The term Christian... It is used 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 people who are not Christian- all the Buddhists, Confucianists, 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-bodied meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, If a man said 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 in with the whole strength of your convictions. Nowadays 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 anybody calling themselves a Christian. The first is one of the dogmatic nature- namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. Then ,further than that you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The mohammedans, for instance, believe in God and immortality yet do not call themselves Christians.I think you must at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. 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 immortality; and secondly why i do not think that Christ was best and wisest of men, although i grant him a very high degree of moral goodness.
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 unaided reason. That 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 unided reason and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are ,of course , a number of them.
Religion is based ,i think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly the wish to feel that you have some 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. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little master them by the help of science, which has forced it way step by step against the Christian religion , against the churches and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can teach us and i think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports , no longer 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. We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world, its good facts its bad fact it beauties and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not merely by slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms . It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in the 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 as good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge kindness and courage, not regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs 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 our intelligence can create.
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Ok, that was a little convoluted but it made some very interesting points. I was raised as a Born-Again Christian. I now consider myself to be Agnostic. My 13 year-old daughter calls me, "The Christian who doesn't believe in Jesus" because I still have that strong sense of morality. My view is, Jesus was crucified (capital punishment, like the electric chair nowadays) because he made the authority figures angry. He was a political prisoner because he could be very blunt and insulting. Yet I find that I can learn from his example. But was he God? Probably not. I'm not ruling it out, but in all likelihood Jesus was just a man who lived many, many years ago. I'm not going to base my whole existence on a dead man. I agree that we need to take responsibility for ourselves.
A few more paragraph breaks and proper grammar would make this blog much easier on the eyes. Well written though.
"What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!"
H. P. Lovecraft
You outlined what you were going to say and then didn't follow your own plan:
"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 immortality; and secondly why i do not think that Christ was best and wisest of men, although i grant him a very high degree of moral goodness."
You told us why you do not believe in God, placing great specific emphasis on the Christian God, mentioned nothing about immortality, and nothing about why you don't think Christ was the best and wisest of men, or anything about his moral goodness.
In addition, you made a few errors in logic. Your assertion that religious faith comes from fear, regardless of whether it is true or not, is simply criticizing the motives of religious faith (appeal to motives) rather than dealing with its actual assertions about truth. You then continue into a question-begging argument that says basically to stop being religious because there is no God, as part of an argument for why there is no God. It doesn't make any logical sense. If you are going to make the assertion that there is no God, at least have some legitimate argument in favor of the proposition instead of just making an unsupported claim.