Lo Mejor

Bertrand Russell: “A Free Man’s Worship” 71: Mephistopheles’s story of the creation: God got bored of the endless praises of the choirs of angel because he deserved the praise, so he creates a worldwhose beings will praise him even though they are tortured. 72: the situation that humans are presented with: purposelessness, death, and the finitude of the universe:
all these things, if not quitebeyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only in the firm foundation of unyielding despair, canthe soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

The savage feels the oppression of his impotence and respects only power. The religion of Moloch [God of the “Idolatrous” Jews, supposedly includingSolomon, to whom children were sacrificed] “is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation.” Noindependent thought. 73: this worship of power is evident in the story of Job. But soon “morality grows bolder” and people maintain that “in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with theworld of ideas” – i.e., God and immortality as wishful thinking The choice: to worship force or goodness?
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, thereis an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of nonhuman power. Whenwe have realized that power is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall weworship force, or shall we worship goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own conscience? In this lies man’s true freedom: in determination to...