Treatise on the Gods

"It was in... the Eighteenth [century], that Christian theology finally disappeared from the intellectual baggage of all really civilized men. On both sides of the Reformation fence the Christian church fought for its life, and nearly everywhere it had the support of the universities, which is to say, of official learning, which is to say, of organized ignorance."

"By the middle of the [Eighteenth] century what Nietzsche was later to call a transvaluation of all values was in full blast. Nothing sacred was spared—not even the classical spirit that had been the chief attainment of the Renaissance—and of the ideas and attitudes that were attacked not many survived. It was no longer necessary to give even lip service to the old preposterous certainties, whether theological or political, aesthetic or philosophical. In France, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot were making a bonfire of all the ancient Christian superstitions; in England Gibbon was preparing to revive the long dormant art of history and Adam Smith was laying the foundations of the new science of economics; in Germany Kant was pondering an ethical scheme that that would give the Great Commandment a rational basis..."

"In one respect, at least, Christianity is vastly superior to every other religion in being today, and, indeed, to all save one of the past: it is full of lush and lovely poetry. The Bible is unquestionably the most beautiful book in the world. ...Nearly all of it comes from the Jews, and their making of it constitutes one of the most astounding phenomena in human history."

"The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display."

"The story of Jesus, as it is told in the Synoptic Gospels, and especially in Luke, is touching beyond compare. It is, indeed, the most lovely story that the human mind has ever devised... The story of Jesus is the sempiternal Cinderella story, lifted to cosmic dimensions. Beside it the best that you will find in the sacred literature of Moslem and Brahman, Parsee and Buddhist, seems flat, stale and unprofitable."

"Among Christians themselves there is a growing tendency, when they throw off Christian theology, to salvage Christian poetry. This is plainly visible in the organized lovey-dovey that began with the Rotary movement and has since proliferated..."

"The grandiose imbecility called Christian Science is... certainly not a science, not even in the lame sense that spiritualism and psychotherapy are, and no Christian theologian save a hopeless dipsomaniac would venture to call it Christianity. It is simply a kind of poetry—an organized and unquestioning belief in the palpably not true."

"Efforts to substitute poetry for theology may be expected to multiply in the near future, for the world is plainly entering upon a new stage of myth-making. The two things, indeed, are much alike, for both are based on the doctrine that it is better to believe what is false than to suffer what is true. ...That modern man still needs such consolations is no more than proof that the emancipation of the human mind has just begun—that he is yet much closer to the ape than he is to the cherubim."

"Religion... sends fears to haunt him—fears which stalk upon him out of the shadows of the Ages of Faith, the Apostolic Age, the Age of the Great Migrations, the Stone Age. Its time-binding afflicts him with moral ideas born of the needs of primitive and long-forgotten peoples... It is, in its very nature, a machine for scaring; it must needs fail and break down as man gains more and more knowledge, for knowledge is not only power; it is also courage."

"Perhaps the theologians are right when they argue that... religion... at least makes humans happier... But, as William James long ago pointed out, there is a hardness of mind... and we probably owe to it every advance that we have made away from the brutes—even the long, tortured advanced toward kindness, charity, tolerance, tenderness, and common decency. It has won for us, not only the concept of the immutability of natural laws, but also the concept of the mutability of all laws made by man."

"The truly civilized man, it seems to me, has already got away from the old puerile demand for a "meaning in life." ...His satisfactions come, not out of a childish confidence that some vague and gaseous god, hidden away in some impossible sky, made him for a lofty purpose and will preserve him to fulfill it, but out of a delight in the operations of the universe... and of his own mind, regardless of the way it takes him, just as it delights the lower animals, including those of his own species, to exercise their muscles."

"If he [the truly civilized man] has not proved positively that religion is not true, then he has at least proved that it is not necessary. Men may live decently without it and they may die courageously without it. But not, of course, for all men. The capacity... is still rare in the race—maybe as rare as the capacity for honor. For the rest there must be faith... It is their fate to live absurdly, flogged by categorical imperatives of their own shallow imagining, and to die insanely, grasping for hands that are not there."

"In "Religion in the Making," by A. N. Whitehead... the approach is philosophical, and there are many interesting and valuable observations. But Dr. Whitehead occasionally indulges himself, like all metaphysicians, in what has a suspicious resemblance to nonsense."