[285F-LER: p. 223]
“That I believe in God means: I believe there is no nature, no necessity. Let the rationalists drop their belief in God, or let them drop physics, astronomy, and physiology. No man can serve two masters. (…)
(…) There are in point of fact men who in practice deny, reject, and ridicule what in their minds they profess, or conversely deny with their minds what they profess in their hearts … .” [285F-LER: p. 223]
[286F-LER: p. 229]
“Even to a believer in natural process, to be sure, nature is an object of the striving for happiness … . Even to a scientific thinker it is an object of imagination and of feeling, even of the feeling of dependency, but only on the basis of its real, objective character; he is not so hoodwinked by his feeling or so overwhelmed by his imagination as to take a subjective view of nature … .” [286F-LER: p. 229]
[287F-LER: p. 231]
“The pagan desires were desires which did not exceed the nature of man, the limits of this life, of this real sensuous world. And for this very reason their gods were no such unlimited and supernatural beings as the Christian God. No! like the pagans’ desires, their gods were not outside or above the world; they were one with the world, worldly beings.” [287F-LER: p. 231]
[288F-LER: p. 233]
“The Christian has a free cause of nature, a lord of nature, whose will and word nature obeys, a God who is not bound by the so-called causal nexus, by necessity or by the chain which links effect to cause and cause to cause, whereas the pagan god is bound by natural necessity and cannot even save his favorites from the necessity of death. (…) For the only real barrier to human desires is nature.” [288F-LER: p. 233]
[289F-LER: p. 233-234]
[P. 233] “The Christian fulfills all these desires, or provides himself with the possibility of their fulfillment, by means of a [P. 234] being who, in his imagination, is above and outside of nature, and in the face of whose will nature is powerless or nonexistent.” [289F-LER: p. 233-234]
[290F-LER: p. 234]
“If nature stems not from a God but from itself, it if is necessary, then death too is necessary, then all the laws or natural necessities to which human nature is subject are immutable and not to be overcome.” [290F-LER: p. 234]
