[274F-LER: p. 206]
“ … it is far more compatible with a truth-loving heart, and even with the honor of God to deny His existence than to give Him a precarious lease on life by means of the shameful and silly sophisms and tricks which pious theologians and philosophers have hatched and spawned to justify divine Providence. It is better to fall with honor than to stand without honor.” [274F-LER: p. 206]
[275F-LER: p. 207]
“What civilized man strives to achieve by molding and cultivating nature, namely, a beautiful, happy existence, sheltered from the brutalities and blind accidents of nature, uncivilized man tries to achieve by religion.” [275F-LER: p. 207]
[276F-LER: p. 208]
“ … unlike religious faith or religious imagination, civilization is not all-powerful. No more than nature can make gold out of leather after the manner of God, can civilization, which masters nature only through nature – that is, by natural means, perform miracles.” [276F-LER: p. 208]
[277F-LER: p. 209]
“Unable to satisfy his desires by his own resources, a child turns to his parents, the beings on whom he feels and knows himself to be dependent, in the hope of obtaining what he wishes through them. Religion has its origin, its true position and significance, in the childhood stage of mankind. But the childhood stage is also the stage of ignorance and inexperience, the uneducated, uncivilized stage.” [277F-LER: p. 209]
[278F-LER: p. 209-210]
[P. 209] “Religion arises solely in the night of ignorance, in times of misery, helplessness, and rudimentary culture, when for this very reason the imagination overshadows all man’s other powers, where man entertains the wildest and most extravagant ideas. Yet it also springs from man’s need of light, of culture … ; it is indeed the first, still crude and vulgar form of human culture … . Everything which later became a field of independent human activity, of culture, was originally an aspect of religion: all the arts, all the sciences, or rather, the first beginnings, the [P. 210] first elements – for as soon as an art or science achieves a high state of development, it ceases to be religion – were originally the concern of religion and its representatives, the priests.” [278F-LER: p. 209-210]
[279F-LER: p. 211-212]
[P. 211] “ … precisely because man made sacraments of the first medicines, of the first elements of human civilization and well-being, religion always became, in the course of development, the antithesis of true civilization, an [P. 212] obstacle to progress; for it opposed every innovation, every change in the old traditional ways.” [279F-LER: p. 211-212]
