[280F-LER: p. 212-213]
[P. 212] “ … today smiths and metalworkers in general know their trade without having any particular god as their patron … . … as long as an art is still imperfect, as long as it is in its swaddling clothes, it requires [P. 213] the protection of religion.” [280F-LER: p. 212-213]
[281F-LER: p. 213]
“ … by its very nature religion comprises anticultural elements; for it strives to perpetuate ideas, customs, inventions that man made in his childhood, and to impose them as the laws of his adult age.” [281F-LER: p. 213]
[282F-LER: p. 214]
“Religion prevents him [man] from behaving like an animal, it is the barrier between humanity and bestiality; in other words, bestiality is inside him, humanity is outside and above him. The sole foundation of his humanity, the only thing that deters him from gluttony and drunkenness is a God, a being who, or so at least he thinks, is distinct from, and outside himself. If there were no God … I should be a beast; the ground and essence of my humanity are outside me. (…) I am a man only if I act humanly of my own accord, if I recognize and practice humanity as a trait of my nature, as a necessary consequence of my own being.” [282F-LER: p. 214]
[283F-LER: p. 216-217]
[P. 216] “In all other fields man progresses; in religious matters he remains stone-blind, stone-deaf, and rooted to the spot. Religious institutions, customs and articles of faith continue to be held sacred even when they stand in the most glaring contradiction to man’s more advanced reason and ennobled feelings; even when the original justification and meaning of these same institutions and conceptions are long forgotten. We ourselves are living amid this same repugnant contradiction between religion and culture; our religious doctrines and usages also stand in the most glaring contradiction to our present cultural and material situation; our task [P. 217] today is to do away with this loathsome and disastrous contradiction. Its elimination is the indispensable condition for the rebirth of mankind, the one and only condition for the appearance of a new mankind, as it were, and for the coming of a new era. Without it, all political and social reforms are meaningless and futile. A new era also requires a new view of the first elements and foundations of human existence; it requires – if we wish to retain the word – a new religion!” [283F-LER: p. 216-217]
[284F-LER: p. 219]
“ … man’s task in the state is not only to believe what he wishes, but to believe what is reasonable, not only to believe, but to know what he can and must know if he is to be a free and cultivated man. Here no barrier to human knowledge can excuse us. In the realm of nature, to be sure, there are still many things we do not understand; but the secrets of religion spring from man himself, and he is capable of knowing them down to their remotest depths. And because he can know them, he ought to know them. (…) The elimination of this lie is the condition for a new, energetic mankind.” [284F-LER: p. 219]
