The God Delusion 读书笔记

“By ‘religion’ Einstein meant something entirely different from what is conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the distinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I am calling only supernatural gods delusional.

Here are some more quotations from Einstein, to give a flavour of Einsteinian religion.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.

I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.”

爱因斯坦本人对于宗教的看法。

“Sacranie explained that ‘The person of the Prophet, peace be upon him, is revered so profoundly in the Muslim world, with a love and affection that cannot be explained in words. It goes beyond your parents, your loved ones, your children. That is part of the faith. There is also an Islamic teaching that one does not depict the Prophet.’ This rather assumes, as Mueller observed,

that the values of Islam trump anyone else’s – which is what any follower of Islam does assume, just as any follower of any religion believes that theirs is the sole way, truth and light. If people wish to love a 7th century preacher more than their own families, that’s up to them, but nobody else is obliged to take it seriously…”

神教的力量就是这么强大，所以抛弃家庭、蔑视法律道德去参加圣战也一点不奇怪了。

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”

主流宗教因为形成的年代太早，主要教义跟科学理论相距太远，所以很难放下信仰的偏见。但是新兴宗教就不一样了，现在新创立的宗教都得扯几句宇宙啥的

“Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.’ Of course, like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal.”

上帝全知全能全善，理论上在煤堆显灵也有可能，但是一般定义还是一个超越自然规律的创造万物的存在。不过这个说法好逗。

“Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God (and he is not the only atheistic scientist to do so), inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own. The dramatic (or was it mischievous?) ending of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, ‘For then we should know the mind of God’, is notoriously misconstrued. It has led people to believe, mistakenly of course, that Hawking is a religious man.”

作者口中的“爱因斯坦上帝”指的是科学家创造的一个工具，便于向大众解释宇宙中的未知数。和神学意义的上帝区别在于科学家相信这个未知数最终是可以被解释的、并没有违反自然的力量，以及他们更不可能去膜拜祂。正如作者在后文中对于爱因斯坦和霍金发言的直接引用，两人都曾多次表示自己不相信超自然的上帝存在。

“In the course of a recently televised conversation, I challenged my friend the obstetrician Robert Winston, a respected pillar of British Jewry, to admit that his Judaism was of exactly this character and that he didn’t really believe in anything supernatural. He came close to admitting it but shied at the last fence (to be fair, he was supposed to be interviewing me, not the other way around).3 When I pressed him, he said he found that Judaism provided a good discipline to help him structure his life and lead a good one. Perhaps it does; but that, of course, has not the smallest bearing on the truth value of any of its supernatural claims. There are many intellectual atheists who proudly call themselves Jews and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to an ancient tradition or to murdered relatives, but also because of a confused and confusing willingness to label as ‘religion’ the pantheistic reverence which many of us share with its most distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein. They may not believe but, to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, they ‘believe in belief’.”

“The present Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, told me that he goes to church as an ‘unbelieving Anglican…out of loyalty to the tribe’.”

这个说法很有意思也很现实，我相信今天大部分还在定时去教堂的信众的主要动力也是“对于部落的忠诚”。

事实是宗教信仰在大部分情况下不是一个人的选择，来自家庭的压力是很大的。另外经过年复一年对宗教活动的参与，许多人也真的在其中找到了对自己生活有益的地方，虽然他们可能不再相信纸面上的教条，但是这种现实参与带来的幸福是很难被替代的，当然这是一种比较正面的状况。也有人在宗教活动里深陷痛苦却因为外界的压力无法脱身，特别对于小孩子宗教信仰有时会带来心理创伤。

“The Roman Catholic Bishop of Kansas City said: ‘It is sad to see a man, who comes from the race of the Old Testament and its teaching, deny the great tradition of that race.’ Other Catholic clergymen chimed in: ‘There is no other God but a personal God…Einstein does not know what he is talking about. He is all wrong. Some men think that because they have achieved a high degree of learning in some field, they are qualified to express opinions in all.’ The notion that religion is a proper field, in which one might claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned. That clergyman presumably would not have deferred to the expertise of a claimed ‘fairyologist’ on the exact shape and colour of fairy wings. Both he and the bishop thought that Einstein, being theologically untrained, had misunderstood the nature of God. On the contrary, Einstein understood very well exactly what he was denying.”

我其实很好奇神学这门学科教的到底是什么，某种类似逻辑学、伦理学和自然哲学的混合？作者在本书从神学届引用的发言过于弱智，以至于我很难相信这就是神学研究的最高水平。

“Let’s remind ourselves of the terminology. A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or even think of doing them). A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don’t believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that[…]”

作者在这里总结了三个概念：有神论、自然神论和泛神论。有神论者就是最原始的神学家形态：相信神造万物，同时神全知全能全善，惩恶扬善。自然神论者相信某个超自然存在创造了世界，但是这个存在并不具备人格或者说神格，对于人类的活动没有兴趣，所谓天地不仁以万物为刍狗。泛神论者把上帝看作某种自然规律，一套操控宇宙运行的智能程序，并不是超自然的存在。所谓的“爱因斯坦上帝”更接近泛神论的范畴。

“Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: ‘To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.’ In this sense I too am religious, with the reservation that ‘cannot grasp’ does not have to mean ‘forever ungraspable’. But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for the vast majority of people, ‘religion’ implies ‘supernatural’. Carl Sagan put it well: ‘…if by “God” one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

所以宗教的害处在于“迷信”，并由此衍生的一切利用迷信控制教众的罪恶。

“Religion…has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’.

Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows – but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe…no, that’s holy?…We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed[…]”

宗教好像确实在西方是一个最敏感的话题，为什么宗教人士这么容易被冒犯？是因为他们的理论太不经推敲？

“I have previously drawn attention to the privileging of religion in public discussions of ethics in the media and in government.7 Whenever a controversy arises over sexual or reproductive morals, you can bet that religious leaders from several different faith groups will be prominently represented on influential committees, or on panel discussions on radio or television. I’m not suggesting that we should go out of our way to censor the views of these people. But why does our society beat a path to their door, as though they had some expertise comparable to that of, say, a moral philosopher, a family lawyer or a doctor?”

涉及到同性恋、堕胎、避孕一类的话题时，最积极的社会群体好像确实是宗教群体……可能是这类问题在道德上最为微妙，而他们掌握了几千年的道德裁量权所以才这么容易不请自来吧。

“The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’.”

因为神学是唯一不需要自证的学科，他们的权威性来自一个几千年前生活的人，和一本被增减删改了几千年的书。

“Sacranie, on the other hand, praised British newspapers for not reprinting the cartoons, to which Mueller voiced the suspicion of most of the nation that ‘the restraint of British newspapers derived less from sensitivity to Muslim discontent than it did from a desire not to have their windows broken’.”

现在人谈穆色变不是出于尊重而是恐惧，这是真的。

“I am not in favour of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it. But I am intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of religion in our otherwise secular societies. All politicians must get used to disrespectful cartoons of their faces, and nobody riots in their defence. What is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect? As H. L. Mencken said: ‘We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

他们的特权来自于他们为了捍卫宗教啥都干得上来。

“But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can? I suspect that neither the Cambridge nor the Oxford astronomer really believed that theologians have any expertise that enables them to answer questions that are too deep for science. I suspect that both astronomers were, yet again, bending over backwards to be polite: theologians have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let’s throw them a sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can answer and maybe never will. Unlike my astronomer friends, I don’t think we should even throw them a sop. I have yet to see any good reason to suppose that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all.

Similarly, we can all agree that science’s entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad? The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway[…]”

这种宗教大于、深于、广于科学，宗教可以解释科学不能解释的问题本来就是宗教人士的一厢情愿，然而被他们洗脑式传播后成为了很多人潜意识里的真理。

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

哈哈哈哈

“Monotheistic chauvinism was until recently written into the charity law of both England and Scotland, discriminating against polytheistic religions in granting tax-exempt status, while allowing an easy ride to charities whose object was to promote monotheistic religion, sparing them the rigorous vetting quite properly required of secular charities. It was my ambition to persuade a member of Britain’s respected Hindu community to come forward and bring a civil action to test this snobbish discrimination against polytheism.”

多神教在全世界好像都是战五渣，组织动员能力被一神教完爆，作者为了阻击一神教甚至想跟多神教联手。。。

“Pope John Paul II created more saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put together, and he had a special affinity with the Virgin Mary. His polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: ‘A maternal hand guided the bullet.’ One cannot help wondering why she didn’t guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit; but perhaps their hands, too, were maternally guided.”

这段笑死我了，遭刺杀不死究竟该不该感谢圣母是个问题。假设杀手也信圣母，圣母确实很难办。

“And I shall not be concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life.”

作者认为儒教和佛教不能算作他定义里的宗教，他把这两者看作道德系统或者对生活的哲学指导。

“The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least. I am continually asked why this is, and I do not know. I suppose it is possible that England has wearied of religion after an appalling history of interfaith violence, with Protestants and Catholics alternately gaining the upper hand and systematically murdering the other lot. Another suggestion stems from the observation that America is a nation of immigrants. A colleague points out to me that immigrants, uprooted from the stability and comfort of an extended family in Europe, could well have embraced a church as a kind of kin-substitute on alien soil. It is an interesting idea, worth researching further. There is no doubt that many Americans see their own local church as an important unit of identity, which does indeed have some of the attributes of an extended family.”

作者的这个观察和解释都很有趣：美国是明确在世俗基础上建立的国家，而英国女王今天还同时兼任国家和国教领袖，然而两国今天对基督教的热衷程度却截然相反。一种解释是英国吃过宗教斗争的亏，对于宗教势力干政心有余悸，而美国作为移民国家，宗教在移民的日常生活里的正面作用远大于旧大陆国家。另一种解释是正因为美国是个世俗国家，宗教可以在自由市场里自由竞争，进而产生了一批经过市场检验的强大宗教集团。而英国的宗教势力没有受到挑战，长期安逸的状态使其失去了进取的活力。

“Yet another hypothesis is that the religiosity of America stems paradoxically from the secularism of its constitution. Precisely because America is legally secular, religion has become free enterprise. Rival churches compete for congregations – not least for the fat tithes that they bring – and the competition is waged with all the aggressive hard-sell techniques of the marketplace. What works for soap flakes works for God, and the result is something approaching religious mania among today’s less educated classes. In England, by contrast, religion under the aegis of the established church has become little more than a pleasant social pastime, scarcely recognizable as religious at all.”

“Downey’s documented evidence of the hatred and misunderstanding of atheists makes it easy to believe that it is, indeed, virtually impossible for an honest atheist to win a public election in America. There are 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 members of the Senate. Assuming that the majority of these 535 individuals are an educated sample of the population, it is statistically all but inevitable that a substantial number of them must be atheists. They must have lied, or concealed their true feelings, in order to get elected. Who can blame them, given the electorate they had to convince? It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any presidential candidate.”

无神论在美国是一个被严重污名化的词汇，无神论者被等同于没有道德的人，在美国从政的人可以是任何种族，任何性取向，但是没有一个人敢声称自己是无神论者，甚至没有一个人敢说自己不是基督教徒，这是一个非常可悲的事实。

“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

罗素老师著名的茶壶理论。

“A popular deity on the Internet at present – and as undisprovable as Yahweh or any other – is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who, many claim, has touched them with his noodly appendage.33 I am delighted to see that the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has now been published as a book,34 to great acclaim. I haven’t read it myself, but who needs to read a gospel when you just know it’s true? By the way, it had to happen – a Great Schism has already occurred, resulting in the Reformed Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

飞天面条神教很对道爷胃口，道爷表示喜闻乐见，很可能是他唯一支持的一神教派。

“Goodness is no part of the definition of the God Hypothesis, merely a desirable add-on.

Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they’d like to be true. But, for a more sophisticated believer in some kind of supernatural intelligence, it is childishly easy to overcome the problem of evil. Simply postulate a nasty god – such as the one who stalks every page of the Old Testament. Or, if you don’t like that, invent a separate evil god, call him Satan, and blame his cosmic battle against the good god for the evil in the world. Or – a more sophisticated solution – postulate a god with grander things to do than fuss about human distress. Or a god who is not indifferent to suffering but regards it as the price that has to be paid for free will in an orderly, lawful cosmos. Theologians can be found buying into all these rationalizations.”

信教者如何逃避世界上存在邪恶这个问题。

“Obviously Beethoven’s late quartets are sublime. So are Shakespeare’s sonnets. They are sublime if God is there and they are sublime if he isn’t. They do not prove the existence of God; they prove the existence of Beethoven and of Shakespeare. A great conductor is credited with saying: ‘If you have Mozart to listen to, why would you need God?”

有些人把艺术品的存在作为上帝存在的论据，因为他们不相信这么美好的东西是人类能创造出来的。

“But there is an additional point that I might have made, and which needs to be made whenever religion is given credit for, say, the Sistine Chapel or Raphael’s Annunciation. Even great artists have to earn a living, and they will take commissions where they are to be had. I have no reason to doubt that Raphael and Michelangelo were Christians – it was pretty much the only option in their time – but the fact is almost incidental. Its enormous wealth had made the Church the dominant patron of the arts. If history had worked out differently, and Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant Museum of Science, mightn’t he have produced something at least as inspirational as the Sistine Chapel? How sad that we shall never hear Beethoven’s Mesozoic Symphony, or Mozart’s opera The Expanding Universe.”

“宗教艺术”和宗教的关系是赞助关系，主要来往是金钱交换艺术品，从这个角度说这是一笔生意，因为教会最有钱所以他们能雇佣最优秀的艺术家。这个看法大概有点偏激，我觉得宗教大概还是给艺术家一些灵感上的促进的。不过谁知道以后会不会出现“科学艺术”呢，有点期待。也许现在已经出现了吧。

“Pascal’s Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he’d see through the deception. The ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do is deliciously mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy ‘to do your believing for you’.”

哈哈Pascal's Wager也是我长久以来的疑惑，很多中国人都是这样，所谓“遇寺必进，见佛必拜”。就算你不信神，客气客气总是没错的，万一是真的呢？你拜这一下可能就留下来良好的印象分了。这是一种非常功利的想法，但是处漏洞：上帝全知全能，不可能看不出你是装的，虚与委蛇招来的处罚可能更严重。“相信”是一种心理状态而不是一种肢体动作，世界上没有任何一个人，包括自己能强迫自己相信。

“But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What’s so special about believing? Isn’t it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn’t the designer of the universe have to be a scientist? Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,’ was Russell’s (I almost said immortal) reply. Mightn’t God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism (let alone for the courageous pacifism that landed him in prison in the First World War) far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging? And, while we cannot know which way God would jump, we don’t need to know in order to refute Pascal’s Wager. We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn’t claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet[…]”

这段总结非常精彩。上帝如果真如传说中全知全能全善，那么你的“相信”与否对祂来说很重要吗？祂最重视的品质为什么不能是诚实、勇敢、独立，这些和虚伪、懦弱、盲从，截然相反的品质？如果罗素这样的人死后收到的判决是在地狱里永世不得翻身，那么这样的上帝又怎么好意思说自己代表全世界所有的善良呢？

“Then again, suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightn’t Pascal have been better off wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god?”

南方公园里有一集，很多信仰不同宗教的人死了以后在炼狱的门口等待宣判，等待揭晓到底谁信的神才是真神，最后答案揭晓，摩门教徒升天堂，其他教徒进炼狱。人群里响起了一阵彩票揭晓后没中奖的人的遗憾叫声。这个讽刺的画面我一直印象深刻。

“The nineteenth-century connection is now clear. The nineteenth century is the last time when it was possible for an educated person to admit to believing in miracles like the virgin birth without embarrassment. When pressed, many educated Christians today are too loyal to deny the virgin birth and the resurrection. But it embarrasses them because their rational minds know it is absurd, so they would much rather not be asked. Hence, if somebody like me insists on asking the question, it is I who am accused of being ‘nineteenth-century’. It is really quite funny, when you think about it.”

确实，目前最硬核的神学家也尽量回避圣经里的超自然现象

“This chapter has contained the central argument of my book, and so, at the risk of sounding repetitive, I shall summarize it as a series of six numbered points.

One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.

The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a ‘crane’, not a ‘skyhook’, for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors[…]”

这6点比较系统地总结了作者对于创世论vs进化论的看法：从生物层面来说，达尔文的进化论已经足够完备，在过去一百多年的时间里没有被明显的反例推翻，即生物的发展是渐进的，而非一蹴而就的。但是在宇宙研究的范畴，暂时没有足够的证据和理论描绘出完备的宇宙起源至今的时间线。作者的猜想是日后某个类似生物进化论的物理理论能最终解释宇宙的发展历程。

“Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide. What worries scientists is something else. It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests. As my friend Matt Ridley has written, ‘Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.’ Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: it gives them something to do. More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”

一些教徒把找到科学中的漏洞视为宗教的胜利。但是：1，科学中的漏洞并不意味着神学就能填不上，事实上神学除了强词夺理假定一个全知全能全善的存在，几乎没有任何其他有力的工具能填补科学的空缺，这是一种懒惰、逃避的消极态度；2，科学家与神学家最大的不同就是前者承认科学漏洞的存在并为之欣喜，然后一代代科学家会不断用证据尝试填补漏洞。留给神学家的漏洞已经越来越少了。

“Why is God considered an explanation for anything? It’s not – it’s a failure to explain, a shrug of the shoulders, an ‘I dunno’ dressed up in spirituality and ritual. If someone credits something to God, generally what it means is that they haven’t a clue, so they’re attributing it to an unreachable, unknowable sky-fairy. Ask for an explanation of where that bloke came from, and odds are you’ll get a vague, pseudo-philosophical reply about having always existed, or being outside nature. Which, of course, explains nothing.”

“The anthropologist Helen Fisher, in Why We Love, has beautifully expressed the insanity of romantic love, and how over-the-top it is compared with what might seem strictly necessary. Look at it this way. From the point of view of a man, say, it is unlikely that any one woman of his acquaintance is a hundred times more lovable than her nearest competitor, yet that is how he is likely to describe her when ‘in love’. Rather than the fanatically monogamous devotion to which we are susceptible, some sort of ‘polyamory’ is on the face of it more rational. (Polyamory is the belief that one can simultaneously love several members of the opposite sex, just as one can love more than one wine, composer, book or sport.) We happily accept that we can love more than one child, parent, sibling, teacher, friend or pet. When you think of it like that, isn’t the total exclusiveness that we expect of spousal love positively weird? Yet it is what we expect, and it is what we set out to achieve. There must be a reason.

宗教和爱情的共同点：对象的单一性和狂热的程度。一神教如犹太教和基督教都有一夫一妻制的传统，是否两者存在关联？

“In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.

The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.

The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days.

Forty days later, the fatherless man went up to the top of a hill and then disappeared bodily into the sky.

If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man, and his ‘father’ (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act upon them. He is simultaneously ableto hear the thoughts of everybody else in the world.”

“If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all, even if nobody else does. You may be rewarded or punished accordingly, including after your death.

The fatherless man’s virgin mother never died but was ‘assumed’ bodily into heaven.

Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles), ‘become’ the body and blood of the fatherless man.”

无情吐槽耶稣，笑死我了。

“The equivalent of the moth’s light-compass reaction is the apparently irrational but useful habit of falling in love with one, and only one, member of the opposite sex. The misfiring by-product – equivalent to flying into the candle flame – is falling in love with Yahweh (or with the Virgin Mary, or with a wafer, or with Allah) and performing irrational acts motivated by such love.”

作者认为人类的大脑中存在某个掌管浪漫情感的部分，这部分的存在为人类寻求繁衍提供充分的动机，但是在历史进程中鬼使神差被宗教传播所利用，许多教士和修女都提到过他们对上帝犹如爱人一般的情感。

“The general theory of religion as an accidental by-product – a misfiring of something useful – is the one I wish to advocate. The details are various, complicated and disputable. For the sake of illustration, I shall continue to use my ‘gullible child’ theory as representative of ‘by-product’ theories in general. This theory – that the child brain is, for good reasons, vulnerable to infection by mental ‘viruses’ – will strike some readers as incomplete. Vulnerable the mind may be, but why should it be infected by this virus rather than that? Are some viruses especially proficient at infecting vulnerable minds? Why does ‘infection’ manifest itself as religion rather than as…well, what? Part of what I want to say is that it doesn’t matter what particular style of nonsense infects the child brain. Once infected, the child will grow up and infect the next generation with the same nonsense, whatever it happens to be.”

作者认为宗教的诞生是人类固有的某种非理性思维或情感的副作用，这种情感有可能是爱情、固执、自我欺骗（相信自己愿意相信的），重点是一旦这种现象被宗教发现可乘之机并利用，人脑内的这一部分基因就会不断遗传

“Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion’s arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: ‘Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.’85 Again: ‘Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.’ And again: ‘Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.”

马丁路德这段话很有意思，也由此可见新教相比天主教并不存在理性上的优势。一个好的教徒是一个从来不思考的教徒。

“In the early stages of a religion’s evolution, before it becomes organized, simple memes survive by virtue of their universal appeal to human psychology. This is where the meme theory of religion and the psychological by-product theory of religion overlap. The later stages, where a religion becomes organized, elaborate and arbitrarily different from other religions, are quite well handled by the theory of memeplexes – cartels of mutually compatible memes.”

作者认为在宗教成立的早期，宗教的偶然出现可能是利用人类心理的某种缺陷，比如对死亡的恐惧、对集体的归属感、对实现某种自私要求的理论支持等。这种解释可以和前一章的“宗教是情感的附属品”理论联动。在宗教形成比较成规模的组织以后，它会根据自己所处的文化环境调节自己的属性以适应不断传播的需求。这一点由作者原创的“meme 文化基因”理论为支持，meme和gene一样，是一种可遗传的文化概念，许多种meme共生共存，就像基因池一样，外部表现就是不同的文化特征。

“CARGO CULTS”

一个非常好玩的20世纪新宗教在南太平洋岛屿上的诞生和发展，可以由此窥见主流宗教在诞生之初的样貌。

“IF THERE IS NO GOD, WHY BE GOOD?

Posed like that, the question sounds positively ignoble. When a religious person puts it to me in this way (and many of them do), my immediate temptation is to issue the following challenge: ‘Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.’ As Einstein said, ‘If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.’ Michael Shermer, in The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would ‘commit robbery, rape, and murder’, you reveal yourself as an immoral person, ‘and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you’. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when[…]”

宗教使人向善——只有宗教才能让人向善——失去了宗教人类将不再善良

作者这话说到了点子上，假如信教者做好事的唯一动机是因为天上有个上帝摄像头无时无刻在监控着他们的行为和想法，那么他们做好事的动机就是害怕惩罚+期望回报，而不是真的出于向善的欲望。这是非常市侩的算计，一点也不高尚。

“Satan worshiping scum…Please die and go to hell…I hope you get a painful disease like rectal cancer and die a slow painful death, so you can meet your God, SATAN…Hey dude this freedom from religion thing sux…So you fags and dykes take it easy and watch where you go cuz whenever you least expect it god will get you…If you don’t like this country and what it was founded on & for, get the fuck out of it and go straight to hell…PS Fuck you, you comunist whore…Get your black asses out of the U.S.A…. You are without excuse. Creation is more than enough evidence of the LORD JESUS CHRIST’S omnipotent power.”

“Even if religion were not true, it is better, much, much better, to believe a noble myth, like Plato’s, if it leads to peace of mind while we live. But your world view leads to anxiety, drug addiction, violence, nihilism, hedonism, Frankenstein science, and hell on earth, and World War III…I wonder how happy you are in your personal relationships? Divorced? Widowed? Gay? Those like you are never happy, or they would not try so hard to prove there is no happiness nor meaning in anything.”

这两封信代表了非常典型的信教人士对无神论者的偏见，如果你不信教，你要么是：同性恋、不爱（美）国、黑人、瘾君子、婚姻不幸福、共产党，或者以上身份的结合，而任意这些身份都足以证明你是个不道德的人，就算信教也不一定能洗刷你的罪恶，更何况你还选择成为撒旦的仆人。可以说宗教是西方社会的绝大多数歧视现象的基础动机。

我以前一直不明白为什么孔子在西方一直被看做一位宗教先知一样的人物。现在想可能西方人无法理解一个宗教力量不占主导地位的文明是如何存在了几千年的，所以必须找一个他们能理解的概念把孔子和儒家思想套进去。

“What shocks me today about such stories is not that they really happened. They probably didn’t. What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh – and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.”

我一直都觉得旧约的故事透着一股阴森和诡异。旧约里的上帝残暴、善妒，活脱脱一个无良暴君。如果旧约的故事告诉了我们什么道理，就是你不听话上帝就会neng死你，究竟为什么这会让信徒产生道德优越感很让人费解，信徒的心理倒是挺符合斯德哥尔摩综合症的症状。

“Notwithstanding his somewhat dodgy family values, Jesus’ ethical teachings were – at least by comparison with the ethical disaster area that is the Old Testament – admirable; but there are other teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support. I refer especially to the central doctrine of Christianity: that of ‘atonement’ for ‘original sin’.”

新约相比旧约在道德标准上有巨大进步，所以今天传教的人大多会鼓励受众阅读新约，对于旧约的故事仅仅做选择性描述。作者认为新约最大的问题在于认为“人人生而有原罪”，而这种原罪来自亚当夏娃，这就没有任何道理可讲，纯粹让人为信而信，以及上帝随后降生把自己变成自己的儿子耶稣来洗刷人类的原罪，这一套逻辑也是十分之混乱。以及犹大背叛耶稣实际很可能是耶稣的安排，犹大因此背了2000年的锅

“Religion is undoubtedly a divisive force, and this is one of the main accusations levelled against it. But it is frequently and rightly said that wars, and feuds between religious groups or sects, are seldom actually about theological disagreements. When an Ulster Protestant paramilitary murders a Catholic, he is not muttering to himself, ‘Take that, transubstantiationist, mariolatrous, incense-reeking bastard!’ He is much more likely to be avenging the death of another Protestant killed by another Catholic, perhaps in the course of a sustained transgenerational vendetta. Religion is a label of in-group/out-group enmity and vendetta, not necessarily worse than other labels such as skin colour, language or preferred football team, but often available when other labels are not.”

这个观点很有意思，宗教从本质上是一个区分敌我的标准，所以宗教和战争常常相伴出现。但是所谓的宗教战争，很少是因为宗教教义不同而引起，更多的情况下只是两群人需要打仗，宗教是一个最好用的借口。

“And the real problem in Northern Ireland is that the labels are inherited down many generations.”

“The two sets of people have the same skin colour, they speak the same language, they enjoy the same things, but they might as well belong to different species, so deep is the historic divide. And without religion, and religiously segregated education, the divide simply would not be there. The warring tribes would have intermarried and long since dissolved into each other. From Kosovo to Palestine, from Iraq to Sudan, from Ulster to the Indian sub-continent, look carefully at any region of the world where you find intractable enmity and violence between rival groups today. I cannot guarantee that you’ll find religions as the dominant labels for in-groups and out-groups. But it’s a good bet.”

宗教最强大的地方是能够在长久的历史时期保持一个族群的独立性，时刻提醒他们与周围其他族群的区别。所以才会有作者提到的这些延续上千年的对立关系，所以世界上才存在犹太人这么一个神奇的族群，这在中国这样没有强大的一神教传统的地区是很难想象的。

“Christian hatred of Jews is not just a Catholic tradition. Martin Luther was a virulent anti-Semite. At the Diet of Worms he said that ‘All Jews should be driven from Germany.’ And he wrote a whole book, On the Jews and their Lies, which probably influenced Hitler. Luther described the Jews as a ‘brood of vipers’, and the same phrase was used by Hitler in a remarkable speech of 1922, in which he several times repeated that he was a Christian:”

“As for the theme of Jewish persecution as part of God’s will, Hitler returned to it in Mein Kampf: ‘Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

耶稣本人是个犹太人，根据作者此前的推断，耶稣最初的传教对象也仅限于犹太人。事实上第一个决定把基督教传播到犹太人之外的人是彼得，他很可能违背了耶稣生前的意愿。为什么基督徒会在今后的一千年里对犹太人变得如此仇视？这个转变的原因很少见到有人讨论。不过这也恰好印证了作者之前的论断，种群之间的仇恨很少源于宗教，但是宗教却能最好帮助区分敌我。

“Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man – living in the sky – who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time…But He loves you!”

这个反差确实让人很难转过弯来。。。

“But what is so hard for us to understand is that – to repeat the point because it is so important – these people actually believe what they say they believe. The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism – as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.’

As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers. The alternative, one so transparent that it should need no urging, is to abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith. This is one reason why I do everything in my power to warn people against faith itself, not just against so-called ‘extremist’ faith. The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.”

想到了一个有意思的比较：宗教就像香烟，香烟是天然有成瘾性的，但是每个人的烟瘾程度不同，有的人不怎么瘾大有的人烟不离手，后者就好比“宗教极端分子”。“宗教极端分子”并没有背离宗教，他们只是严格按照教义要求把圣训做的很彻底而已。“温和分子”和“极端分子”信的教并没有本质区别，他们的区别只在于执行程度，就好比烟瘾大的人烟瘾小的人抽的都是同一种烟，只不过有的人一天抽几十根，有的一天抽几根而已。那么为了防治肺癌我们应该“禁烟”还是“禁烟瘾”呢？

“Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. By contrast, what I, as a scientist, believe (for example, evolution) I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence. It really is a very different matter. Books about evolution are believed not because they are holy. They are believed because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle, any reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books.”

宗教和科学的区别。科学有根据事实不断自我修正的能力，宗教宣扬的一切真理来自几千年前的一个人或一本书，如果书里的教条和现实相矛盾，获胜的永远是教条。

“It is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may well appear passionate when I defend evolution against a fundamentalist creationist, but this is not because of a rival fundamentalism of my own. It is because the evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly strong and I am passionately distressed that my opponent can’t see it – or, more usually, refuses to look at it because it contradicts his holy book. My passion is increased when I think about how much the poor fundamentalists, and those whom they influence, are missing. The truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; how truly tragic to die having missed out on all that! Of course that makes me passionate. How could it not? But my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.”

道爷解释自己为什么有时候看起来有一点点小激动

“Our Western politicians avoid mentioning the R word (religion), and instead characterize their battle as a war against ‘terror’, as though terror were a kind of spirit or force, with a will and a mind of its own. Or they characterize terrorists as motivated by pure ‘evil’. But they are not motivated by evil. However misguided we may think them, they are motivated, like the Christian murderers of abortion doctors, by what they perceive to be righteousness, faithfully pursuing what their religion tells them. They are not psychotic; they are religious idealists who, by their own lights, are rational. They perceive their acts to be good, not because of some warped personal idiosyncrasy, and not because they have been possessed by Satan, but because they have been brought up, from the cradle, to have total and unquestioning faith.”

西方政客无法直面宗教的破坏性，世俗价值观和宗教价值观事实上在渐行渐远。正如作者所说，“恐怖分子”不认为自己在做坏事，他们认为自己做的是世界上最高尚的事。所谓的宗教温和派并没有在改善宗教中的极端因素，他们只是在掩饰这一点

“Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don’t have to make the case for what you believe. If somebody announces that it is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is obliged, by ingrained custom, to ‘respect’ it without question; respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid bombings. Then there is a great chorus of disownings, as clerics and ‘community leaders’ (who elected them, by the way?) line up to explain that this extremism is a perversion of the ‘true’ faith. But how can there be a perversion of faith, if faith, lacking objective justification, doesn’t have any demonstrable standard to pervert?”

社会对宗教无条件纵容，甚至不允许对宗教本质的讨论，不直面这个问题，“极端主义”的土壤就永远存在并会不断结出恶果

“PHYSICAL AND MENTAL ABUSE”

这一节给我的触动最深。从心理上控制一个人最快速、省力的方法不是感化、爱护对方，或是企图利用其他什么正向的引导方式，一是因为这需要较高的教育成本，二是约束力没那么强。最简单的办法是把恐惧植入对方的内心，用可怕的预言威胁对方离开之后要面临的灾难，许多成年人尚且能被这种方式征服，更不要提小孩子。所以 地狱、永世不得翻身翻身 之类的词汇会成为许多宗教宣传的标配，这些恫吓足以让对方畏惧离开自己的代价。

“I suggested that the extreme horribleness of hell, as portrayed by priests and nuns, is inflated to compensate for its implausibility. If hell were plausible, it would only have to be moderately unpleasant in order to deter. Given that it is so unlikely to be true, it has to be advertised as very very scary indeed, to balance its implausibility and retain some deterrence value.”

作者在这里证明地狱很可能不存在的方法也很巧妙：假如地狱存在的可能性很高，那么地狱不需要“那么”可怕也足以使人畏惧；正因为教士知道，信徒也知道地狱很可能不存在，所以教士必须把地狱描述的足够可怖，才能让教众相信就算地狱有亿分之一的概率存在，入地狱的代价也是自己不可能承担的了的。

这就像违反交规和罚款的关系。闯红灯被抓到的概率和被抓后被罚款的金额不足是两个组成了违反交规的机会成本的维度，为了提高违反交规的机会成本，要么提高警察巡逻的几率，要么提高罚款的金额。在地狱这个例子里，地狱出现的概率是不受教会控制的，他们唯一能做的就是尽可能夸大地狱的可怕之处。

“maintaining cultural diversity. All right, you may want to say, so it’s tough on a child of the Amish, or the Hasidim, or the gypsies to be shaped up by their parents in the ways they are – but at least the result is that these fascinating cultural traditions continue. Would not our whole civilization be impoverished if they were to go? It’s a shame, maybe, when individuals have to be sacrificed to maintain such diversity. But there it is: it’s the price we pay as a society. Except, I would feel bound to remind you, we do not pay it, they do.”

所以真正的普世价值只有：不要把大人的想法强加到孩子身上。教他们如何思考，而不是相信什么。任何情况下不要以任何名义给任何人强加痛苦。

这说起来简单做起来很难。

“There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of ‘diversity’ and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture. A small part of me can see something in this. But the larger part is made to feel very queasy indeed.”

这段评价让我联想起来我国一些少数民族聚集区，从我们这些外人的角度看：他们的文化很新奇，他们的宗教信仰很虔诚，很多来自内地的人对这种生活方式赞赏有加，甚至流露出向往。但我觉得这种赞赏和向往是很虚伪，因为我们很少看到有人会抛弃城市生活选择成为这种多元文化的一部分。每个人都应该有权力享受科技带来的一切便利，如果这会带来文化消亡的代价，这种代价也是值得的。

“Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them – ‘Catholic child’, ‘Protestant child’, ‘Jewish child’, ‘Muslim child’, etc. – although no other comparable labels: no conservative children, no liberal children, no Republican children, no Democrat children. Please, please raise your consciousness about this, and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening. A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a ‘child of Muslim parents’ will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose – or reject – when she becomes old enough to do so.”

“Most of them, therefore, cannot be ‘superior to others’. Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether any are ‘valid’, let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.”

大人要有把选择权交给孩子的自觉。

“As long ago as 1954, according to Robert Hinde in his thoughtful book Why Gods Persist, a Gallup poll in the United States of America found the following. Three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants could not name a single Old Testament prophet. More than two-thirds didn’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. A substantial number thought that Moses was one of Jesus’s twelve apostles. That, to repeat, was in the United States, which is dramatically more religious than other parts of the developed world.”

这一点我没有觉得很奇怪哈哈，很多美国人的圣经知识就像他们的历史知识一样不怎么丰富，很难想象一个国家如此痴迷于宗教和保卫“宗教伦理”，但是对宗教的文本又知之甚少，或许这种叶公好龙的现象正说明宗教不需要理性只需要盲从。美国人常常自豪于他们的宗教传统，我认为这还是一种区分他们自己和世界其他国家的手段，毕竟现在的新教大国只有美国，因为独特所以牛逼。

“Let me not labour the point. I have probably said enough to convince at least my older readers that an atheistic world-view provides no justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books, out of our education. And of course we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.”

作者终于在这一节表现出了对宗教的一丝温情。所以宗教不是一无是处，宗教影响了文学和生活习俗，一个人不信上帝的人依然可以从宗教组织和宗教活动中获得很多生活下去的动力。作者反对的是宗教中的迷信和盲从。

“Jaynes’s suggestion is that some time before 1000 BC people in general were unaware that the second voice – the Gilbert Pinfold voice – came from within themselves. They thought the Pinfold voice was a god: Apollo, say, or Astarte or Yahweh or, more probably, a minor household god, offering them advice or orders. Jaynes even located the voices of the gods in the opposite hemisphere of the brain from the one that controls audible speech. The ‘breakdown of the bicameral’ mind was, for Jaynes, a historical transition. It was the moment in history when it dawned on people that the external voices that they seemed to be hearing were really internal. Jaynes even goes so far as to define this historical transition as the dawning of human consciousness.”

这个理论很有意思，或许更古老一点的人类会更容易感知到脑海里的第二人格和自己的对话，当第二人格为自己提供了精神能量以后，人类很容易对这样的幻想产生依赖，也许这就是上帝的起源。

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.”

罗素的豁达真让人向往

“There must be a God, the argument goes, because, if there were not, life would be empty, pointless, futile, a desert of meaninglessness and insignificance. How can it be necessary to point out that the logic falls at the first fence? Maybe life is empty. Maybe our prayers for the dead really are pointless. To presume the opposite is to presume the truth of the very conclusion we seek to prove.”

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. It is all of a piece with the infantilism of those who, the moment they twist their ankle, look around for someone to sue. Somebody else must be responsible for my well-being, and somebody else must be to blame if I am hurt. Is it a similar infantilism that really lies behind the ‘need’ for a God?”

“The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.”

宗教或上帝不应该成为任何人生活的目标或者意义。生活的目标和意义是一个只能被自己定义的概念。