Why I am not a Christian

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Why I am not a Christian (Original title: Why I Am Not a Christian ) is an essay by the British philosopher, mathematician and Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell from 1927. The catchy title has inspired various imitators and similarly worded titles as a cliché .

Emergence

The text is based on a lecture that Russell gave in Battersea Town Hall in 1927 under the auspices of the National Secular Society . It was published as an essay that same year. In 1932 a German translation was published for the first time, published by the Circle of Friends of Monistic Literature in Dresden. In 1957 Paul Edwards gave the English text, supplemented with a few essays by Russell on the same subject and an appendix The Bertrand Russell Case (on the problems that Russell arose after his advocacy for homosexual rights in the United States in the early 1940s Wanted to teach there for years), as a new book. The distribution of this English edition has been banned in various countries such as South Africa. This extended version was published in 1963 by Szczesny Verlag in Munich and from 1968 in numerous large new editions by Rowohlt .

content

In the first part, Russell analyzes a number of proofs of God . B. the argument of the first cause , the teleological proof of God and several moral arguments for existence. He judges these reasons as not logically compelling and even as contradicting the idea of ​​God's omnipotence or omniscience.

In a second part he examines Christian theology and comments on the practice of the Christian churches . He calls Jesus a good, but not very good person, since he repeatedly threatened those who did not follow him with hell and eternal damnation. Even his belief in the imminent end of the previous world is probably not compatible with wisdom or omniscience.

The moral laws of the New Testament , which are neglected or practicable in the everyday life of Christians, and the violence in and between the societies by the churches not or hardly reduced, but rather promoted, make the churches the main enemy of moral progress for him .

Russell sees fear as the primary foundation of religion and the conflicts that go with it. He hopes that religion will be overcome through science and that man will create a better world for himself with the power of his intelligence (cf. scientism ).

“Religion is primarily and primarily based on fear. Partly it is the fear of the unknown and partly, as I said, the desire to feel that you have some kind of big brother who stands by you in all difficulties and struggles. Fear is the basis of it all - fear of the mysterious, fear of failure, fear of death . Fear is the mother of cruelty , and it is therefore no wonder that cruelty and religion go hand in hand, because both arise from fear. [...] A good world needs knowledge, kindness and courage, it does not need a painful longing for the past, it does not need the shackling of free intelligence by words that were spoken a long time ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook on the future and free intelligence. "

- Bertrand Russell : Why I am not a Christian

References

Following Russell's footsteps, the Australian philosopher John Leslie Mackie compiled the justifications for the existence of God in a much more extensive manner in 1981 and, after a detailed analysis, also came to the conclusion that there was no reasonable reason to believe in the existence of the Christian God. The American writer Philip Roth quotes in his 2008 novel Indignation (German outrage ) in detail from Russell's lecture. The German historian of philosophy Kurt Flasch published his rejection of Christianity in 2013 under the almost same title Why I am not a Christian. Report and argumentation , similar to the English-speaking author Richard Carrier .

Hans Küng countered the 1987 Why I am still a Christian . Küng himself referred, among other things, to Nietzsche - according to which, with the decline of the Christian religion, (generally applicable) moral concepts also lose their interpretive power. Küng doubts that absolute morality can be based solely on reason.

In Why I Am Not a Secularist, the philosopher William E. Connolly took up and commented critically on various aspects of Russell's argument. He assumes Russell that he wants to replace a previous Western reference point of public life, the Christian-Jewish tradition, with a single other, secular (“scientific”) one. In fact, Russell is concerned with using science as a tool to stand on our own two feet and "look at the world openly and honestly" in the Enlightenment sense . On the basis of his assumption, Connolly comes to the conclusion that he has to construct a contrast between his radical pluralism and a claim to sole representation assumed by Russell and lists authors such as Nietzsche , Freud , Judith Butler such as Michael J. Shapiro and Michel Foucault as suitable representatives of one of the "more open" propagated by him Procedure ". Connolly also criticizes secularism - which he attributes to Russell - a position that would undermine self-stated goals such as freedom and diversity due to an inadequate and narrow understanding of the public and reason, even though Russell has an open, courageous and open-minded view of the World advocates.

Similar titles on other topics

With Why I am not a communist , the Czech writer Karel Čapek set himself apart from communism as early as 1924 in the magazine Přítomnost .

The work Mere Christianity , already written by CS Lewis in 1952 , later appeared in German under the title Pardon, I am Christ - My arguments for faith .

A similar title is, among others, Why I Am Not a Conservative by the economist Friedrich Hayek (1960).

The critic of Islam, who appears under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq , published a pamphlet in Why I am not a Muslim in 1995 . Kancha Ilaiah under Why I Am Not A Hind is a biting criticism of the Indian caste system . Why I Am Not a Scientist (2009) by anthropologist Jonathan M. Marks deals with the narrowed concept of science in English-speaking countries. In contrast to its German counterpart, science is clearly narrowed down to natural science subjects.

expenditure

  • Bertrand Russell: Why I am not a Christian. Edited by Paul Edwards . George Allen & Unwin, London 1957, OCLC 460035794 .
  • Bertrand Russell: Why I am not a Christian. Translated from the English by Annie Farchy. Foreword by Kurt Grelling: Who is Bertrand Russell . Circle of Friends of Monistic Literature, Dresden [1932].
  • Bertrand Russell: Why I am not a Christian. Translated from the English by Marion Steipe. Szczesny Verlag, Munich May 1963, ² July 1963. (For one week in 1963 at number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list )
  • Bertrand Russell: Why I am not a Christian. Translated from English by Marion Steipe. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1968, DNB 457989858 , ISBN 3-499-16685-2 .
  • Bertrand Russell: Why I am not a Christian. Translated from the English by Grete Osterwald. Foreword by Martin Walser , afterword by Sebastian Kleinschmidt . Matthes & Seitz Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-95757-268-4 .

literature

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Literary review" - E. Katzmann, Karl Ude [ed.]: World and Word. Literary monthly, 14th year (1959), 200.
  2. ↑ John Leslie Mackie: Das Wunder des Theismus , Reclam, Stuttgart 2013, p. 402, ISBN 3-15-008075-4 .
  3. ↑ Why I Am Still a Christian, by Hans Küng, A&C Black, December 20, 2005, pp. 4 and 10.
  4. ^ A b c William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-8166-3331-9 , pp. 5ff.
  5. ↑ Karel Čapek: Proč nejsem komunistou? (German: Why I am not a communist ) in: Přítomnost , December 4, 1924 in Czech
  6. ↑ Not included: Paul Edwards: Introduction by the editor , Bertrand Russell: Foreword [for the German edition] and 8 of his 16 essays; In terms of size, 52% of the texts contained in the 1932, 1963 and 1968 editions are missing, and around 48% of the original 1957 and 2004 editions.