absurdity, and the consequent despair, of our never being able to establish any certainty of belief as both a source of energy for the step in the dark and an indication of the direction in which it should be taken. Because (it is said) by any empirical human definition of what constitutes knowing I cannot know anything finally, I must leap to some state that does permit me to know finally – a state of certainty ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ attainment by empirical or rational means. But this is as if, finding myself in doubt and in darkness, I should decide, instead of cautiously feeling my way forward, to leap; not only to leap, to leap desperately; and not only to leap desperately, but into the darkest part of the surrounding darkness. There is an obvious emotional heroic-defiant appeal about this violent plunge from the battlements of reason; and an equally obvious lack of spiritual glamour in the cautious inching forward by the dim light of probability and the intermittent flicker (in this remote region) of scientific method. But I believe, and my reason tells me I am right to believe, that the step in the dark constitutes an existential betrayal and blasphemy, which is the maintaining that scientific probability should play no part in matters of faith. On the contrary I believe that probability must play a major part. I believe in the situation and cosmos described in the first group of notes here because it seems to me the most probable. No one but Jesus has been born of a virgin or has risen on the third day, and these, like the other incredible facts about him, are running at very long odds indeed. It is countless thousands of millions to one that I am right in refusing to believe in certain aspects of the Biblical accounts of his life, and countless thousands of millions to one that you, if you do believe them, are wrong.*
10 To take these incredible aspects from his life does not diminish Jesus; it enhances him. If Christians were to say that these incredible events and the doctrines and rituals evolved from them are to be understood metaphorically, I could become a Christian. I could believe in the Virgin Birth (that the whole of evolution, of whatever is the case, fathers each child); in the Resurrection (for Jesus has risen again in men’s minds); in the Miracles (because we should all like to perform such generous acts); in the Divinity of Christ and in Transubstantiation (we are all complementary one to another, and all to ‘God’); I could believe in all these things that at present excommunicate my reason. But traditional Christians would call this lack of faith.
11 Intelligent Athenians of the fifth century knew their gods were metaphors, personifications of forces and principles. There are many signs that the athenianization of Christianity has begun. The second coming of Christ will be the realization that Jesus of Nazareth was supremely human, not supremely divine; but this will be to relegate him to the ranks of the philosophers and to reduce the vast apparatus of ritual, church and priesthood to an empty shell.
12 It is not what Jesus made of mankind, but what mankind made of him.
13 The Christian churches, contrary to the philosophy of Jesus himself, have frequently made their own self- continuance their chief preoccupation. They have fostered poverty, or indifference to it; they have forced people to look beyond life; they have abused the childish concept of hell and hell-fire; they have supported reactionary temporal powers; they have condemned countless innocent pleasures and bred centuries of bigotry; they have set themselves up as refuges and too often taken good care that outside their doors refuge shall be needed. Things are better now; but we have not forgotten that things were not better till history presented the churches with a clear choice: reform or die.
14 A similar scramble to clean up the house is taking place today in Christian theology; but it comes too late. There are ‘advanced’ Christian thinkers who propose a god not very different from the one I have described earlier. They wish to humanize Jesus, to demythologize the Bible, to turn Christianity into something bizarrely like an early Marxism. Everything we once understood to be Christianity is now, we are told, a metaphor of a deeper truth. But if we can now see this deeper truth, then the metaphor is unnecessary. The new theologians are sawing the branches they sit on; and they are bound to fall.
15 Worst of all, the churches have jealously caged Jesus. What right have they to say that he cannot be approached except through them? Must I believe in the Olympians and practise ancient Greek religious rituals before I can approach Socrates? The church has become not the body and spirit of Jesus; but a screen and barrier round him.
16 Jesus was human. Perhaps he believed he was all that he claimed to be; but that he was not all that he claimed to be is trivial, not vital, because he was human; and because the essence of his teaching does not depend on his divinity.
17 There is no redemption, no remission; a sin has no price. It cannot be bought back till time itself is bought back.
18 Children learn very early the double vision a dogmatic church induces. They pray to God and nothing happens. They learn that there are two modes of behaviour, an absolute one in church, and a relative one outside. They are taught science and then ordered to believe what is palpably unscientific. They are told to revere the Bible, and yet even they can see that it is in one way a rag bag of myths, tribal gibberish, wild vindictiveness, insane puritanism, garbled history, absurdly one-sided propaganda – and in another way a monument of splendid poetry, profound wisdom, crowned by the richly human story of Jesus.
19 It is not the child adopting double standards who is to blame; it is the churches that perpetuate them. To claim of something that it belongs to a special category of absolute truth or reality is to pronounce its death sentence: there is no absolute truth or reality.
20 After Platonism, and surrounded by the puerilities of the debased classical religion of the later Roman civilization, Mediterranean man was bound to develop a monotheistic and ethically-inclined counter-religion. A kind of Jesus and a kind of Christianity was as inevitable as was a kind of Marx and Marxism in the later stages of the Industrial Revolution.
21 Humanity is like a tall building. It needs stage after stage of scaffolding. Religion after religion, philosophy after philosophy; one cannot build the twentieth floor from the scaffolding of the first. The great religions prevent the Many from looking and thinking. The world would not at once be a happier place if they looked and they thought; but this is no defence of dogmatic religions.
22 Does one snatch a cripple’s crutch away because it is not the latest sort? Is it even enough to put the latest sort in his hands? He may not know how to use it. But this is not an argument against the latest sort of crutch.
23 Religious faith: mystery. Rational faith: law. The fundamental nature of reality is mysterious – this is a scientific fact. In basing themselves on mystery, religions are more scientific than rational philosophies. But there are mysteries and mysteries; and Christianity has foolishly tried to particularize the fundamental mystery. The essential and only mystery is the nature of what the Christians call God or Providence. But the church has introduced a fairground of pseudo-mysteries, which have no relation to truth, but only to the truth that mystery has power.
24 Yet man is starved of mystery: so starved that even the most futile enigmas have their power still. If no one will write new detective stories, then people will still read the old ones. Virgin birth makes Jesus unique; the mystery of this impudent uniqueness is so pleasurable that we cannot resist it.
25 In most parts of the world the horse and cart has been superseded by the automobile. But we do not say of the horse and cart that it is untrue, or that simply because the automobile is generally more useful and faster all horses and carts should be abolished. There are still places where the horse and cart is indispensable. Where it is used and useful it is evolutionally true.
26 Militant anti-religious movements are based on this mechanization fallacy: that the most efficient machine must be the best. But it is the most effective machine in the circumstances that is the best.
27 If the necessity of the situation is that it should be softened, misted, muffled, then Christianity is good. There are many such situations. If to a man dying of cancer Christianity makes dying of cancer an easier death, not all the arguments of all the anti-Christians could make me believe Christianity, in this situation, is not true. But this truth is a kind of utility, and in general I think it probable that clear glass is of greater utility than frosted.
28 For every Christian who believes in all the dogma of his church, there are a thousand who half believe because they feel a man should believe in something. If the old religions survive, it is because they are convenient receptacles of the desire to believe; and because they are, though poor ones, ports; and because they at least try to satisfy the hunger for mystery.
29 All the old religions cause a barbarous waste of moral energy; ramshackle water mills on a river that could serve hydro-electric dynamos.
30 All gods alleged to be capable of intervention in our existence are idols; all images of gods are idols; all prayer to them, all adoration of them, is idolatry.
31 Gratitude for having been born and for existing is an archetypal human feeling; so is gratitude for good
