The Faith of a Heretic

"Kant himself refused to base his moral views on his religion, and he argued that morality cannot be founded on religion. Indeed, he took great pride in having shown that we can not know that God exists but only postulate God’s existence. If we knew that God exists, such knowledge would make true morality impossible. For if we acted morally from fear or fright, or confident of a reward, then this would not be moral. It would be enlightened selfishness."

"It is easy to see why a democratic society would be skeptical about great men and suspicious of the tragic virtues. Democracy depends on compromise. But democracy can ill afford to dispense with moral courage. Under certain circumstances it may require moral courage to advocate compromise. What matters is that the decision is not influenced by the desire for acclaim."

"Organized Christianity could be defined as the ever renewed effort to get around these sayings without repudiating Jesus."

"Organized religion flourishes. And so do thoughtlessness, dishonesty, and hypocrisy."

"My four virtues cannot be proved. Whoever claims to prove his ethic deceives others and probably also himself."

"At all times men are subject to insidious pressures to accept the prejudices of their age and to rationalize them, whether theologically or scientifically. Nietzsche and Freud found that the best, if not the only, way to resist this danger is not to humor the hypersensitive ears of one’s contemporaries by choosing comfortable words but to emphasize precisely that which is not fashionable, not heard gladly—that which gives offense."

"The historically ignorant believe in absolute novelty."

"Luther’s vision of Christianity: radical through and through, and opposed alike to wisdom, reason, and subtlety."

"Since the Second World War, the greatest and most original minds have in no way whatsoever refined religion: they are men of science and literature, of the arts and perhaps politics."

"Popular notions about the relation of morality to organized religion are for the most part completely out of touch with fact."

"For all the talk of humility that pervades some self-styled absolute moralities, there is something arrogant about those who profess that their morality is absolute."

"There is no devil; there is no need for one: dishonesty does his work."

"A man who does not consider how his actions are likely to affect other people is to that extent irresponsible, even if he acts on “principle.”"

"Psychology is not incompatible with the belief that there are great men; only a simple-minded psychology is."

"In most of the Hebrew Scriptures it is simply axiomatic that suffering comes from God."

"It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is worthwhile if the world is not governed by a purpose. On the contrary, the lack of any cosmic purpose may be experienced as liberating, as if a great weight had been lifted from us."

"Only an age in which salvation had all but lost meaning could misconstrue Jesus’ moral teachings the way liberal Protestantism did."

"Consider the Christian story the way it looks to an outsider. God causes a virgin, betrothed to Joseph, to conceive his own son, and this son had to be betrayed, crucified, and resurrected in order that those, and only those, might be saved who should both believe this story and be baptized and eat and drink on regular occasions what they themselves to be the flesh and blood of this son (or, in some denominations, merely the symbols of his flesh and blood); meanwhile, all, or most, of the rest of mankind suffer some kind of eternal torment, and according to many Christian creeds and teachers they were actually predestined for damnation by God from the very beginning."

"Such pleasant suggestions conflict with the historic evidence."

"What makes the decisive difference is not whether religion is persecuted or not, but whether religion is a pious name for conformity or a fighting name for non-conformity."

"The moral failures of organized religions are legion and fill libraries. Incredulous Christians may make a beginning by reading Malcolm Hays’ short book on Europe and the Jews. Not having read such books, one does not know Christianity; one lives in a fool’s paradise."

"The connection between religious preaching and moral conduct is much less close than most men suppose, while the importance of the environment and the level of education is far greater. Nor has organized religion thrown its full weight behind a high morality. Least of all does organized religion have a monopoly on teaching morals."

"The main objection to absolute morality is that even if there were absolute moral standards we should have no way of knowing whether we had found them."

"The point is rather that “absolute” is one of those words that often give off heat without light."

"Finally, and most important: there is an element of self-deception in the claim to have an absolute morality. One claims to know what in fact one does not know. One pretends to knowledge about matters about which one really does not have knowledge—and about which, for the most part, one prefers not even to think too carefully."

"My own ethic is not absolute but a morality of openness. It is not a morality of rules but an ethic of virtues. It offers no security but goals."

"We are confronted with Scylla, the rock that thinks that she alone is right, and Charybdis, the whirlpool that supposes that all views are equally defensible. In morality, as in religion and philosophy and other fields, both are wrong. Both make things very easy for themselves: they avoid the hard task of examining alternatives, criticizing what is open to objections, finding gradually what prevails and stands up."

"To ask seriously, one has to ask specifically, offering some objection to one or another virtue, and one must be willing to consider the ramifications of abandoning it...It is more popular, and easier, to proceed in the opposite direction: to begin by proposing one’s own “philosophy” and then to judge other views from there, externally. In that case, other views are rarely taken seriously; one generally has not really exposed oneself to them; there have been no genuine encounters."

"Freud, even more than Lincoln, might well be called the Great Emancipator. Like no man before him, he lent substance to the notion that all men are brothers. Criminals and madmen are not devils in disguise but men and women who have problems similar to our own, and there, but for one experience or another, go you and I."

"It is partly the American infatuation with success that stands in the way of our having tragedies. It is well known that the Puritans closed the British theaters; it is less well understood that Calvin’s ethos dealt tragedy a much more lasting blow by preaching success and lack of sympathy for failure."

"One’s strategy in trying to defend or to attack the claim that God exists obviously depends on what is meant by “God.” It may be objected that it is not so difficult to isolate what might be called the popular conception of God. The problem of suffering is of crucial importance because it shows that the God of popular theism does not exist."

"The theism preached from thousands of pulpits and credited by millions of believers is disproved by Auschwitz and a billion lesser evils."

"What matters in the present context is that no doctrine of immortality or resurrection can solve the problem of suffering. Suppose that Anne Frank enjoys eternal bliss in heaven: should an omnipotent god have found it impossible to let her have eternal bliss without first making her a victim of the Nazis and without having her die in a concentration camp? If you treat a child unfairly, it may possibly forget about it if you afterward give it a lollipop, but injustice remains injustice. Faith in immortality, like belief in Satan, leaves unanswered the ancient questions: is God unable to prevent suffering and thus not omnipotent? or is he able but not willing to prevent it and thus not merciful? And is he just?"

"Nietzsche remarked in The Dawn (¶84) how Christian scholars and preachers had spread “the art of reading badly.”"

"Far from being an isolated dictum, the prospect of damnation is one of the central motifs of the Gospels."

"Inequality is instituted by God: some are chosen, others rejected."

"Most Christians gerrymander the Gospels and carve an idealized self-portrait out of the texts."

"For Paul, as for Jesus, social justice and political arrangements seemed irrelevant. He accepted the prevailing order, sometimes with contempt because it was merely secular, sometimes with respect because it was ordained by God...The ancient notion of the equality and brotherhood of men is reinterpreted in a purely otherworldly sense...The foundation is laid for an elaborate hierarchy and for radical inequalities even within the church, while in the social order outside it inequality and injustice are accepted as fated."

"Schweitzer has the rare honesty to insist that Christianity failed morally not because Christians have not been Christian enough, but because of the very nature of Christianity."

"The logical enormity of Schweitzer’s argument is obvious. Few men have done more than he to demonstrate the complete incompatibility of Jesus’ conception of the kingdom with any social or this-worldly aspirations."

"Perhaps it is the essence of organized religion to read current insights into the ancient books and rites. But if one does this, disregarding Jesus’ counsel not to do it, one should realize that one could do it with almost any religion."

"But the prophets did not agitate for references to trust in God on coins, for an increase of ritual in schools and public life, for still more massive or more regular attendance at worship services; nor did they conduct revival meetings and request decisions for God. What the prophets criticized, mocked, and denounced was precisely the kind of religion that has been revived since the Second World War."

"If it is the purpose of the churches to save men from fates to which, even without the churches’ labors, no man would be likely to be sentenced, we have to conclude: the churches are like clubs for the prevention of homesteading on the sun."

"The most obvious failure of organized religions is surely that almost all of them have made a mockery of what their founders taught."

"Truth is not determined by reflections on social convenience."

"Luther certainly did not always speak and write in this vein. At other times he suggested that, while faith alone saves and works have no saving power whatever, faith naturally overflows into charity and good works. Luther himself, Calvin, the Crusaders, Inquisitors, and witch hunters show how false that is as a matter of empirical fact."

"Where morality is based on religion, even if only psychologically, criticisms of religion, no less than public avowals of disbelief, undermine morality and threaten public order; and in such countries, therefore, opposition to free speech is powerful, and the pressure for censorship overwhelming. And where it is sincerely believed that heretics will be damned in all eternity, the argument for persecuting heretics to avoid contagion is scarcely answerable."

"There always remains the question: How do we know which standard is the right one?"

"Men of intelligence have their moral disagreements, like everybody else, but they often fume less because they know what they disagree about. Fuming not only prevents us from seeing clearly; it is a smoke screen that covers up a lack of clarity."

"Our attitude toward death is influenced by hope as much as it is by fear. If fear is the mother of cowardice, hope is the father."