purpose in life is to make innocent people suffer. Surely there could be no better argument that there is no god, or He is insane.

Cosmic Purpose

Either the psychological reason for people seeing a purpose in things leads to the idea of a Creator, or vice-versa. In human life, people create things for a purpose, so a cosmic Creator must have had one. To imagine that the omnipotent Creator has created a cosmos with a purpose is absurd. The Creator, being omnipotent could achieve His purpose instantly, so what is the purpose of purpose? Physicists say, as energy becomes more evenly distributed, it will become more useless. Gradually everything will evaporate or disperse. The cosmos seems to go nowhere, just empty. Perhaps there is a cosmic purpose, but no evidence demonstrates it.

If there is a purpose and if this purpose is that of an omnipotent Creator, then that Creator, so far from being loving and kind must be wicked beyond imagination.

• A man who commits a murder is considered wicked. The supposed omnipotent God that many people worship will kill every one of His worshippers. He murders everybody. It is a punishment, the scriptures tell us. The worshipper’s compensation is to believe, on the trust of another like-minded person, that death is really birth! Again no evidence demonstrates it.
• A man who willingly injected another with cancer would be considered a fiend. But the supposed Creator and Sustainer of the universe afflicts millions with this dreadful disease.
• A man who brought up his children to be criminals and murderers would be viewed with execration. But the supposed God generates many many people that he knows will be wicked and will cause distress to other people before He makes them.

Theologians at all times over-estimate the importance of our planet in the cosmos. It was natural enough when the heavens were thought to revolve about the earth, but since Copernicus and still more since the modern exploration of space, this pre-occupation with the earth has become rather parochial. If the universe had a Creator, it is only our hubris to suppose that He was specially interested in us or our miniscule planet. If really man is the purpose of the universe, both the introduction to it, and its conclusion, seem too long. Why did an omnipotent God mess around like this?

The second law of thermodynamics makes it scarcely possible to doubt that the universe is running down, and that ultimately nothing of the slightest interest will be possible anywhere. God will wind up the machinery again, Christians might believe but that is purely faith, with not a shred of evidence. Science predicts that the universe will die. There seems little purpose in this. There is no need to believe in any sort of God, however vague and however attenuated.

Bush’s Demon

Many believers speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. Often when President Bush, the candidate of the Christian Right, appears on TV, on some frames a leering devil can be seen behind him grinning over his shoulder. Although it is not always easy to see, it is there, and once, with a little prayer and concentration, it has been seen, it cannot be missed. Those who cannot see it must be blind, or they are too wicked. Christian skeptics have not disproved it. The existence of such devils are affirmed in ancient books, taught to schoolchildren as the sacred truth, and believed even by adults that attend church every Sunday. Some people can see it, and no one can disprove it, so, it ought to be considered as a vitally important sign, perhaps especially by Christians. Just to disbelieve that this devil is there is wilful or hard-core skepticism. That is how Christians argue.

Christians also think that, if a belief is widespread, it must be reasonable or true.

• Yet Protestants know there are absurd beliefs among Catholics.
• Catholics know there are absurd beliefs among Protestants.
• Conservatives are amazed by the superstitions to be found among liberals and socialists.
• Socialists and liberals are aghast at the credulity of Conservatives.

For most of mankind the beliefs of the rest are stupid and dangerous, and so the popularity of any belief is no proof of its rationality or correctness. There is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, there is no reason to wish that they were true. Human beings, in so far as they are not subject to natural forces, are free to work out their own destinies. Theirs is the entire responsibility, and theirs is the opportunity.

All these intellectual arguments do not really move people to believe in God. People believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and for emotional not intellectual reasons. The most powerful reason is the wish for help and comfort, a feeling that a big brother will look after you. That profoundly influences people’s desire for a belief in God.

The Character Of Christ

Religion is a social phenomenon. The most important thing about Christianity, from a social and historical point of view, is not Christ but the church, and the gospels offer little to judge Christianity as a social force. Churches are often founded by teachers with strong convictions, but pay scant regard to them. The churches they found however enormously influence the communities in which they flourish. Thus, the teaching of Christ, as it appears in the gospels, has had little to do with the ethics of Christians.

Was Christ the best and the wisest of men? The Christian consensus is that he was, or was even divine. For all that, most Christians ignore almost everything that can be understood about his teachings about life in the Christian New Testament. Christ taught among other things that his followers:

1. should give their goods to the poor,
2. had no need to attend church,
3. should not fight their enemies,
4. should not punish adultery.

Christians have not followed His teaching in any of these respects. When some Franciscans tried to practice apostolic poverty, the Pope condemned them, and their doctrine was declared heretical. What influence has a text like “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” had upon the Inquisition and the Ku Klux Klan?

Christianity is not alone in this culpability. The Buddha was amiable and enlightened. On his deathbed he laughed at his disciples for supposing he was immortal. But the Buddhist priesthood as it was in Tibet has been obscurantist, tyrannous, and cruel in the highest degree.

This difference between a church and its founder is not accidental. The sayings of a man with a following are declared by the followers to have been absolute truth. Then they declare they are the ones who can interpret these sayings properly. So, these experts acquire power in the new sect by having the key to truth. It is their business to expound this unchanging truth, revealed once and for all in utter perfection. Thus they are necessarily opponents of intellectual and moral progress.

The church opposed Galileo, Darwin and Freud. In the days of its greatest power, Pope Gregory the Great wrote to a bishop a letter beginning:

A report has reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends.

This bishop was compelled by the Pope not to teach anything as debased as grammar. Those people who try to pretend that the Dark Ages were not really dark at all because life went on, ignore the fact that they were dark because the Church banned all learning other than what was needed by a few for devotional purposes. Life did not cease but Europe lived in ignorance until the Renaissance.

Historically, it is possible Christ never existed, but Christians believe he did, and, if he did not, it does not detract from the value of the maxims that the mythical Christ purveyed. Many, if not most, religious founders were mythical, the myth having been created to justify certain practices that had arisen or been imposed. He said:

Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

The Christian President of the Free World did not base his policies after the attack on the Twin Towers on this principle, even though it was said by God Himself, or at least His best man. The Nasi of the Chosen People naturally rejects this principle and daily proves it. Because his Moslem opponents are foolish enough to believe in immortality, and show a willingness to blow themselves up alongside their enemies, hoping to enter heaven for their earthly sacrifice, Sharon decides to help them on their way with tanks, rockets and helicopter gunships. Christ also said:

Judge not lest ye be judged.

The Supreme Court, a body of professional judges and mainly, if not entirely, Christians, did not consider at any point in their careers that they had undertaken a profession that God Himself forbade, or at least His best man did. In particular, they did not think they were doing any wrong in judging that the legally elected President of the United States, Al Gore, had not been properly elected, thus proving that Conservative Justices are no guardians of the wishes of 100 million voters in the supposed bastion of democracy. Then Christ says:

If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor.

Anyone looking at the basis of Christianity expressed in the gospels would say that this is the central characteristic of the Son of God. He valued poverty as a spiritual virtue. It is not much practiced by any Christians other than a few monks or large numbers in the Third World by necessity. Did God mean it?

Christians dismiss all these maxims as impossible to live up to in the modern world, and therefore no longer applicable. Christians morality turns out to be, “Ignore whatever God says that is hard to do.” These maxims were never easy to live up to. They were difficult but not impossible to live up to, and most Christians must feel that Christ Himself did live up to them. He urged Christians to “be perfect,” but no Christian, we can deduce, considers it necessry to “be perfect.” Yet not one of them thinks they will not go to heaven, even though it is itself a perfect place, and only perfect people can enter it. They do not want to know that!

Other maxims of Christ in the gospels do not seem to be wise or even correct. He says:

Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.

There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom.

This belief was the basis of much of his moral teaching, like:

Take no thought for the morrow.

He thought the kingdom of God was coming soon, and so mundane matters could be ignored. The early Christians really did believe it, and abstained from such futile occupations as working, as Paul’s epistles confirm. If this was a prophecy, then it was utterly wrong. On the scriptural criterion, Christ was a false prophet and deserved the fate he had. Christ was not superlatively wise, as Christians seem to think on the basis of ignoring what he got wrong.

Morality in Christian Practice

Objections to Christianity are intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true. The moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.

Christianity is morally pernicious. Morals are meant to maintain certain standards of conduct that make it possible for human beings to live happily together. Christianity teaches ethical codes which inhibit human happiness! The churches opposed the abolition of slavery as long as they dared. A Pope and most US Christians have condemned socialism, although Jesus and the Nazarenes had themselves held their goods in common. Christians continue to oppose every movement toward social and economic justice.

The worst feature of the Christian religion is its morbid and so unnatural attitude toward sex. Chritians claim in a gross perversion of history that Christianity improved the status of women. From their predecessors, the Essenes, Christians have always regarded woman as the temptress, the inspirer of impure lusts. Even if it were true, that is how God has made her! How then can it be morally wrong? A society that regards women in this demeaning way cannot treat women with any justice and equality.

The teaching of the church is that virginity is best, but those who find this impossible are allowed ro marry. S Paul puts it:

It is better to marry than to burn.

By making marriage indissoluble, and by stamping out all knowledge of the the art of love, the church ensured that the only sex which it permitted involved negligible pleasure and much pain. The opposition to birth control is the same. Birth control was discouraged because, when a woman has a child a year until she dies worn out, she will not derive much pleasure from her married life.

The Christian conception of sin lets people be sadistic for legitimate and even noble reasons. Christians argue that suffering in the world is a purification for sin and so is a good thing. Thus does the church rationalize sadism. It is not true that the pain in the world is due to sin—sin does not cause rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt—but it would make no difference if it were true. Christians believe the world was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. He foresaw all the pain and misery the world would contain before He created. He is therefore responsible for all of it. If God knew in advance the sins of humanity, He was responsible for them when He created man.

Are the children suffering in a children’s ward of a hospital enduring their pain and disabilities because they are so morally abandoned as to deserve it? Anyone who can think this must have lost all their feelings of mercy and compassion. They model themselves on a cruel God and so become as cruel as the God they believe in.

Christians use the concept of sin to impose cruelty. Take the prevention of AIDS. The danger of contracting the disease can be minimized by taking suitable precautions before sex. Many Christians think no one should know about it because sinners deserve to be punished, and AIDS is God’s punishment. Punishment should even extend to the wives or husbands, and children of sinners. Thousands of children are born suffering from congenital disease because Christians want to see sinners punished for their sexuality.

There is no defense of the view that knowledge is undesirable. Young people should not be made guilty because they have a natural curiosity about sex. The Christian taboo on the young having sexual knowledge, leaving them a sense that something is wrong with it, can make them feel sex is always dirty and indecent when they are older. Nor should sexual instruction merely be mechanical, and prefereably should be the responsibility of sensitive parents. Anyone properly instructed will act more wisely than one who is ignorant. Proper, effective tuition which imbues the responsibilities of having children too young, and of parenthood is needed when children are ready for it. Children should not be kept deliberately ignorant about sex.

Hell

A serious defect in Christ’s moral character is that he believed in hell. No good God can propose the punishment of everlasting burning, and nor could a best man of God condone it, unless the God was not good. What is more, Christ repeatedly shows a vindictive fury against people who would not listen to him. Christ said:

Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell.

Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come.

This has caused much misery for the best Christians, the pious believing Christians who took their sayings of Jesus so seriously they imagined they had spoken against the Holy Ghost, and thought they would not be forgiven, especially in the world to come. If Jesus was God or guided by God and God is omniscient and has precognition, then He knew He would be causing a lot of unjustified misery from fears and terrors of this sort—and in the best of disciples. Christ also 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.

Christ seems to savour the idea of wailing and gnashing of teeth, for it recurs often. He will also divide the sheep from the goats, and will say to the goats:

Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.

He says to people:

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…

This doctrine that hell-fire is a punishment for sin is a doctrine of cruelty not love. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world, and gave the world generations of cruel torture, and the Christ of the gospels is responsible for it. Christian churches are now rejecting the whole concept of eternal roasting in favour of an alienation from God, showing that they have no regard for the gospels when they offend their flocks or their sinecures. Neither in wisdom nor in virtue does Christ stands as high as say Buddha and Socrates.

Righteousness

The Christian emphasis on the individual soul is a doctrine fundamentally akin to that of the Stoics, arising as theirs did in communities that could no longer cherish political hopes. The natural impulse of the vigorous person of decent character is to attempt to do good, but those deprived of all political power and of all opportunity to influence events, will be deflected from their natural course and will decide that the important thing is to be good.

This is what happened to the early Christians. It led to a conception of personal holiness as something quite independent of beneficient action, since holiness had to be something that could be achieved by people who were impotent in action. Social virtue came therefore to be excluded from Christian ethics. Christians still think a politician who is an adulterer more wicked than one who takes bribes, although the latter probably does a thousand times more harm.

Is there a saint in the calendar whose saintship is due to useful public work? The church would never regard a man as a saint because he reformed the finances, or the criminal law, or the judiciary. Such mere contributions to human welfare would be regarded as of no importance. The man of God retired from the world. With this separation between the social and the moral person there went an increasing separation between soul and body, which has survived in Christian metaphysics and in the systems derived from Descartes. The result of the centuries of Christianity has been to make men more egotistic, more shut up in themselves, than nature made them.

The individual soul was to enjoy hereafter endless bliss or endless woe according to circumstances. The circumstances upon which this momentous difference depended were curious. If you died immediately after a priest had sprinkled water upon you while pronouncing certain words, you inherited eternal bliss, whereas, if after a long and virtuous life you happened to be struck by lightning at a moment when you were using bad language because you had broken a bootlace, you would inherit eternal torment.

The modern liberal Christian might no longer believe this, nor the ordinary unsophisticated Catholic who has not been adequately instructed in theology, but this is the orthodox Christian doctrine and was firmly believed until recent times. The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out. These infants went to straight to heaven. No orthodox Christian can find any logical reason for condemning their action, although all nowadays do. The doctrine of personal immortality in its Christian form has had disastrous effects upon morals, and the metaphysical separation of soul and body has had disastrous effects upon philosophy.

The intolerance that spread over the world with the advent of Christianity is due to the Jewish belief in righteousness and in the exclusive reality of the Jewish God. Jews, and more especially their prophets, emphasised personal righteousness and the idea that it is wicked to tolerate any religion except one. These two ideas really are the same because righteousness was doing God’s will—that is doing what the priests told you. If you did not you were apostatizing—going against the religion. The idea had an extraordinarily disastrous effect upon Occidental history.

What, in Christian terms, is “unrighteousness” in practice? It is behaviour Christians dislike. By calling it unrighteousness, and by arranging an elaborate system of ethics around this conception, they justify themselves in wreaking punishment upon the objects of their own dislike, while at the same time, since the Christian is righteous by definition, it enhances their own self-esteem at the moment of their impulse to cruelty. This is the psychology of the Inquisition and witch hunts, and of the lynch mob. The essence of the conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice.

Righteousness in the mouths of the Hebrew prophets meant what was approved by them and Yehouah. One finds the same attitude expressed in the Acts of the Apostles, where the apostles began a pronouncement with the words “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us” (Acts 15:28).

This kind of individual certainty as to God’s tastes and opinions cannot be made the basis of any institution. A new prophet could maintain that his revelation was more authentic than those of his predecessors, and there was nothing in the general outlook of Protestantism to show that this claim was invalid. Consequently Protestantism split into innumerable sects, which weakened one another.

In the Catholic Church inspiration such as the prophets enjoyed has its place, but it is recognized that phenomena which look rather like genuine divine inspiration may be inspired by the Devil, and it is the business of the church to discriminate, just as it is the business of the art connoisseur to know a genuine Leonardo from a forgery. In this way revelation becomes institutionalized at the same time. Righteousness is what the church approves, and unrighteousness is what it does not approves. Thus the effective part of the conception of righteousness is a justification of herd antipathy.

The church made much of the persecution of Christians by the Roman State before the time of Constantine. This persecution, however, was slight and intermittent and wholly political. At all times, from the age of Constantine to the end of the seventeenth century, Christians were far more fiercely persecuted by other Christians than they ever were by the Roman emperors.

Before the rise of Christianity this persecuting attitude was unknown to the ancient world except among the Jews. In Herodotus is a bland and tolerant account of the habits of the foreign nations he visited. Sometimes a peculiarly barbarous custom might shock him, but in general he is hospitable to foreign gods and foreign customs. He is not anxious to prove that people who call Zeus by some other name will suffer eternal punishment and ought to be put to death in order that their punishment may begin as soon as possible. Evidently God reserved this attitude for Christians.

Christianity makes Men Virtuous?

People say it is wrong to attack religion, because Christianity makes men virtuous. So, in Samuel Butler’s book, Erewhon Revisited, Higgs returns to Erewhon to find that his previous visit was the cause of his deification, and his escape by balloon, like Dorothy in Wizard of Oz, was his ascension into heaven. Higgs wants them to desist from his worship and determines to expose the truth, but the two High Priests of the religion, Hanky and Panky, told him:

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.

Everyone would be wicked if they do not hold to the Christian religion. Yet the more profound the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty, and the worse the state of affairs. In the so-called “ages of faith,” people really did believe the Christian religion in its completeness, hell fire and all. Then were the Crusades when Christian armies murdered perhaps millions of people, and not only Moslems, there was the bloody subjugation of the Cathars, and there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures, and myriads of unfortunate women burned as witches, all in the name of religion.

If an inexperienced girl marries a syphilitic man, the marriage remains in the Catholic Church an indissoluble sacrament. If the woman gets pregnant, she cannot procure a termination of her pregnancy and she must give birth to possibly syphilitic children. This is the absurd morality of Christianity. It has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct, particularly sexual conduct, which have the effect of reducing human happiness when behaving morally is meant to increase it.

All progress of human feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of other 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. The Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

The modern Christian is less sadistic, but that is not thanks to Christianity, it is thanks to the generations of freethinkers, who from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their traditional beliefs. Modern Christians telling us how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is, ignoring the fact that its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by Christians.

Nobody nowadays believes that the world was created in 4004 BC, but not so long ago skepticism on this point was thought an abominable crime. It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities that were believed 200 years ago. The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of freethinkers.

What We Must Do

The three human impulses embodied in Christianity are fear, conceit or self-esteem, and hatred. The purpose of Christianity is to give an air of respectability to these passions, provided they run in certain channels. Because these passions make for human misery, Christianity is a force for evil. It permits people to indulge these passions without restraint, where but for its sanction they might, at least to a certain degree, control them.

The most important source of religion is fear. Christianity is based primarily and mainly upon fear—anything that causes alarm turns people’s thoughts to God. Warfare, pestilence, and shipwreck all tend to make people religious, fear of the mysterious and the unknown, fear of illness and embarassment, fear of conquest, fear of death, and even fear of facing up to everyday life without a buddy Jesus who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of cruelty, and it is no wonder if cruelty and Christianity have gone hand-in-hand.

Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and 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 despoiled and fearful place that the churches all these centuries have made it.

Hatred and fear, it may be said, are essential human characteristics. Humanity always has felt them and always will. The best that you can do with them is to direct them into channels where they are less harmful than they would be in other channels. A Christian theologian might say that their treatment by the church in analogous to its treatment of the sex impulse, which it deplores. It attempts to render concupiscence innocuous by confining it within the bounds of matrimony. So, if mankind must inevitably feel hatred, it is better to direct this hatred against those who are really harmful, and this is precisely what the church does by its conception of righteousness.

The church’s conception of righteousness is socially undesirable in various ways—its depreciation of intelligence, and of science. This defect is inherited from the gospels. Christ tells us to become as little children, but little children cannot understand the differential calculus, or the principles of currency, or the modern methods of combating disease. To acquire such knowledge is no part of our duty, according to the church. The church no longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did so in its palmy days, but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to a pride of intellect, and hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma.

Take, two men, one of whom has stamped out yellow fever throughout some large region in the tropics but has in the course of his labors had occasional relations with women to whom he was not married. The other has been lazy and shiftless, begetting a child a year until his wife died of exhaustion and taking so little care of his children that half of them died from preventable causes, but never indulging in illicit sexual intercourse. A good Christian must count the second of these as more virtuous than the first. This absurdity is inevitable so long as avoidance of sin is thought more important than positive merit, and so long as the importance of knowledge as a help to a useful life is not recognized.

Fear and hatred can be eliminated from human nature by educational, economic, and political reforms. The educational reforms must be the basis, since men who feel hatred and fear will also admire these emotions and wish to perpetuate them, although this admiration and wish will probably be unconscious, as it is in the ordinary Christian. An education designed to eliminate fear is by no means difficult to create. It is only necessary to treat a child with kindness, to put them in an environment where initiative is possible without disastrous results, and to save them from contact with adults who have irrational terrors, whether of the dark, of mice, or of social revolution. A child must also not be subject to severe punishment, or to threats, or to grave and excessive reproof.

To save a child from hatred is a somewhat more elaborate business. Situations arousing jealousy must be carefully avoided by means of scrupulous and exact justice as between different children. A child must feel himself the object of warm affection on the part of some at least of the adults with whom he has to do, and he must not be thwarted in his natural activities and curiosities except when danger to life or health is concerned. If these simple precepts are observed from the start, the child will be fearless and friendly.

With our present industrial technique we can, if we choose, provide a tolerable subsistence for everybody. We could secure that the world’s population should be stationary if we were not prevented by the political influence of churches which prefer war, pestilence, and famine to contraception. The knowledge exists by which universal happiness can be secured. The chief obstacle to its utilization for that purpose is the teaching of religion. Christianity prevents our children from having a rational education, Christianity prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war, Christianity prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment. To release humanity from its fetters and open up its creative and protective potential, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon of Christianity.

Christianity also appeals specifically to our human self-esteem. If Christianity is true, mankind are not such pitiful worms as they seem to be. They are of interest to the Creator of the universe, who takes the trouble to be pleased with them when they behave well and displeased when they behave badly. This is a great compliment. We should not think of studying an ants’ nest to find out which of the ants performed their duty, and we should certainly not think of picking out those individual ants who were remiss and putting them into a bonfire. If God does this for us, it is a compliment to our importance, and it is even a pleasanter compliment if he awards to the good among us everlasting happiness in heaven. It is flattering to suppose that the universe is controlled by a Being who shares our tastes and prejudices.

The conception of an omnipotent, God, supposed perfect, is that of the oriental despot, who, in spite of capricious cruelties, continued to enjoy the adulation of their slaves. This is the psychology of orthodox Christianity. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, they are acting like the craven servants of the Assyrian king. For them submission was a necessity. Today, it is not, and is contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.

No one should believe, or try to make others believe, any proposition for which there is no evidence. No one should commit themselves to dogmatic negations any more than to dogmatic affirmations. Men and women feel certain about many propositions for which they have no reason to feel certain. They have been persuaded by someone for particular motives and they should examine what those motives were. It is unlikely that they were what they seemed.

The authorities are organized upon a basis of irrational dogmas. Whatever grown men and women may eventually think, the authorities think the young ought to believe a lot of absurdities, and they think it is impossible for the young to attain necessary virtues unless they believe bad arguments in favor of them—arguments which they will see through as soon as they get older. So, many dubious propositions are taught to the young with great emphasis, and the young grow up accepting them. Any virtue believed in should be one that can be supported from the outset without needing to appeal to what cannot be believed. Education will be transformed if this is accepted, yet, public money given to education is never given to any education that involves no element of superstition.

A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage, not a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the intellect by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

• Let us stand on our own feet and look fair and square at the world—its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness.
• Let us see the world as it is and be not afraid of it.
• Let us face the world with intelligence and not by being slavishly subdued by terror of it.
• Let us make the best we can of the world. It is the only world we have!

The fear we should have is the fear that we shall destroy the world as a place suitable for human life. Let us make sure we do not. That should be our religion.

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