The Improbability of God ! Richard Dawkins

The Improbability of God

Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs oppress women in his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex lives in his name. Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name. The achievements of religion in past history - bloody crusades, torturing inquisitions, mass-murdering conquistadors, culture-destroying missionaries, legally enforced resistance to each new piece of scientific truth until the last possible moment - are even more impressive. And what has it all been in aid of? I believe it is becoming increasingly clear that the answer is absolutely nothing at all. There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.
Why do people believe in God? For most people the answer is still some version of the ancient Argument from Design. We look about us at the beauty and intricacy of the world - at the aerodynamic sweep of a swallow's wing, at the delicacy of flowers and of the butterflies that fertilize them, through a microscope at the teeming life in every drop of pond water, through a telescope at the crown of a giant redwood tree. We reflect on the electronic complexity and optical perfection of our own eyes that do the looking. If we have any imagination, these things drive us to a sense of awe and reverence. Moreover, we cannot fail to be struck by the obvious resemblance of living organs to the carefully planned designs of human engineers. The argument was most famously expressed in the watchmaker analogy of the eighteenth-century priest William Paley. Even if you didn't know what a watch was, the obviously designed character of its cogs and springs and of how they mesh together for a purpose would force you to conclude "that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use." If this is true of a comparatively simple watch, how much the more so is it true of the eye, ear, kidney, elbow joint, brain? These beautiful, complex, intricate, and obviously purpose-built structures must have had their own designer, their own watchmaker - God.
So ran Paley's argument, and it is an argument that nearly all thoughtful and sensitive people discover for themselves at some stage in their childhood. Throughout most of history it must have seemed utterly convincing, self-evidently true. And yet, as the result of one of the most astonishing intellectual revolutions in history, we now know that it is wrong, or at least superfluous. We now know that the order and apparent purposefulness of the living world has come about through an entirely different process, a process that works without the need for any designer and one that is a consequence of basically very simple laws of physics. This is the process of evolution by natural selection, discovered by Charles Darwin and, independently, by Alfred Russel Wallace.
What do all objects that look as if they must have had a designer have in common? The answer is statistical improbability. If we find a transparent pebble washed into the shape of a crude lens by the sea, we do not conclude that it must have been designed by an optician: the unaided laws of physics are capable of achieving this result; it is not too improbable to have just "happened." But if we find an elaborate compound lens, carefully corrected against spherical and chromatic aberration, coated against glare, and with "Carl Zeiss" engraved on the rim, we know that it could not have just happened by chance. If you take all the atoms of such a compound lens and throw them together at random under the jostling influence of the ordinary laws of physics in nature, it is theoretically possible that, by sheer luck, the atoms would just happen to fall into the pattern of a Zeiss compound lens, and even that the atoms round the rim should happen to fall in such a way that the name Carl Zeiss is etched out. But the number of other ways in which the atoms could, with equal likelihood, have fallen, is so hugely, vastly, immeasurably greater that we can completely discount the chance hypothesis. Chance is out of the question as an explanation.
This is not a circular argument, by the way. It might seem to be circular because, it could be said, any particular arrangement of atoms is, with hindsight, very improbable. As has been said before, when a ball lands on a particular blade of grass on the golf course, it would be foolish to exclaim: "Out of all the billions of blades of grass that it could have fallen on, the ball actually fell on this one. How amazingly, miraculously improbable!" The fallacy here, of course, is that the ball had to land somewhere. We can only stand amazed at the improbability of the actual event if we specify it a priori: for example, if a blindfolded man spins himself round on the tee, hits the ball at random, and achieves a hole in one. That would be truly amazing, because the target destination of the ball is specified in advance.
Of all the trillions of different ways of putting together the atoms of a telescope, only a minority would actually work in some useful way. Only a tiny minority would have Carl Zeiss engraved on them, or, indeed, any recognizable words of any human language. The same goes for the parts of a watch: of all the billions of possible ways of putting them together, only a tiny minority will tell the time or do anything useful. And of course the same goes, a fortiori, for the parts of a living body. Of all the trillions of trillions of ways of putting together the parts of a body, only an infinitesimal minority would live, seek food, eat, and reproduce. True, there are many different ways of being alive - at least ten million different ways if we count the number of distinct species alive today - but, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead!
We can safely conclude that living bodies are billions of times too complicated - too statistically improbable - to have come into being by sheer chance. How, then, did they come into being? The answer is that chance enters into the story, but not a single, monolithic act of chance. Instead, a whole series of tiny chance steps, each one small enough to be a believable product of its predecessor, occurred one after the other in sequence. These small steps of chance are caused by genetic mutations, random changes - mistakes really - in the genetic material. They give rise to changes in the existing bodily structure. Most of these changes are deleterious and lead to death. A minority of them turn out to be slight improvements, leading to increased survival and reproduction. By this process of natural selection, those random changes that turn out to be beneficial eventually spread through the species and become the norm. The stage is now set for the next small change in the evolutionary process. After, say, a thousand of these small changes in series, each change providing the basis for the next, the end result has become, by a process of accumulation, far too complex to have come about in a single act of chance.
For instance, it is theoretically possible for an eye to spring into being, in a single lucky step, from nothing: from bare skin, let's say. It is theoretically possible in the sense that a recipe could be written out in the form of a large number of mutations. If all these mutations happened simultaneously, a complete eye could, indeed, spring from nothing. But although it is theoretically possible, it is in practice inconceivable. The quantity of luck involved is much too large. The "correct" recipe involves changes in a huge number of genes simultaneously. The correct recipe is one particular combination of changes out of trillions of equally probable combinations of chances. We can certainly rule out such a miraculous coincidence. But it is perfectly plausible that the modern eye could have sprung from something almost the same as the modern eye but not quite: a very slightly less elaborate eye. By the same argument, this slightly less elaborate eye sprang from a slightly less elaborate eye still, and so on. If you assume a sufficiently large number of sufficiently small differences between each evolutionary stage and its predecessor, you are bound to be able to derive a full, complex, working eye from bare skin. How many intermediate stages are we allowed to postulate? That depends on how much time we have to play with. Has there been enough time for eyes to evolve by little steps from nothing?
The fossils tell us that life has been evolving on Earth for more than 3,000 million years. It is almost impossible for the human mind to grasp such an immensity of time. We, naturally and mercifully, tend to see our own expected lifetime as a fairly long time, but we can't expect to live even one century. It is 2,000 years since Jesus lived, a time span long enough to blur the distinction between history and myth. Can you imagine a million such periods laid end to end? Suppose we wanted to write the whole history on a single long scroll. If we crammed all of Common Era history into one metre of scroll, how long would the pre-Common Era part of the scroll, back to the start of evolution, be? The answer is that the pre-Common Era part of the scroll would stretch from Milan to Moscow. Think of the implications of this for the quantity of evolutionary change that can be accommodated. All the domestic breeds of dogs - Pekingeses, poodles, spaniels, Saint Bernards, and Chihuahuas - have come from wolves in a time span measured in hundreds or at the most thousands of years: no more than two meters along the road from Milan to Moscow. Think of the quantity of change involved in going from a wolf to a Pekingese; now multiply that quantity of change by a million. When you look at it like that, it becomes easy to believe that an eye could have evolved from no eye by small degrees.
It remains necessary to satisfy ourselves that every one of the intermediates on the evolutionary route, say from bare skin to a modern eye, would have been favored by natural selection; would have been an improvement over its predecessor in the sequence or at least would have survived. It is no good proving to ourselves that there is theoretically a chain of almost perceptibly different intermediates leading to an eye if many of those intermediates would have died. It is sometimes argued that the parts of an eye have to be all there together or the eye won't work at all. Half an eye, the argument runs, is no better than no eye at all. You can't fly with half a wing; you can't hear with half an ear. Therefore there can't have been a series of step-by-step intermediates leading up to a modern eye, wing, or ear.
This type of argument is so naive that one can only wonder at the subconscious motives for wanting to believe it. It is obviously not true that half an eye is useless. Cataract sufferers who have had their lenses surgically removed cannot see very well without glasses, but they are still much better off than people with no eyes at all. Without a lens you can't focus a detailed image, but you can avoid bumping into obstacles and you could detect the looming shadow of a predator.
As for the argument that you can't fly with only half a wing, it is disproved by large numbers of very successful gliding animals, including mammals of many different kinds, lizards, frogs, snakes, and squids. Many different kinds of tree-dwelling animals have flaps of skin between their joints that really are fractional wings. If you fall out of a tree, any skin flap or flattening of the body that increases your surface area can save your life. And, however small or large your flaps may be, there must always be a critical height such that, if you fall from a tree of that height, your life would have been saved by just a little bit more surface area. Then, when your descendants have evolved that extra surface area, their lives would be saved by just a bit more still if they fell from trees of a slightly greater height. And so on by insensibly graded steps until, hundreds of generations later, we arrive at full wings.
Eyes and wings cannot spring into existence in a single step. That would be like having the almost infinite luck to hit upon the combination number that opens a large bank vault. But if you spun the dials of the lock at random, and every time you got a little bit closer to the lucky number the vault door creaked open another chink, you would soon have the door open! Essentially, that is the secret of how evolution by natural selection achieves what once seemed impossible. Things that cannot plausibly be derived from very different predecessors can plausibly be derived from only slightly different predecessors. Provided only that there is a sufficiently long series of such slightly different predecessors, you can derive anything from anything else.
Evolution, then, is theoretically capable of doing the job that, once upon a time, seemed to be the prerogative of God. But is there any evidence that evolution actually has happened? The answer is yes; the evidence is overwhelming. Millions of fossils are found in exactly the places and at exactly the depths that we should expect if evolution had happened. Not a single fossil has ever been found in any place where the evolution theory would not have expected it, although this could very easily have happened: a fossil mammal in rocks so old that fishes have not yet arrived, for instance, would be enough to disprove the evolution theory.
The patterns of distribution of living animals and plants on the continents and islands of the world is exactly what would be expected if they had evolved from common ancestors by slow, gradual degrees. The patterns of resemblance among animals and plants is exactly what we should expect if some were close cousins, and others more distant cousins to each other. The fact that the genetic code is the same in all living creatures overwhelmingly suggests that all are descended from one single ancestor. The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened. In other words, the fossils, the geographical distribution of animals, and so on, are all one gigantic confidence trick. Does anybody want to worship a God capable of such trickery? It is surely far more reverent, as well as more scientifically sensible, to take the evidence at face value. All living creatures are cousins of one another, descended from one remote ancestor that lived more than 3,000 million years ago.
The Argument from Design, then, has been destroyed as a reason for believing in a God. Are there any other arguments? Some people believe in God because of what appears to them to be an inner revelation. Such revelations are not always edifying but they undoubtedly feel real to the individual concerned. Many inhabitants of lunatic asylums have an unshakable inner faith that they are Napoleon or, indeed, God himself. There is no doubting the power of such convictions for those that have them, but this is no reason for the rest of us to believe them. Indeed, since such beliefs are mutually contradictory, we can't believe them all.
There is a little more that needs to be said. Evolution by natural selection explains a lot, but it couldn't start from nothing. It couldn't have started until there was some kind of rudimentary reproduction and heredity. Modern heredity is based on the DNA code, which is itself too complicated to have sprung spontaneously into being by a single act of chance. This seems to mean that there must have been some earlier hereditary system, now disappeared, which was simple enough to have arisen by chance and the laws of chemistry and which provided the medium in which a primitive form of cumulative natural selection could get started. DNA was a later product of this earlier cumulative selection. Before this original kind of natural selection, there was a period when complex chemical compounds were built up from simpler ones and before that a period when the chemical elements were built up from simpler elements, following the well-understood laws of physics. Before that, everything was ultimately built up from pure hydrogen in the immediate aftermath of the big bang, which initiated the universe.
There is a temptation to argue that, although God may not be needed to explain the evolution of complex order once the universe, with its fundamental laws of physics, had begun, we do need a God to explain the origin of all things. This idea doesn't leave God with very much to do: just set off the big bang, then sit back and wait for everything to happen. The physical chemist Peter Atkins, in his beautifully written book The Creation, postulates a lazy God who strove to do as little as possible in order to initiate everything. Atkins explains how each step in the history of the universe followed, by simple physical law, from its predecessor. He thus pares down the amount of work that the lazy creator would need to do and eventually concludes that he would in fact have needed to do nothing at all!
The details of the early phase of the universe belong to the realm of physics, whereas I am a biologist, more concerned with the later phases of the evolution of complexity. For me, the important point is that, even if the physicist needs to postulate an irreducible minimum that had to be present in the beginning, in order for the universe to get started, that irreducible minimum is certainly extremely simple. By definition, explanations that build on simple premises are more plausible and more satisfying than explanations that have to postulate complex and statistically improbable beginnings. And you can't get much more complex than an Almighty God!

Author : Professor Richard Dawkins

ALBERT CAMUS -Con người phản kháng - Bùi Giáng dịch

ALBERT CAMUS
Bùi Giáng dịch
Một trích đoạn từ tác phẩm

Con người phản kháng
(L’homme révolté)
Sao gọi là một con người phản kháng? Một con người nói ‘không’. Nhưng nó chối từ mà không khước bỏ. Nó khước bỏ mà không từ nan. Đó cũng là một con người nói ‘vâng’, một con người nói ‘phải ‘, kể từ khi khởi sự lên lời, kể từ lúc sơ đầu động đậy. Một kẻ nô lệ, suốt đời vốn cúi đầu nhận lĩnh mệnh lệnh, bỗng một sớm một chiều đột ngột bất khả chấp thuận một mệnh lệnh mới thêm vào, thêm nữa, thêm ra. Nội dung của tiếng ‘không’ nọ là gì ?
Nó có nghĩa, chả hạn, là ‘sự vụ ngổn ngang kể từ khi gặp tới giờ đã kéo dài quá hạn’, ‘kể từ đó tới đây, vâng được, thêm vào ra nữa, không không’, hoặc chả hạn là ‘có một cái giới hạn mà các ngài sẽ không được phép vượt qua’. Nói tắt là, cái tiếng ‘không’ nọ xác định sự tồn tại của một biên thùy. Cũng cái ý niệm về biên giới nọ là cái ta nhận thấy trở lại trong xúc cảm của kẻ phản kháng, nó cảm thấy rằng kẻ kia đùa dai, rỡn dẻo, kéo dài quá độ cuộc chịu chơi đau đớn, rằng kẻ kia đem cái quyền của mình dàn trải ra quá rộng, vượt quá một biên thùy giới hạn, kể từ một mép bờ nọ thì một cái quyền khác sừng sững hiện ra đối diện với, và hạn định giùm, và hạn chế cho. Ấy vậy, cái cơn triều động của phản kháng nó tựa vào, cùng một lúc, tại nơi cái sự chối từ tuyệt đối không chấp nhận một sự xâm nhập lăng phạm được xét ra là vô khả dung thứ, bất khả khoan thuận, cùng một lúc tại niềm tin, chắc chắn tuy mơ hồ là: có một cái quyền thật sự, đúng hơn, cái cảm tưởng, tại nơi người phản kháng, là y ‘có quyền làm cái nọ, y rất mực được quyền làm cái kia’. Tinh thần phản kháng đi song đôi dìu dặt hàng hai, bước chân chữ bát, với cái cảm giác là chính mình, mình cũng, theo một lối nào đó, tại một góc nào đó, chính mình mình cũng có lý như ai. Chính tại chỗ đó mà gã nô lệ phản kháng đồng thời nói ‘phải ‘ nói ‘không’, vừa gật đầu bảo ‘có được như vậy’, vừa lắc đầu bảo ‘chẳng nên thế đâu’. Đồng thời y quyết đoán rằng: cái giới hạn có thật, và sự tồn tại của thảy thảy những gì y ngơ ngác đoán ra và muốn bảo tồn ở bên mép rìa này của giới hạn. Y minh chứng, một cách nằng nặc hãnh kiêu, rằng trong người y, có một cái gì đó ‘rất đáng kể, rất đáng nên nhọc lòng lưu tâm...’, cái đó yêu thỉnh các ngài phải lưu ý. Bằng một phương cách nào đó, y chống đối lại cái trật tự đè ép y, bằng một thứ quyền sống không bị đàn áp quá cái mức chịu đựng của y .
Đồng thời với cái cơn cưỡng kháng lại kẻ xâm lăng tiếm vị đoạt phần, lại có một sự đề huề hảo hợp tham dự triệt để và tức-thì-thẳng-tắp của con người vào cuộc với cái phần nào đó của chính mình. Vậy là, một cách mặc nhiên, y đưa vào can thiệp trong cuộc, một phán quyết về giá trị, một cách thiết tha, không phải hồ đồ vô cố, cho đến nỗi y quyết bảo tồn nó suốt lộ trình duyệt lịch, và duy trì nó một cách thật o bế o bồng qua mọi hiểm họa trở cơn. Kể từ trước tới lúc bấy giờ, ít ra nữa, y cũng đã im lặng, phó mặc đời mình lây lất theo niềm tuyệt vọng, và trong tuyệt vọng nọ, một trạng huống được chấp thuận, dẫu rằng y xét thấy trạng huống nọ bất công. Im lặng là để cho thiên hạ nghĩ rằng mình chẳng xét đoán, chẳng mơ mòng ước ao gì cả, và, quả thật, trong vài trường hợp, mình chẳng ao ước hoài mong gì hết. Niềm tuyệt vọng dậy triều, cũng như cái phi lý trở cơn, nó xét đoán hết thảy và ước mong hết thảy, một cách tổng quát, mà chẳng đoán xét ước ao gì cả một cách riêng tây (1). Sự im lặng diễn giải được thấu lẽ đó. Nhưng khởi từ cái lúc người nô lệ lên tiếng, dù lên tiếng nói không, là y đã ao ước và xét đoán. Kẻ phản kháng theo nghĩa nguyên sơ, là kẻ quay mặt trở lại. Trước đó y lầm lũi bước đi dưới lằn roi vi vút của chủ. Thì bây giờ, y quay bật trở lại , mặt đối mặt, nhìn nhau. Cái gì nên, cái gì không nên, y muốn cùng kẻ kia xét lại. Y đem cái phải chọi lại cái không phải. Mọi giá trị không nhất thiết lôi cuốn tinh thần phản kháng theo, nhưng mọi hành động phản kháng dậy triều đều bao hàm một giá trị, đều âm thầm viện dẫn một giá trị trên mặt đất thị phi. Thật có phải rằng ít ra đây cũng là vấn đề về một giá trị ?
Dù hỗn độn mơ hồ bao nhiêu chăng nữa, từ tinh thần phản kháng một tâm thức nảy ra: cơn ý thức đột ngột choáng váng về một cái gì trong thân phận con người, và con người có thể tự đồng hóa vào đó, dẫu chỉ một lúc thôi, một thời gian nào đó thôi. Sự đồng hóa kia, kể từ trước tới nay, chưa từng được cảm thụ, thể nghiệm thật sự. Tất cả những cưỡng thủ, những giật giàm lặc tác, bóc lột xảy ra từ trước phong trào bạo động nổi loạn, người nô lệ đã cúi đầu chịu đựng, y ngoan ngoãn chấp thuận hết mọi yêu sách. Lắm lúc y lại đã từng tòng phục êm đềm những mệnh lệnh quỉ dị tức chết người đi được, còn mãnh liệt hơn cả cái mệnh lệnh xui y phản đối ngày nay. Trong thâm tâm có lẽ y đã chối bỏ hết , nhưng y đã nhẫn nại vô cùng bởi vì y đã nín câm, y đã im lặng, y đã bận tâm với chuyện hay dở trực tiếp hơn là ý thức về quyền lợi thật sự của mình. Nhưng khi nhẫn nại không còn, lúc bắt đầu cơn nóng lòng bực dọc, là khởi sự một trận phát động phong trào có thể tràn lan trên mọi sự việc đã từng được chấp thuận trước kia. Cơn phấn phát nọ thường luôn luôn có tính chất hồi tố. Người nô lệ, lúc khước từ trật tự đảo điên lăng nhục của chủ, đồng thời cũng khước từ luôn cả trạng huống nô lệ của mình (2). Cuộc phản kháng có tầm vóc rộng rãi, một phạm vi hiệu năng xa vời hơn là trong một sự chối từ thông thường. Nó vượt luôn cả cái giới hạn xưa kia đã được ổn định cho đối thủ, nó đòi hỏi được đối xử như kẻ đồng đẳng, ngang hàng. Những gì thoạt tiên chỉ là một cơn kháng cưỡng vô khả phân hóa của con người, bỗng trở thành đích thị con người trọn vẹn, con người tự đồng hóa mình với cơn kháng cưỡng kia và tự chung đúc mình trong đó. Cái phân vị của chính-con-người-mình mà kẻ nô lệ muốn người ta phải tôn trọng, phần đó được chàng ta đặt lên trên tất cả, hơn cả sinh mệnh nữa. Nó trở thành của quí tối thượng của chàng ta. Trước kia, chàng được đặt nằm đề huề trong một cuộc thỏa hiệp lai rai ba phải, bất thình lình chàng nô lệ lao đầu vào trong cơn một còn một mất , nhất chín nhì bù, còn thì còn với toàn khối diễm lệ càn khôn, mất thì xin phiêu bồng cùng càn khôn mất trụi. Tâm linh ý thức phát sinh cùng với cơn cưỡng kháng.
Nhưng người ta thấy đó đồng thời là ý thức về một cái toàn khối, tuy vẫn còn khá mơ hồ hàm hỗn, và về một cái ‘toàn không’ báo hiệu trận hy sinh khả dĩ thực hiện được của con người đối với cái toàn khối nọ. Kẻ phản kháng muốn mình là toàn khối, muốn đồng hóa mình trọn vẹn vào cái của quý mà anh ta vừa đột ngột ý thức được và muốn rằng thứ của đó trong con người anh, phải được nhìn nhận và hoan nghênh và muốn mình là toàn không, nghĩa là hoàn toàn và vĩnh viễn bị lật nhào đồi phế bởi các lực lượng lung trạo anh ta. Tới giới hạn cuối cùng, anh ta chấp nhận cuộc đồi phế cực chung kết liễu hết mọi thị phi, ấy là cái chết, nếu như thân phận anh đáo cùng phải chịu thiếu vắng cái sự chuẩn nhận cung hiến, bất khả phân hóa, mà anh sẽ gọi bằng danh từ, chả hạn tự do. Thà chết đứng giữa trận tiền hơn là sống trong qụy lụy.
Theo những tác giả đàng hoàng, giá trị thường biểu hiện một bước băng qua từ sự kiện tới quyền lợi, từ cái được mong muốn tới cái đáng mong (nói chung: qua sự trung gian của cái được thói thường mong muốn) (3). Trong tinh thần phản kháng, như ta đã thấy, cái bước băng tới quyền lợi đã hiển nhiên. Cũng vậy, cái bước đi từ ‘đáng lẽ phải nên như thế’ tới ‘tôi muốn rằng sự đó phải được thực hiện là thế’. Nhưng còn hơn nữa, có lẽ, ấy là cái quan niệm của cá nhân tự vượt mình, bước vào trong một cõi đẹp tốt chung cho cô bác từ đó về sau. Hoặc Tất Cả hoặc Số Không, hoặc được Toàn Bộ, hoặc mất Toàn Sòng, cái tia lửa nẩy vọt đó cho thấy rõ: trái với ý kiến thông thường, và mặc dù là nẩy sinh từ những gì có tính cách cá biệt nhất trong con người ta, tinh thần phản kháng lại đem ngay cả cái quan niệm về cá nhân ra mà làm nên vấn đề để tư lự. Thật vậy, nếu cá nhân chịu liều thân, và gặp cơ hội thì chịu chết, chết trong niềm rạt rào phản kháng, điều đó cho thấy y hy sinh thân mình vì một lợi ích tốt đẹp, vì một cõi phúc hảo bao la, ở ngoài vòng định mệnh cá nhân mình. Nếu chàng chịu chết để bảo vệ cái quyền lợi nọ, nếu chàng thà chịu nát thân hơn là sống để thấy quyền lợi, lợi ích phúc hảo nọ bị hủy diệt, ấy là chàng đã đặt lợi ích lương hảo ở bên trên cuộc đời mình, chàng đã coi trọng nó hơn đời sống mình. Thế nên chàng hành động là nhân danh một cái gì. Nhân danh một giá trị ? Một nội dung thanh hảo thanh hà? Còn bối rối mơ hồ, nhưng ít ra chàng cũng linh cảm rằng cái cõi đó là cõi chung cho chàng đi về cùng thiên hạ thượng hằng nối mộng chung đôi. Ta thấy rằng niềm quyết đoán mạnh mẽ, bao hàm trong mọi hành động phản kháng, quả thật là dàn trải rộng ra tới một cái gì tràn ngập xô vỡ cá nhân chính trong hạn độ nào mà lôi xốc cá nhân ra ngoài niềm cô độc giả định, và cấp cho cá nhân một lý do để hành động theo tiết điệu động hành. Nhưng đã cần phải nhận xét ngay rằng cái nội dung giá trị vốn tiên tại, vốn có sẵn từ trước khi mọi hành động hiện ra, giá trị đó chối từ những triết học thuần đơn lịch sử, trong những triết học này thì giá trị được chinh phục (nếu nó có thể được chinh phục) ở cuối đường hành động. Cuộc phân tích tinh thần phản kháng ít ra cũng dẫn ta tới chỗ bàng hoàng đăm chiêu nhưng chừng rằng quả thật có một bản tính nhân loại bẩm sinh theo như người Hy-Lạp xưa đã nghĩ, và trái hẳn lại những định tắc của tư tưởng thời nay. Thật vậy, nếu không có một cái gì trường tại cần được bảo tồn ở trong mình, thì còn nhọc công phản kháng làm gì cho mệt xác. Người nô lệ đứng lên phản kháng ấy là phản kháng vì mọi kiếp người trong một lúc, khi gã nhận thấy rằng: do trật tự nào, do tổ chức xã hội nào, một cái gì thiết cốt trong con người của gã bị chối bỏ, một cái gì trong con người của gã nhưng không phải chỉ riêng của gã, mà chính là một cõi chung cho mọi người về sum họp, kể cả cái kẻ đang chửi rủa, áp bức gã (4).
Hai nhận xét sẽ phù dực, tán trợ cho lập luận kia. Trước tiên, ta sẽ ghi nhận rằng cơn phát động phản kháng, trong tinh thần của nó, vốn không phải là một cơn náo động vị kỷ. Hẳn nhiên là có những quyết định vị kỷ. Nhưng con người ta đứng lên phản kháng chống hồ ngôn loạn ngữ cũng như chống lại sức đàn áp cưỡng bức. Vả chăng, kể từ những quyết định kia, và kể từ trong thâm để cơn phấn khích, kẻ phản kháng không dự phóng gì hết cho mình, bởi vì gã đã trăm nghìn đổ hết vào một cuộc, muôn vạn trút hết vào một trận một phen, tử sinh liều giữa trận tiền, dạn dày cho biết gan liền dấy lên. Hẳn nhiên là y có đòi hỏi sự tôn trọng cho riêng mình, nhưng cũng là trong hạn độ nào mà cái mình của gã đã được đồng hóa vào trong cái mình của khắp mặt bà con trong một cõi thuần nhiên hảo hợp.
Sau nữa, ta hãy nhận xét rằng tinh thần phản kháng không nhất thiết chỉ nẩy nở tại nơi kẻ bị áp bức thôi mà còn có thể nẩy ra trước cái cảnh tượng áp bức mà kẻ khác phải chịu làm nạn nhân. Vậy trong trường hợp đó, có sự đồng hóa giữa kẻ này với kẻ kia. Và cần phải xác định ngay rằng đó không phải là một trận đồng hóa tâm lý, một chuyển-hoàn-thuật do đó cá nhân cảm thấy bằng tưởng tượng rằng chính mình là kẻ chịu cuộc lăng nhục. Không phải vậy. Trái lại, rất có thể rằng con người ta không thể chịu đựng nổi lúc nhìn kẻ khác phải chịu những lăng nhục mà chính mình từng đã chịu với một tâm hồn thanh bình, không phản kháng, không phân bua. Tinh thần dấy động hoằng viễn nọ được biểu dương rạng rỡ trong những cuộc tự tử phản kháng của những người thuộc bạo-chính-đảng Nga, lúc họ nhìn bạn hữu của mình bị đánh đập. Đó cũng không phải là ý thức về quyền lợi chung của nhóm. Thật vậy, chúng ta có thể cảm thấy tức tối lúc nhìn những bất công vô lý trút lên đầu những kẻ mà ta vốn coi là địch thủ của mình. Vấn đề chỉ là: đồng hóa trong định mệnh, chung chìm chung nổi trong thân phận con người, kết hợp trong con thuyền phiêu dạt long đong. Riêng cá nhân thôi, không phải là cái giá trị mà cá nhân muốn bảo tồn bảo vệ. Ít ra phải là toàn thể mọi người mới làm nên cái giá trị vô giá kia. Trong tinh thần phản kháng, con người tự vượt mình để đạt tới kẻ kia, cập bờ thiên hạ, cập bến nhân gian, và từ quan điểm đó mà xét đi, thì sự đoàn kết của loài người quả thật mang tính chất hình nhi thượng, và nó sắp bước vào cõi miền càn khôn vũ trụ để thọ trì tồn lưu. Giờ đây, một cách đơn sơ, ta chỉ nói tới loại đoàn kết phát sinh từ trong những xích xiềng triền phược.

ALBERT CAMUS
Bùi Giáng dịch

(1) Désespoir Camus dùng tại đây quả thật trong tinh thể nó không hề giống chút gì với niềm tuyệt vọng theo thói thường quan niệm. Désespoir nghĩa là xa rời hết mọi ước ao trên bình diện hoạt sinh náo nức. Nằm trong cơn sầu trăm năm dâu biển nghe trần ai tịch mịch đi về đối thoại với Thái Hư Chân Như trong cái Đêm Trong Suốt của Khắc Khoải Hư Không Thanh Bình (dans la nuit claire du Néant de l’Angoisse - in der hellen Nacth des Nichts der Angst), viết Tân Thanh trong không khí Văn Tế Thập Loại Chúng Sinh. Vua quan triều Nguyễn không hiểu chỗ đó nên vô tình quở trách, đày đọa Tố Như một cách chẳng đâu vào đâu hết. Họ lấy cái lòng tiểu nhân mà ước độ cái lượng kẻ anh hùng. Tại đây, giải thích désespoir theo lối nọ, bằng tinh thần siêu đẳng chịu chơi, Camus ngầm bảo người trưởng giả rằng: rất có thể sự khuất phục tuyệt đối vô hy vọng của người nô lệ nằm bên mép tư lường trong cõi tư tưởng của Thánh Nhân (chú thích của BG).
(2) Cet élan est presque toujours rétroactif. L’esclave à l’instant qu’il rejette l’ordre humiliant de son supérieur, rejette en même temps l’état d’esclave lui-même.
(3) Lalande - Vocabulaire philosophique (chú thích của Camus).
(4) Cõi chung hảo hợp thanh hà của những nạn nhân cũng chính là cõi chung giao nối nạn nhân với đao phủ. Nhưng đao phủ lại không biết điều đó. (Có lẽ đao phủ chỉ ý thức được điều đó lúc mê cung tồn hoạt chuyển thêm một nhịp quay nữa, và đẩy đao phủ tới phiên mình phải làm nạn nhân. Và khi đó mọi sự đã lỡ làng) (chú thích của BG).

Protecting Our Children-Dharma Talk given by Thich Nhat Hanh

Dharma Talk given by Thich Nhat Hanh in Plum Village, France.
Protecting Our Children

© Thich Nhat Hanh


Good morning dear friends.

… We are in the New Hamlet, and today we are going to speak French. That’s good, isn’t it?

You know well that the Buddha is not God; the Buddha is a human being like all of us. He suffered a lot. He practiced, and he overcame his suffering and his difficulties, in order to become a wonderful being who was very calm, very compassionate, very understanding; and he had much happiness. He showed us the way. The Buddha is our teacher, our master, our spiritual father, our brother, and it is absolutely possible to hold the hand of the Buddha while we walk. Every day when I walk I hold the hand of the Buddha. This is something very pleasant to do.

Remember that the Buddha is not God, the Buddha is a human being like all of us. The Buddha had many friends and many teachers. In a previous life the Buddha had been a disciple of a master called Dipankara. Dipankara is a Pali word, meaning he or she who lights the lamp. The world needs light, and we need men and women who are able to light up the lamps, to bring into this world the light of freedom, the light of understanding, the light of love. Buddha Dipankara is someone who is able to light up the lamp in order to shine light on the way the world is. In that time the Buddha was a student. He was following higher studies in letters, and his dream was to become a statesman, like the Minister of Internal Affairs, or the Minister of Foreign Affairs, or the Prime Minister. That was his dream. In that time the Buddha, Shakyamuni, was called bodhisattva, because he wasn’t yet Buddha. The bodhisattva was a student, and his dream was to become a statesman.

All the young people of his time had the same dream: to study, to do research, in order to pass the exams and to be chosen by the king to become a statesman. At that time the parents and friends did everything they could to help students to pass the exams. Every three years there were examinations, and, if you passed the exams well, you could be chosen, to be a statesman. In each province there was a competition organized, and young people like the bodhisattva, were asked to come to the competition. There were thousands of people who were admitted to the competition, but only a hundred could be chosen as statesmen. After they were chosen, all of them were sent to the capital, so the king could make another selection, and this was called the Imperial Competition. The subject of the dissertation was prepared by the king himself. He would ask them ten or fifteen question, to find out if the candidates were able to understand the situation of the country, of the society, and if they had any ways to help the people and the society to develop and be happier.
So the young man offered himself in the competition, but he wasn’t chosen. It was with a lot of despair that he left the competition. He had studied a lot, and his dream was to be selected so he could become a statesman, and then he could have a family, become rich and famous, and be able to help his people and his land. But he suffered despair after the competition because he hadn’t been chosen, and he went back to his homeland very exhausted. He had to walk for hours and hours across the mountains, through the forests, and over the countryside.
One afternoon he was going past a hill, completely exhausted, and he was hungry. He couldn’t go on. Just then he met a hermit, a monk who lived very simply at the foot of a hill. He stopped, and he noticed that the hermit was cooking something in his little pot. He was hungry, he was so tired, he was exhausted, and the worst thing was that despair was ruling his heart. He stopped, and he asked for something to eat, and the hermit said, "Rest a little bit, and when I have finished cooking this soup, I will give you a bowl. But the soup is not cooked, so please lie down. There are the roots of a tree, you can use them as your pillow, and you can rest for the moment, while I finish cooking this soup." The soup which the hermit was making was a millet soup. I don’t know if you know of a kind of cereal which is called millet. This was called "golden millet," and it was very good. My mother often made millet soup for me and I like it very much.
The young man lay down, and began to rest. All of a sudden he fell into a deep dream. A very strange dream. In the dream, he saw that he had been chosen in the triennial competition, and he had been first out of a hundred young people who had been chosen. After that he had been sent to the capital in order to take part in the Imperial competition. He did his very best to answer the questions asked by the Emperor. He used all of his intelligence and all the knowledge he had acquired through his reading of many, many volumes of books. Then, he was chosen by the Emperor, and since he was considered the most brilliant of all the young people who had presented themselves at the competition, the Emperor offered him the hand of the Princess. The Princess was very beautiful, and you cannot imagine how happy he was. He was full of hope, full of energy, he had been very fortunate.
He was given a very important post in the cabinet: he was made the Minister of Defense. His land was very small, situated next to a very strong country, and this strong country would often send troops to invade the little country. Therefore, the Emperor made him the Minister of Defense, so he could prepare the land to fight against the invading forces from the neighboring country. He went through many difficulties, many sufferings. There was jealousy, there was despair, there was anger, and his relationship with his wife, the Princess, was not easy. They had arguments nearly every day. They had two children, and the children were very difficult to bring up. So there was a lot of unhappiness, a lot of difficulties in his married life, and also in his social and political life. Then suddenly, he learned that the invading forces of the neighboring country were getting ready to come and invade the country. So he had to call all of his troops together, and send to them to the frontier to resist this military invasion from the next country.
This Minister of Defense was not happy, and therefore his relationships with his wife and his children were not good. He didn’t have enough peace and intelligence and clarity in his heart, and so, when he organized the resistance against the enemy, he made a lot of mistakes. The result was that the enemy army was able to invade his country, and take a lot of territory. The news of the defeat was brought to the Emperor, and he was furious with the Minister of Defense. He designated someone else to be in charge of the national defense, and he gave orders for the old Minister of Defense to be beheaded.
In the dream the young man saw himself taken to the execution block, surrounded by soldiers, to be beheaded in a military ceremony. At the moment when he was about to be beheaded, he heard something like the song of a bird, and he woke up. He came out of his dream, and he didn’t know where he was. When he looked to the left and the right, he saw that he was at the foot of a hill, and near him was a hermit who was stirring some millet soup in a little pot. It seemed that the dream had not lasted very long, maybe fifteen minutes, but during that time a whole lifetime had passed. I think that the hermit helped this dream to come into the head of the young man, to help him learn something: a whole life had passed in a dream, and it wasn’t fifteen minutes at all. When he looked at the hermit, the hermit looked at him with a beautiful smile, and said, "Did you have a good rest? Now the soup is ready. Sit down next to me, I’m going to give you a bowl of this good soup." The young man stood up, and he was no longer hungry. He had seen so much in his dream!
Each life can be a dream, and if you do not know how to live each moment of your life deeply, your life will pass like a dream, very quickly, maybe even more quickly than fifteen minutes. The hermit was there, calm and serene, and he was using a chopstick to stir the millet soup. Looking deeply at the hermit you could see that peace was alive in him. He was really alive, he was really happy. With peace, with solidity and freedom, life is something wonderful, and happiness is possible. The young man was sitting near the hermit, and he asked him questions about the practice. Since he was intelligent, he began to discover that peace in the heart, that liberty and freedom in the heart, are very basic for a happy life. Therefore, he gave up his ambitions to be a statesman. He gave up his dreams. He wanted to learn to live like the hermit, in order to be able to transform his suffering and to bring peace and freedom back into his heart. He decided to become a disciple of the hermit.
This hermit was the Buddha Dipankara, the one who lights the lamp. And afterwards, the young man, when he had practiced through many lifetimes, became a Buddha with the name Shakyamuni. He is our teacher, he is our spiritual father, he is our grandfather, and he is a person with whom we can walk everyday when we do walking meditation. Therefore, if you are a student in the university, think about this. Look deeply into your ambitions, into your plans, to see if it’s worth spending all your life and your energy to acquire these objects of your desire. Would it be wiser to look deeply, in order to be able to see that without inner freedom, without solidity, without peace, no happiness will be possible?
To be in touch with someone, a friend, who knows the path of freedom, who knows the path of the practice of solidity and compassion, is something very necessary. The Buddha Dipankara is always there, always near you. If you are attentive, you will recognize him. There is a very important word in Buddhism: it is kalyanamitra. It means a friend who is wise, a friend who has light. This friend can be very close to you, but because you are not mindful enough you have not been able to recognize his presence near you. Buddha Dipankara is there, with his freedom, with his understanding, with his power of shining light. He is the lighter of the lamp for society. You should recognize him and become close to him. You should see him as your closest friend, in order to be able to become what the Buddha Shakyamuni was able to become. This is the theme of my talk: the friend of your life, your lifetime friend, the friend who can uphold you, who can give you light, so that you do not lose your way on paths full of darkness. There are so many young people who are wandering in darkness: alcohol, drugs, and destruction of the body and the mind by an irresponsible way of life. All of this represents the darkness, and too many young people suffer in our society. Therefore we need a great deal of light. But Buddha Dipankara, the person who lights up the lamps in order to bring us light in the world, is always there, near us. We have to look. The moment when you find that spiritual friend is a wonderful moment, and you need to write to me and tell me that you have met the Buddha Dipankara when you meet him or her.
The little bell will be invited, you will stand up and bow to the Sangha, and then you can go out and continue to discuss the Dharma.
(Bell)
My dear friends, I think that we need to set up an alliance between parents and teachers to protect our children. The environment in which our children live does not have enough safety. There are too many negative things in this environment, and the children are exposed to too many dangers. We need to do something to protect the children, day and night, against the aggressions of society. We have organized our society in such a way that we produce many young people who are uprooted from society, from their spiritual traditions, from their families. We have been through times when we have seen the family broken into pieces, and churches which are empty of young people. The spiritual and moral leaders are not able to inspire people, above all the younger generation. There have been times when, and it is true now, when people do not want to listen to the sound of the bell of the church. In the United States, churches no longer ring their bells, and monks no longer wear their habits when they go outside the monastery. Religion has lost its prestige, it’s lost the confidence of people, and so has the family. The family is being broken up. There is no longer any happiness, any harmony in the family. The children born into families like that, growing up in families like that, no longer have confidence in family life; and they no longer have confidence in society or in the church. We have produced generations and generations of young people who can be described as hungry ghosts: hungry for love, for understanding. They can no longer find values to accept and live with.
In my own country we have a tradition of offering food to the hungry ghosts. Once a year, on the full moon day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar—that is the next full moon as far as our calendar here is concerned—each house in our country has an ancestral altar. You have children in the house, but you also have your ancestors in your house. And the practice is to put yourself in contact with your ancestors every day, and also to be in contact with your children every day. This is a very important practice for us in Southeast Asia. When the Catholic missionaries came to Southeast Asia, they told us to abandon this ancestor worship and become Christians. I’m sure that in Christianity there are many things that we can learn and bring into our spiritual lives, but to advise us to abandon our practice of being in touch with our ancestors was something very negative. Every day someone in the family has to dust the altar of the ancestors, change the water in the flower vase, light a stick of incense and come back to oneself before the altar for one or two minutes. It is our daily practice in Vietnam, and every family does this.
The children see their father practicing like this, and they see their mother or their elder sister practicing like this, and they learn how to do the same things: how to dust, how to light incense on the altar. This is a time to be in touch with your roots. If you are uprooted, you cannot be a happy person; therefore you have to keep in touch with your ancestors. They are always there in the family, and in our tradition, everything that happens, every special event in the family, has to be announced to the ancestors. If you are about to send your son to the university, you prepare a little offering to the ancestors, light incense, and tell the ancestors, "A week from now we are going to send this young man to the university." This is not superstition. It is communication with our ancestors, our own source.
The ancestral altar is a symbol. The ancestors are not on the altar, they are in you. But when you look at the altar, you touch the essence of your ancestors in you, and that is the essence of the practice. Even if you are very poor, even if you do not have enough to eat, you will always have an altar for the ancestors in your house, and the altar is always put in the central place in the house. If someone in the family is very sick, your must tell the ancestors, and ask the ancestors to send their support to the one who is sick. Your ancestors are in you, the strong cells in your body, and if you can touch your ancestors, especially those ancestors who lived a long life, perhaps ninety years, you are touching the strong cells in you, and those strong cells can help the cells in you which are not strong, to become strong again.
If you have cancer, you know that there are cells in you which are not working as they should. There is a kind of disorder in your body. Maybe your way of life is not healthy, there is too much stress. Being in touch with your grandfather or your grandmother, who is in you, who was in good health, who was able to overcome their physical and psychological difficulties, you activate the strong elements in yourself in order to be able to get better. So to be able to be in touch with ancestors is a wonderful practice. When you do that you receive a great deal of energy, and understanding and wisdom, and also a great deal of love, which has been handed down to you in the form of seeds. In your store consciousness, your ancestors are all there, with their wisdom, their love. So when you touch the ancestral altar, you touch the ancestors in yourself. If you’re going to marry your daughter to a young man in the neighboring village, you have to tell the ancestors, so there is a regular and continual contact with the ancestors. This is an essential practice as far as I am concerned, and I have proposed it to our Western friends. It is not superstition.
In Plum Village, in the Lower Hamlet, we always used to make an altar for the spirit of the Earth. In all the houses in Vietnam, there is a little altar to the spirit of the Earth. The Earth protects us, the Earth nourishes us, giving us the food that we need and everything else. Therefore, every time we light incense and come back to ourselves before the altar of the Earth spirit, we make a deep aspiration to protect the Earth, because in protecting the Earth, we protect ourselves. This all comes from the spiritual tradition of Southeast Asia.
If you know how to be in touch with your ancestors, then you know how to be in touch with your children and your grandchildren. It is the same thing. You need time to be with your young people, with your children. Not with incense, but with other things: with your breathing, and by walking in the woods with them. I have suggested that we have a little meditation room in each house to be called the breathing room, and there you can renew yourselves. In daily life we are always losing ourselves: we lose our energy, we lose our calm, we lose our honesty. Therefore we need somewhere to be able to go back to ourselves, to be able to renew ourselves. And we call this place the breathing room or the meditation room. In each house of the next century we want to have this kind of room. We have a room for everything: for guests, for children to play in, to sleep, to receive our guests. We have rooms for all these things, but we do not have rooms to renew ourselves, to takes care of our nervous systems. We need a room for our nervous systems, a room where we can make ourselves new, and we can renew the relationships between ourselves and those who live with us. In this room, you can put a little table, with maybe a vase of flowers—or maybe one flower is enough, because this flower symbolizes freshness and beauty and truth. You do not need a statue of the Buddha, but you may need a flower and a few cushions for the different members of your family. Each morning, before leaving the house to go to the office or school, it would be wonderful to sit down together for just one or two minutes. Invite the bell to sound, listen deeply, practice deep listening to the sound of the bell. Touch the depth of your being, touch your spiritual ancestors, and your blood ancestors, and breathe mindfully in and out. This is a wonderful way to begin our day.
Before we have to leave each other, we may say, "Have a good day" to the other person, but this is just a wish. Rather than just wishing that the day will be good, we can make the day good. We can begin our day in such a way that it will be a good day. Sitting on a cushion with your husband or your wife, and with your children, to listen to the bell three times, to breathe deeply at the same time, is a beautiful practice, and it’s very easy to do. You will see harmony and unity in the family, and the child who is there will also feel something. This kind of thing will nourish the children, and throughout their lives they will be able to use these practices as a refuge.
Before going to bed, we can do the same thing. Instead of praying, we can practice a little meditation, just for one minute, before wishing "goodnight" to our children. As parents you can sit with your children for one or two minutes. You can say, "Children, it’s time to go into the breathing room. Let’s sit down and listen to the bell." You turn off the television and go with the children into this little room, which represents peace and calm, and the spirituality of the house. We need a source of spirituality in our houses, and this room represents our spiritual traditions. Therefore we go to this room to sit down peacefully. We go to that room with walking meditation, taking the hand of a child. It is a way of expressing your love, to take the hand of your child, and to go to the breathing room with peace and solidity, and also to give your child peace and happiness. Stay with your child a minute, and listen to the bell. The bell can be invited by the child, and after that the child will go to bed. You will continue what you have to do in the family, and when the time comes for you to go to bed, you will do the same with your husband or wife. These are very simple things to do, but they are very important. It’s rather like having an ancestral altar.
We all have ancestors, spiritual and blood ancestors, and we know that someone who is cut off from their roots cannot be happy. Thus, the practice is to be able to put down our roots, re-root ourselves. It’s very important to be able to do this. The child needs to go back to his or her roots; how can they do that? Only with you. You need to help the child to go back to his or her roots, organizing your daily family life in such a way that the child can practice rooting himself or herself every day.
Without roots we become hungry ghosts. Look around your. There are so many young people who are completely uprooted from their cultures, their families, and their spiritual traditions. They have nothing to do with them. They are looking for something true and beautiful and good, but they are unable to find these things. In the church they cannot find them, in the family they cannot find them, in society they cannot find them, and they despair. In their anguish, they feel that they feel they cannot go on. They cannot bear this terrible emptiness, since they can find nothing beautiful in the world, nothing true, nothing good. Therefore they despair, and despair is the most terrible poison. Young people have come to this point, this sickness of despair, and therefore they use drugs, or they use music, or they use alcohol, and destroy themselves physically, and mentally.
The government has had to use strong means to stop the importation of drugs, even using the army. They use airplanes and helicopters to mount an attack on those who bring in drugs. But the only way is to see the cause of people wanting to take drugs, which is because of a lack. People feel the need for something to believe in: truth, goodness, beauty, without which life has no meaning. That is why the young people have suffered so much, and many of them have become hungry ghosts. I have met many young people who are hungry ghosts, or wandering spirits. They come to our practice center. You only have to look at them for one or two minutes and you will be able to identify them as hungry ghosts. The way they walk, the way they sit, the way they stand up, proves that they are hungry ghosts. They are hungry for understanding, hungry for love, and wherever they go they are not understood by the church, their families or society.
In my own country, on full moon day of the seventh month, we offer food for the hungry spirits. We can do this in France also, but in a different way. As far as we believe, a hungry ghost has a huge belly, and an esophagus as thin as a needle. We call them pretas in Sanskrit. Even if you have food to offer to these hungry ghosts, it is impossible for them to swallow it, because their throats are too small. They cannot swallow, therefore in the ceremony we have to use a mantra which is able to make their throats the usual size, so that they are able to receive food. We make the offering in the garden, in front of the house, because only the ancestors can eat at the ancestral altar, and there isn’t enough room there for the hungry ghosts. Therefore a table is set up in the garden in front of the house, and on that table we offer food and drink for the hungry ghosts. And we recite mantras and dharani, magic formulas to help hungry ghosts have throats of a normal size, so that they are able to receive food and drink. There are many chants also, and readings from the sutras to help the hungry ghosts to have a deeper understanding of the practice, so that they can transform themselves. This is the living practice in Vietnam.
Now if we look around us we will see that the hungry ghosts are always there, and every day we create more hundreds of thousands of hungry ghosts. The way in which we organize our society produces hundreds of thousands of hungry ghosts every day. I have tried a great deal to help these young people, but it is very difficult, because there is so much suspicion in them. They do not believe us easily. Even if you have something to offer them, it is difficult for them to accept it, because of their suspicion and doubt. We need to be very patient to gain their trust. Before we gain their trust, we cannot do anything to help them. They need understanding, they need love. But even if you have understanding and love, it is difficult to give it to them, because they are suspicious of everything, and they doubt everything. Therefore you need a lot of patience in order to help them. You need to learn how to embrace them with your tolerance, and above all with your patience. One day a little root may emerge, and you’ll have hope; your task is to help that person to have roots, to put down their roots again, and you’ll do your best to send that person back to their family, their society, and their church.
Understanding is essential. We need to understand why the situation in the family has become what it is; we have to understand why that situation in the church has become what it is. We have to understand why the situation in the society has become what it is. And once we understand that, we can forgive, and we will be able to have enough energy to go back and to do something to renew the institution called family, church or society. The family needs to be restructured. With the practice and mindfulness, you can restructure your family, and you can restructure your church, your society. We need to truly bring about the energy of understanding and compassion in the family, in order to be able to reclaim the young people who have left us. When we practice mindfulness, we can look deeply and try to restructure our families. We act in such a way that understanding and harmony and being in touch are possible every day. Practice in such a way that you can be in touch with your ancestors every day. Practice in such a way that the relationship between you and your children is re-established, and communication is restored.
It is necessary to practice listening deeply, to practice compassionate listening. And practicing loving speech is also necessary. All these things are taught in practice centers. Learn how to listen, to your ancestors, to your children, and your partner. Without doing this, you cannot re-establish communication, and without communication will be lost.
Deep listening means compassionate listening. It is something we have to train ourselves in straight away, because many of us have lost the capacity to listen. There’s too much pain and too much irritation in us, and we are not able to listen with patience and compassion. In each of us there is some suffering, there is despair, there is anger and irritation. There are people who are like bombs, ready to explode at any moment, and we are afraid to go near them, we are afraid to talk to them. The slightest mistake will make them explode. When we try to avoid such a person, he thinks we have given up on him or her, he thinks everyone hates him or her. Therefore, at all costs, we should learn how to communicate, and the practice of listening deeply is absolutely necessary.
In Buddhism there is someone called Avalokiteshvara. He or she is someone who has wonderful ability to listen with compassion, knowing that the other person suffers so much. We know that they need to express themselves, but nobody in the house dares to listen, because everyone else has their own suffering. When listening to the other person with all your pain, it is possible that you will what you hear will water the seeds of suffering in you, and when those seeds are watered you will have no more patience or ability to listen deeply. Compassionate listening has one aim only, and that is to relieve the suffering of the other person. You need to breathe mindfully in order to nourish your intention to listen. I have no other motivation for listening other than to give the person the opportunity to express themselves. We need to train for a long time in order to be able to do this. Even if the other person accuses you, even if the other person is full of wrong perceptions, even if the other person accuses you quite unjustly, is always reproaching you, you keep your compassion alive, and you are able to stay by them, silently, calmly. Your business is to listen, even if there is no truth, no justice in what they are saying. If you can listen for an hour like that it is already a wonderful help to the other person. You are the best kind of psychotherapist, because you have the capacity to listen with compassion, just to listen. You don’t have to say anything. Even if the other person says very foolish things, if all of his perceptions are wrong, even if he or she accuses you, you always follow your breath and keep calm, because you are playing the role of Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, listening in order to relieve the suffering. This is something that anyone can do.
If you practice mindful breathing sitting meditation, walking meditation for a week, you will be able to acquire the capacity to listen deeply to the other person. And with the practice of deep listening goes the practice of loving speech, a kind of speech which is characterized by calmness. You have the right to say everything which is in your heart. You do not need to hide things. You don’t need to hide anything. You have the right, even the duty, to tell everything that is in your heart, but you have to say it in a loving way, a calm way. This may not be easy. It takes a lot of concentration.
At first you may have a very strong intention to use only calm words, but when you begin to speak you begin to touch the blocks of suffering within yourself, and you lose yourself. There are vibrations in your voice. The pain begins to manifest itself in your words. You suffer, you become irritable, and your words lose their capacity to communicate. The energy of your pain starts to rise up in you until you can no longer speak with loving speech. In such a case you shouldn’t continue. You should say, "My dear one, I do not feel quite right. I promise that we can continue another day." And at that point you retire. You should not try too much. You should stop as soon as you see that you are no longer calm. You have your limits, and you know your limits. Therefore, you have to train more and more, until you can stay for half an hour or an hour, and practice loving speech. You have to communicate to the other in such a way that they can accept what you are saying. Tell them the truth. Tell them what has made you suffer. Do not blame or make any accusations. Just help the other to see what is in your heart: "Darling, I have suffered, and this is my suffering. I just wanted you to know what is happening in me, because I need your help. Without you I cannot do it." At this moment there is a transformation, a healing, and you have to commit yourself in this way so that the other person can sit down and listen to you.
One of the Five Mindfulness Trainings, the Fourth Mindfulness Training, is about the practice of deep listening and loving speech. You know that without practicing mindful walking, mindful breathing, without being able to embrace your pain while breathing deeply, we cannot do this deep listening. Therefore, it all a practice which you have to apply in your daily lives. When you are in a mindfulness retreat, you must make all efforts to learn and to make a firm beginning in the practice. Every day of practice will bring you more strength, and you will learn the art of living mindfully. You will learn how to walk, how to sit, how to breathe, how to listen, and how to use calm and loving speech. When you go back home you have to arrange things in such a way that your practice will continue. If you have a partner who can practice with you, you are very lucky. If you have a child who is ready to practice with you, that is very good. But if you are alone, you can practice in such a way that others can see you are now a more pleasant person, more fresh, more loving. We have confidence in the practice because the practice can modify everything. And the practice begins with you, yourself, and then it will increase and go to others and touch those who live with you. You don’t have to wait for the other to change. You should begin to change yourself, in your own way, with your own words, by your listening, by your walking, by your way of eating and your way of living your daily life. Then the peace, happiness and calm in you will be noticed by others. In this way you have begun to change the situation, through change in yourself, before you are able to change what is outside of yourself.
(Bell)
We all have a tendency to blame the other person. If things are not going well, we say that it’s his fault, or her fault. If something’s going wrong, it must be him, or it must be her—it’s not me! The Buddha said, "This is because that is; this is not, because that is not. This is like this, because that is like that." He used very simple words. You want to change the other person, whether it happens to be your child or your spouse, but you don’t think about changing yourself. First of all the change has to take place in you—the way you listen, the way you speak, the way you walk, the way you sit down, the way you work—you can change it all, you can better it all, in order to help others to change.
(Bell)
The Buddha has taught us six ways of going beyond, of going over to the shore of non-suffering. In order to be able to cross the river of our difficulties and arrive at the other side, the shore of well being. This teaching is called the teaching of the Six Paramitas, the six ways of going across, of going over. If you’re angry, you’re on this side of the river, but you shouldn’t stay on this side of the river. You should do something to get to the other side, the side of well being. This is something we can do in our daily lives. Often we find ourselves in a difficult position, which has been brought about by our own psyche; we can do something in order to get out of this position. The heart of the practice is mindfulness. We all know that mindfulness is an energy which allows us to be there in the present moment, to become really present, to become truly and totally alive. I’m going to draw something. This is a circle, with this character, which means mindfulness. The Chinese word for mindfulness is written like this: the top half means now, and underneath we have the character which means mind. Your mind comes back to the present moment, that is what is meant by mindfulness. So breathing in, or taking a step, you’re able to bring your body and your mind back together, and suddenly you are really there in the here and the now. This state of being is called the oneness of body and mind. It’s a very simple practice, but it’s very efficient and it’s very efficacious. Only one breathing in or breathing out will bring you back to the present moment, and there you will be able to touch life deeply.
I’m drawing a petal, because the Six Paramitas, the six crossings-over, are thought of as a flower. The first practice is called the practice of giving. You have to know how to give, and if you are able to give, you will go beyond suffering, and you will re-establish well being in yourself. What do you have to give? Do you need money in order to be able to give? No. You always have something to give, and I want to tell you that the most precious thing that you can give is your presence. You can always offer your presence to someone as a gift. When you love someone, what can you give them, what can you do, to have something to give them? You can give your presence, because without being present you cannot have love. To love means to be there, body and mind united. This is something you can do. Breathing mindfully, you come back to yourself, and you can look at the other person and say, "Darling, I am here for you." If you are not there, how can you love? We are all so busy, and our presence for the person we love is something very rare.
I know a child of eleven years old, and his father asked him, "Tomorrow is your birthday. Can I buy something for you?" The young man was not interested. His father was extremely rich, and he could have bought anything for his son, but the child didn’t need that kind of thing. He had so many toys already. He only needed one thing: his father’s presence. When you are rich, you have to use your time and energy to stay rich. You don’t have enough time for being with the ones you love. So if a father is intelligent, he will see that the most beautiful present he can give to his child is his own presence. Often we are there physically, but we are not there spiritually. We are lost in the past, in the future, and in our plans. We are not really there. A child is disappointed, a wife is disappointed, a husband is disappointed. You are not really there. So the child can come and touch your shoulder, and he can say, "Is someone home?" You’ll come out of your dream, out of your prison, out of the past and the future, and come back to yourself. If the child doesn’t do that you’ll have to do it for yourself. You have to take some steps into mindfulness, take some breaths in mindfulness, make yourself present, look at your child, and say: "Darling, I am here for you now." You open your arms, and that is the most precious gift you can give to the one you love: your own presence. You don’t need money to do this.
When you are there, something else is there too. As I said yesterday, when you are really there, life is there too. Life with all its wonders: the blue sky, the luxurious vegetation, the setting sun, the full moon, the wonderful face of the one you love, all these things are available to you. If you are not there, you will lose it all, these things do not mean anything. But when you are there, the other thing is there too, and you are practicing the recognition of what is beautiful and wonderful in your life. When you are there, the person you love is there too. So you can open your eyes, smile, and make a declaration: "Darling, I know you are there, and it makes me very happy." To be loved is to be recognized as being, as existing, and you should confirm your mindfulness of the other person’s existence. "Darling you are there, alive, and that is something very precious as far as I am concerned. I am very happy because of it." With the energy of mindfulness you embrace the one you love, and when someone is surrounded by this wonderful energy, they will open like a flower. That person may be your child, may be your daughter, your son, that person may be your partner. You can have the luxury of the practice, and with one conscious breath, some mindful breathings, some mindful steps, you can bring about your own presence, and make it a present for the one you love.
In tantric Buddhism we practice reciting dharanis, and we say that by reciting these magic formulae we change the situation. But now we can recite mantras in French or English. With right mindfulness present in you, you become really there, really alive. You have only to open your mouth and say the words: "Darling, I am here for you. I am really here for you". That is the mantra. The second one: "Darling, I know you are there, and it makes me very happy," is another mantra, something which can make the other person happy straight away, instantly. The essence of the practice is mindfulness, and with mindfulness you are really there, you are there in the situation to be able to recognize the presence of the other person. To be loved is to be recognized as existing.
Remember, there are moments when you are driving your car, and he or she is sitting next to you. You are thinking about everything, but you don’t think about the person sitting next to you—you think that you know everything about that person. You can even be singing a song, and thinking about your future and your plans, and you are quite unaware of the person who is sitting next to you. There is no mindfulness. You are not practicing love. Love is the energy of mindfulness which surrounds and embraces the object of your love.
(Bell)
These two mantras can be practiced in French, English, German or Italian. I can assure you that it will work, and lead to the energy of mindfulness. If the energy of mindfulness is in you, the mantras will be very effective. You will see straight away the effect of this practice in the present moment. You should nourish the person you love with mindfulness and with your real presence. You should nourish yourself with this mindfulness, this energy of mindfulness. You should be there for yourself; you should be there for the person you love. You know what to do in order to be there for yourself and for the other.
When the other suffers, which he or she will do from time to time, if you are really there you will notice that there is suffering there, and with the same method you light up the lamp of mindfulness in yourself, you go to him or her, and you recite the third mantra: "Dear one, I know you are suffering, and that is why I am here for you." When you suffer, and the person you love most of all is not aware of it, you suffer even more. But if the person you love is there and is aware that you are suffering, your suffering is already relieved. You suffer much less, because your loved one knows that you are suffering. Before you’ve actually done anything to help the other, your presence alone has transformed the situation. Your presence is healing and transforming. This is something not difficult to do. Having practiced somewhat, you can change the atmosphere in the family and you can improve the quality of relationship between you and your loved ones.
I have a fourth mantra which is a little difficult to practice, but we need to be able to train to do it. It’s an important mantra. You use it when you are suffering yourself, and you think that the other person is the reason for your suffering, the person that you love most of all. It’s difficult. If somebody else had said that, had done that, you would have suffered much less; but because that person, the person you love the most, said that or did that, you suffer a hundred times more. You want to close yourself in your room in order to cry on your own, and if that person comes towards you, you prefer that he or she not touch you: "Leave me alone." That is your natural tendency. When you suffer, you want to be alone. You feel that the other person is the cause of your suffering, and you do not want to be helped by him or her. You want to show that you don’t need him or her. This is very childish, but we all do this. When we think that the other person is the reason for our suffering, we want to show them that we can be all alone, that we don’t need them. The fourth mantra is something which will help you.
There is a story, a tragedy, which everyone in my country knows about. The story of a man who went to war and left his wife at home, pregnant. When they were separated, they cried a lot, but, fortunately, two years later he came back home. By that time the little boy had been born. His wife and his little boy came to the gate of the village to meet the veteran. He wept in their arms, and then he said to his wife, "Go to the market and buy some things to be able to prepare an offering to put on the ancestral altar, and to announce to the ancestors that the soldier has returned." The ancestors always need to be told the good news.
When his wife was at the market, the husband tried to persuade the child to call him Daddy. "No, mister, you are not my Daddy. My Daddy is someone else. He comes every night, and my Mommy talks a long time to him, many times, and she cries a lot. Each time she sits down, he sits down too. Each time she lies down, he lies down too." The child spoke all these terrible things, and the happiness of the husband disappeared completely. He became a block of ice. When his young wife came home, he did not look at her. His suffering was so great, it came right up to his heart. There was nothing he could do. After he had offered incense to the ancestors, he touched the earth four times, as we do in Vietnam, and he addressed his prayer to the ancestors. Then he rolled up the mat on which he had touched the earth, so that his wife would not be able to touch the earth in front of the ancestors. He thought that his wife was unfaithful to him, and therefore was not worthy to present herself before the ancestors. His wife was still very young, she didn’t understand at all why her husband’s attitude had changed so drastically after she came back from the market. She suffered too much. She kept all this suffering within her own heart, because she was proud. He was proud. He suffered so much, but his pride was too great to allow him to share his suffering with his wife.
After having told the ancestors the good news that he had returned home, he went out into the village, and he spent all his time in the bar, drinking alcohol. When people suffer a lot, if they do not know how to practice, they use alcohol to drown their suffering. Usually, after an offering like this, the whole family needs to come together before the altar to celebrate the good news; but he went out into the village, and he only came back at two o’clock in the morning. He did this for three or four days, and his wife couldn’t bear it any longer. She threw herself into the river and drowned herself.
After hearing the news the young husband came back home to take care of his child. That night, he lit up the kerosene lamp in the house, and the little boy pointed to the shadow of his father, and he said, "Mister, that’s my father. He comes every night, and Mommy speaks to him every night, and she cries a lot. And every time she sits down, he sits down too." The child’s words! Now the husband began to understand. The father the child talked about was just the shadow thrown onto the wall. His wife had spoken to a shadow every night: "My dear husband, you’ve been away so long. How can I, all alone, take care of our little boy?" and then she would cry. And of course, every time she sat down, the shadow sat down too. Wrong perception had now been removed, but it was too late. The young lady was already dead, and there was no way to bring her back to life.
If there had been ho pride, the young man could have come to his wife and said, "While you were out in the market, our little boy said that someone comes to visit you every night. I don’t understand. I’m suffering so much because of this. You have to explain it to me." If he had done this, his young wife would have had an opportunity to explain, and both of them would not have had to undergo the tragedy which happened. But he didn’t do that. His wife too had suffered greatly, but the pride she had stopped her going to her husband and saying: "Darling, why are you acting like this? Why are you behaving like this? Since I came back from the market you haven’t looked at me, you haven’t spoken to me. Have I done something so terrible, to be treated like this?" If his wife had said something like that, then her husband would have been able to explain what had happened, and together they would have not had to go through this tragedy.
All of us, we can make the same mistake in our daily lives, when we suffer, and we think that the other person is the cause of our suffering, we want to be alone, we want to show: "I don’t need you any more. I can live without you." This is a very childish attitude, but it always remains in us. So the fourth mantra is to help you to go across the river and reach the other shore. You need mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindfulness in all your activities; and then with calm words you go to the other and you say, "Darling, I am suffering so much. You have to help me; you have to explain: why did you do that? Why did you say that? Without you I cannot get out of this difficulty I’m in." If you have the ability to say such a thing is such a way, then the person you love will have the chance to explain to you, and if there is a wrong perception, you will be able to free yourself from that wrong perception.
In daily life, there are so many wrong perceptions, and sometimes we keep a wrong perception for a very long time. For ten years, twenty years, a wrong perception can destroy our relationship. Therefore, I do not want my friends to make the same mistake as Mr. Truong. Next time you are suffering and you think that the suffering is caused by the person that you love most in the world, remember the fourth mantra. "Darling, I’m suffering so much. I don’t understand why you, the person that I love most in the world, could have said something like this, could have done something like this to me. Help me. Explain why you did that." This will bring a lot of mindfulness energy to the other, and the other will say something to help you get out of your difficult situation.
The gift of giving…giving is a way of going across the river of suffering, and establishing yourself on the shore of well being. The first gift you give is your presence, your mindfulness of what is in the present moment. This energy of mindfulness will relieve the suffering, and therefore it is a present you can give to the one you love. The Buddha said when you are angry and you have done everything you can to put an end to your anger, but you have not yet managed to do that, practice giving. Find something and offer it to the person who has caused your suffering, caused your anger, and the Buddha guarantees that after giving your anger will be transformed. I suggest that you do not wait until you are angry to prepare the gift you will be giving. Prepare the gift beforehand. Maybe that person is your father, is your husband, your wife, your partner. Sometimes you are angry with him or her; therefore, prepare yourself in advance, before it happens again, and have a present ready, or kind words written, and keep the present in your house. When you feel angry and you have done everything you can to get over your anger but it doesn’t work, you bring out your present, you go to the Post Office, and you send it to him or her. You don’t have to wait. Once you have sent the present in the post, you will already feel that your anger has been transformed. If you are angry with someone, give him or her something. That is what the Buddha said. Giving is a way, a wonderful way, to come to the other shore.
Another petal is called mindfulness, mindfulness training. This is the practice of protection. The five Mindfulness Trainings are to protect you and your loved ones. If you live according to the insight of the Five Mindfulness Trainings, you will be able to put yourself in a safe place. If you love someone, you should practice the mindfulness trainings. It’s a kind of gift. When love is new, you want the person you love to be safe. Therefore, you can sign up with an insurance company, you think only in monetary terms. We can protect our selves and the people we love with money, but there are other ways to protect oneself. According to the Buddha, to protect oneself with mindfulness is the surest way to protect yourself. There are countries where, when we say goodbye to somebody, we say, "Take care." Either at the beginning of a journey, or just at the beginning of a day, we say: "Take good care." In Vietnam, and in China, we say than trong. "Take care." It expresses love. If you love someone, look after yourself. Looking after yourself, you look after the one you love. It’s very clear.
You love your child, but you cannot be with your child 24hrs a day, your child has to go to school. Your child has to be in touch with others in the society, so he is at risk. How can you make your child secure, safe? When something happens to you, it happens to your child; when something happens to your child, it happens to you. You and your child inter-are. We inter-are. Therefore, to protect oneself is to protect the other, and helping the other to protect themselves is to protect yourself. That is exactly what we are learning here in the Five Mindfulness Trainings. If you study deeply the nature of the Five Mindfulness Trainings, you will see that they are realistic ways to protect you, to protect your loved ones, and to protect your society. For example, the Fourth Mindfulness Training, which concerns the art of deep listening and loving speech. If you train yourself to listen deeply, to speak lovingly, you will protect yourself and you will protect other members of your family. There are so many families which are broken because people cannot communicate between themselves within the family. We are not capable of listening, of speaking calmly, and we provoke dangerous situations in our families. Separation is a dangerous situation. Hate is a dangerous situation. And they come from us, ourselves. It’s not like a car accident, which can happen because of somebody else’s driving. The seed of anger is always there in us, and our lack of mindfulness can always put our anger into motion. So to practice mindful speech and listening will protect you and the others.
The Fifth Mindfulness Training concerns consumption, the practice of mindful consumption. We know that we can ingest elements that bring war and disorder into our body. We can ingest elements that will destroy our minds. When a child is exposed to television programs which are not healthy, this is dangerous consumption. When you read a book, when you look at television, you are consuming. When you listen to a conversation which contains a lot of poisons and despair, you are consuming these things. We are prey to so many toxins in our daily lives. Therefore, the Fifth Mindfulness Training is to protect us and our loved ones by mindful consumption. Before eating something, we have to look deeply to see whether this food is going to destroy or nourish us. The same is true for spiritual nourishment, magazines, television programs, conversations—all these things can be toxic. We have to practice mindfulness in order to understand, in order to identify the products which we consume. Can they help us to heal? We should avoid all kinds of products which will ruin us. And so we come together as a family, as a Sangha, and we make laws concerning consumption. If we are depressed, it is because we have consumed without mindfulness, we have allowed toxins and poisons to come into us. By our consumption, we have listened, we have looked, we have thought, we have allowed these toxic elements to come into us. To consume mindfully is a way to protect ourselves, which is very effective and absolutely necessary. If you are able to apply this practice in your family, there will be perfect security for your family. If you can live with these protections, that is the most beautiful gift you can give to your society, and to your family. Therefore the practice of mindful consumption is a form of gift.
So many families have been broken by sexual misconduct. We are talking about the Third Mindfulness Training. Sex without love and a real long-term commitment is empty sex, and it’s dangerous. We think that the emptiness in us will dissolve if we have a sexual relationship with another person. We feel a vacuum, an emptiness within ourselves, and we cannot bear this: "I don’t want to undergo this." We feel too lonely, and we think that our loneliness will dissolve when we have sexual relations with another person. When two bodies come together in a sexual way, there must be mutual understanding, there must be deep and perfect communication, so that the sexual act is not empty. We live in a time when young people practice empty sex, and this is very dangerous. At thirteen or fourteen years old, when they don’t know anything about real love, they have sex, which is something very destructive. We have live in such a way, and tell our children, that it is very dangerous to have empty sex, because empty sex will stop you being able to experience real love in the future. Real love only comes from deeply understanding each other. There has to be perfect communication, there has to be deep sharing, as far as our ideals in life are concerned.
We have be in agreement about how we will get out of our difficulties together, we have to know how to be partners in the family and in the society, before we have sexual relations. Because of empty sex and violence, young people today can destroy everything. We have to give them a good example. We have to live in a way that shows young people the way, and therefore the Third Mindfulness Training is about protection of the family, of children, from sexual abuse. Our society has been damaged by this sexual misconduct. As a Sangha, we should get together and practice looking deeply to find ways to protect ourselves and to protect our families against this practice of empty sex, which is truly destructive. We will continue this teaching on Sunday in Vietnamese. First of all giving, and then the practice of Mindfulness Trainings. We are going to talk about the practice of inclusiveness.
As far as I am concerned, the practice of the Five Mindfulness Trainings is the only way to help us get out of our difficult situation in our society today. I am sure that if everyone could go back to their spiritual source, and practice looking deeply, they would discover the equivalent of the Five Mindfulness Trainings in their own traditions. They are not things imposed on us by someone else. They are the result of the deep insight that we have discovered when we live in mindfulness. You know what is happening. You know about the destruction, the pain the suffering which reigns in the world, and when you look deeply at the world, you see that if we have this kind of suffering, it is because we have done something, or we have failed to do something. Therefore, we come to a kind of wisdom, and that wisdom is that we should live mindfully in order to restructure our own lives, our family life and our social life. If you ask me what we can do to get out of this difficult situation, I would say quite simply, live according to the Five Mindfulness Trainings. The Five Mindfulness Trainings give a very concrete way to live our daily lives mindfully. Mindfulness manifests concretely in the Five Mindfulness Trainings, which can be seen as the way of liberation, the path of emancipation.
(Three Bells)

End of Dharma talk.



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Why I am Not a Christian-Bertrand Russell

Little Blue Book No. 1372
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

Why I am Not a Christian
Bertrand Russell
[March 6, 1927]
[HTML by Cliff Walker, April 27, 1998]

Index: Historical Writings (Russell)
Home to Positive Atheism
Go to Bertrand Russell Society Home Page
Mentioned in: Why I Am A Rationalist
Excerpted in: Atheist Centre (India) Souvenir
Haldeman-Julius Publications
Girard, Kansas
Copyright, 1929,
By Haldeman-Jullius Company
Printed in the United States of America

Why I Am Not a Christian
An Examination of the God-Idea and Christianity

[The lecture that is here presented was delivered at the Battersea Town Hall under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society, England. It should be added that the editor is willing to share full responsibility with the Hon. Bertrand Russell in that he is in accord with the political and other opinions expressed.] [The previous statement was included in the original, and is not made by Positive Atheism.]

As your chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is "Why I Am Not a Christian." Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word "Christian." It is used in these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians -- all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on -- are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.


What is a Christian?

Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anyone calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature -- namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think that you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there is another sense which you find in Whitaker's Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers, and so on; but in that sense we are all Christians. The geography books counts us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore. Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness.

But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in the olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included the belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.


The Existence Of God

To come to this question of the existence of God, it is a large and serious question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. This is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time the Freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason, and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few.


The First Cause Argument

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God. That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality that it used to have; but apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man, and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.


The Natural-Law Argument

Then there is a very common argument from Natural Law. That was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for any explanation of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of Natural Law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were Natural Laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depth of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find that they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards to a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes the whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, 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 you to behave a certain way, in which way you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and, being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there were you are then faced with the question, Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others? If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it -- if there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate law-giver. In short, this whole argument from natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of these arguments. 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 Argument From Design

The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti, and Mr. Winston Churchill? Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe." I am not very much impressed by the splendor of those people. Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions and temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen in this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.


The Moral Arguments For Deity

Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what are called the moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee. That illustrates what the psycho-analysts so much emphasize -- the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times.

Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right and wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are then in this situation: is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God who made this world, or could take up the line that some of the agnostics ["Gnostics" -- CW] took up -- a line which I often thought was a very plausible one -- that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the Devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.


The Argument For The Remedying Of Injustice

Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of the universe that we know there is a great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth, and so they say that there must be a God, and that there must be Heaven and Hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say, "After all, I only know this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here then the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also." Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue: "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance." You would say: "Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment;" and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say: "Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one." Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about is not really what moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.

Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire for a belief in God.


The Character Of Christ

I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said: "Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-Tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister, for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.

Then there is another point which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged." That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and they none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, "Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away." This is a very good principle. Your chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the liberals and conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.

Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practiced. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, I am not by way of doing so, and it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.


Defects In Christ's Teaching

Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance: "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come." Then He says: "There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom"; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians really did believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In this respect clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and he certainly was not superlatively wise.


The Moral Problem

Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person that is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance, find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.

You will find that in the Gospels Christ said: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of this sort into the world.

Then Christ 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"; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats: "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." He continues: "And these shall go away into everlasting fire." Then He says again, "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, where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world, and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him as his chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.

There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig-tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when he came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever'.... and Peter.... saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to History. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.


The Emotional Factor

As I said before, I do not think that the real reason that people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshipped under the name of the "Sun Child"; and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the High Priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says: "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told, "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"; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away.

That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called Ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or ever mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.


How The Churches Have Retarded Progress

You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so, I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says, "This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life," and no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to syphilitic children. This is what the Catholic church says. I say that that is fiendish cruelty, and nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.

That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which at the present moment the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."


Fear, The Foundation Of Religion

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 the 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 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 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 a God is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. 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 for 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.

Index: Historical Writings (Russell)
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