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Freud recognizes the neurotic need to hide from fear in religious doctrine
and theistic dependence, yet dismisses both the historical and the numinous, seeing only science, logic and rational
analysis as true objective reality.
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BERTRAND RUSSELL
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Russell, like Freud, recognizes that fear plays a dominate role in religious
faith. What else does one have in times of distress? On the death bed? Russell, like Freud looks to Science, human
reason and rational thinking. His courage stands true, yet there lacks the ability to see the numinous, the revelation
behind religious experience..
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Otto recognizes the experiential in awe, terror, stupor, the dependence and
impulsive fascination of perceiving the non-rational entity, apart from deduction, explanation, separated from
all analytical treatment. It is here that lives the religious experience far removed from all intellectual explanation
and logic.
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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
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Nietzsche saw something more than blind aesthetic romanticism,
empty rationalism and conformist tradition to those that create values, the value producers, the source. Rationalism
is outer directed from other values; traditionalism is first created, only to become routinely followed and outer
directed. Only the creator, the value producer, the originator is the inner directed man.
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"Religious doctrines are not the residue of experience or the
final result of reflection. They are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes
of mankind. The secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes."
"The historical residues of religion have helped us to view religious teachings as neurotic relics and the
time has come for analytical treatment." The Future of An
Illusion p. 56
"Religious doctrines will have to be discarded . . . in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience,
and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable." p. 69
"No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would
be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere." p. 71
"Civilization has little to fear from educated people and
brainworkers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behavior by other, secular motives would
proceed unobtrusively; moreover, such people are to a large extent themselves vehicles of civilization. But it
is another matter with the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed, who have every reason for being enemies
of civilization. So long as they do not discover that people no longer believe in God, all is well. But they will
discover it, infallibly, even if this piece of writing of mine is not published . . . Is there not a danger here
that the hostility of these masses to civilization will throw itself against the weak spot that they have found
in their task-mistress? If the sole reason why you must not kill your neighbor is because God has forbidden it
and will severely punish you for it in this or the next life - then, when you learn that there is no God and that
you need not fear His punishment, you will certainly kill you neighbor without hesitation, and you can only be
prevented from doing so by mundane force. Thus either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and
kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization
and religion must undergo a fundamental revision." p. 50
"If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience which bears witness to that truth,
what is one to do about the many people who do not have this rare experience? Once may require every man to use
the gift of reason which he possesses, but one cannot erect, on the basis of a motive that exists only for a very
few, an obligation that shall apply to everyone. If one man has gained an unshakable conviction of the true reality
of religious doctrines from a state of ecstasy which has deeply moved him, of what significance is that to others?"
p. 36
"If we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas, these, which are given out as teachings,
are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking; they are illusions, fulfillment's of the oldest,
strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes
. . . The benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a
moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice . . the wish-fulfillments of men. . . It is
an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father complex -
conflicts which it has never wholly overcome - are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally
accepted. pp.38-39
"Religion was born as the means of dealing with the trauma of self-conscious existence, a tool designed to
keep our hysteria in check, not through divine revelation, but out of human need." Paraphrase
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Religion is based, I think primarily and mainly
upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a
kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing
- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no
wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things.
In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which
has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition
of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many
generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach, 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 sort
of place that 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 God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental desporisms.
It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that
they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human
beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world,
and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in
all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after
the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless
outlook and a free intelligence. it needs hope from 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. taken from Russell's book, Why I Am Not A Christian.
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"Religious development lies
in a peculiar moment of consciousness, the stupor before something 'wholly other." The
Idea of The Holy p. 27
"Beneath the sphere of reason, of clarity and lucidity lies a hidden depth, inaccessible to our conceptual
thought, which we call the non-rational." p. 58
"The religious element in art is immanent, it is "a presence" or an atmosphere rather than a formulated
idea . . it cannot be described in words, because it lies beyond intellectual definition." p. 67 fn.
"So far from keeping
the non-rational element in religion alive in the heart of the religious experience, orthodox Christianity manifestly
failed to recognize its value, and by this failure gave to the idea of God a one-sidedly intellectualistic and
rationalistic interpretation." The
Idea of The Holy, pp.
17-18
"Revelation does
not mean a mere passing over into the intelligible and comprehensible. Something may be profoundly and intimately
known in feeling for the bliss it brings or the agitation it produces, and yet the understanding may find no concept
for it. To know and to understand conceptually are two different things, are often even mutually exclusive and
contrasted." p. 135
"As the rational elements, following a priori
principles, come together in the historical evolution of religions with the nonrational, they serve to 'schematize
these . . . The 'moment' mysterisum is schematized by the absoluteness of all rational attributes applied to the Deity." p. 140
(The evolutionary thrust of man) is nothing else than the pure impulsion to redemption . . found in all religions."
p. 167
"Mere general argument, even moral demonstrations are useless . . . for these weapons are far too short, as
the assailant is always standing right outside the (rational, conceptual and intellectual) arena! But if these
intuitions are immune from rational criticism, they are are equally unaffected by the fluctuating results of biblical
exegesis and the labored justifications of historical apologetics. For they are possible without these, spring,
as they do, from first-hand personal divination." pp. 173-174
"By the continual living activity of religious non-rational elements a religion is guarded from the passing
into 'rationalism.' By being steeped in and saturated with rational elements it is guarded from sinking into fanaticism
or mere mysticaliity, or at least from persisting in these, and is qualified to become a religion for all civilized
humanity. The degree in which both rational and non-rational elements are jointly present, united healthy harmony,
affords a criterion to measure the relative rank of religions." p. 142
"Saint John Chrysostom (347-407AD) shows that feeling and experience reach far beyond conceiving, and that
a conception negative in form may often become the symbol (what we have called an 'ideogram' for a meaning which,
if absolutely unutterable is none the less in the highest degree positive. And the example of Chrysostom at the
same time shows that a 'negative theology' can and indeed must arise, not only from the 'infusion of Hellenistic
speculation and nature mysticism,' but from purely and genuinely religious roots, namely, the experience of the
numinous." pp. 184-185
"The naturalistic rationalist will set up some sort of plausible psychological "explanation," differing
according to the empirical psychology that is at his disposal; or, resorting to still simpler mode of explanation,
he will be inclined to say that such occurrences never occurred at all. But whoever knows anything of the Spirit
and its miraculous nature, whoever feels in himself the Spirit active in those mysterious experiences that build
up the Christian's life, will reject such explanations." p.224
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MAX WEBER
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"It goes without saying that Max Weber never for a moment considered
whether Calvin might actually have had a revelation from God - which would certainly change the looks of things.
Weber's atheism was dogmatic, but he was not interested in proving that Calvin was a charlatan or a madman. He
rather preferred to believe in the authenticity of Calvin and other such founding figures as representing peak
psychological types who can live and act in the world who know how to take responsibility,
who have an inner sureness or commitment. The religious experience
is the thing, not God. The old quarrel between reason and revelation is a matter of indifference, because both
sides were wrong, had faulty self understandings. However, revelation teaches us what man is and needs. Men like
Calvin are the value producers and
hence the models for action in history. We cannot believe in the ground (God) of their experience, but that experience
is critical. We are not interested in finding out how they understood themselves but whether in searching in the
self for the
mysterious substitute for their ground. We cannot have, and do not want to have, their peculiar illusions, but
we do want values and commitments. The result of the
atheistic religiosity is the mysterious musings and language of Weber and many others (think of Sartre) about belief
and action, which culminate in something very different from what either religious leaders or rational statesmen
ever said or did. It fuses the two kinds of men, but with greater
weight given to the former, to the necessity of faith and all that goes with it. The intellectual apparatus accompanying
this analysis tends to obscure the alternatives to it, particularly the rational." Allan Bloom, The Closing
of The American Mind, pp. 210-211
What can be considered as outer-direction, conformism and value
producing, is described by Weber as traditional, rational
and charismatic.
The metaphysics of "revolution," . . "Nietzsche concluded that there was no text here but only interpretation.
This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view that there is no is but only perspectives
on becoming, that the perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived
to be. This view is, of course, allied with the notion that man is a value-creating, not a good-discovering, being.
it is not surprising to find its source at least partially in the greatest events of modern politics." pp. 159-160
It was Nietzsche who said "God is dead."
Rationalism and equalitarianism had leveled man's ability to create his gods, to produce his values.
"To put it simply, Nietzsche says that modern man is loosing, or has lost the capacity to value, and therewith
his humanity." Man must leave his comfortable atheism to an agonizing atheism. He must be brought back to
the abyss. Nihilism, although dangerous in it's chaos of passions, is a necessary stage to create values. Moses
came from Mt. Sinai with a tablet of his created values. God is man's created values and a necessary part of humanity.
Equalitarian levels all of this. Man must be a sculptor, as Nietzsche claimed, "Art is greater than truth."
All men do not have the same experiences and perception and are Not all equal.
"It is not the truth of their thought that distinguished men, but its capacity to generate culture. A value
is only a value if it is a life-preserving and life enhancing. Equalitarianism means conformism, because it gives
power to the sterile who can only make use of old values (traditions), other men's ready-made values, which are
not alive and to which their promoters are not committed. Equalitarianism is founded on reason, which denies creativity.
It was Pascal's wager, no longer on God's existence, but on one's capacity to believe in oneself and the goals
one has set for oneself." p. 201
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