foundation of his spiritual existence, so that a god is a physical being; or in subjective terms: man’s first god is need, and specifically physical need … . (…)
[P. 295] … the first and oldest God, the God before and behind the ethical and spiritual God is the physical God … . (…) This makes it clear that the abstract concept ‘being’ has flesh and blood, truth and reality, only in nature and that consequently, just as being precedes wisdom and goodness, so the physical God precedes the spiritual and the ethical God … .” [322F-LER: p. 294-295]
[323F-LER: p. 298]
“ … faith and love are exact opposites.” [323F-LER: p. 298]
[324F-LER: p. 300]
“ … to say that morality is based, or must be based, on religion is merely to say that morality must be based on egoism, self-love, and the striving for happiness, that otherwise it has no foundation. The only difference between Judaism and Christianity is that in Judaism morality is based on the love of temporal, earthly life, and in Christianity on the love of eternal, heavenly life. If it is not generally recognized that egoism alone is the secret of faith as distinct from love, the secret of religion as distinct from ethics, it is only because religious egoism does not have the appearance of egoism; in religion man affirms his self in the form of self-abnegation … .” [324F-LER: p. 300]
[325F-LER: p. 302]
“ … in reality states, even Christian states, are built not on the power of religion, though they have used it too (i.e., credulity, man’s weak point) as a means to their ends, but on the power of bayonets and other instruments of torture. In reality men act out of entirely different motives than their religious imagination leads them to suppose.” [325F-LER: p. 302]
[326F-LER: p. 302-303]
[P. 302] “But whence comes this weakness of faith? From the fact that the power of belief is nothing other than the power of imagination, and that reality is an infinitely greater power, directly opposed to the imagination. (…) [P. 303] … as even the greatest heroes of faith have confessed, it flies in the face of sensory evidence, natural feeling, and man’s innate tendency to disbelief. How, indeed, can anything built on constraint, on the forcible repression of a sound inclination, anything exposed at every moment to the mind’s doubts and the contradictions of experience, provide a firm and secure foundation?” [326F-LER: p. 302-303]
[327F-LER: p. 303]
“ … nothing is more groundless than the fear that the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, must vanish with the gods. The distinction exists and will continue to exist as long as there is a difference between me and thee, for this is the source of ethics and law. My egoism may permit me to steal, but my fellow man’s egoism will sternly forbid me; left to myself I may know nothing of unselfishness, but the selfishness of others will teach me the virtue of unselfishness.” [327F-LER: p. 303]
