"Albert Einstein. The world as I see it (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

present itself to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men
to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little
consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside
over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is
above all fear that evokes religious notions-fear of hunger, wild beasts,
sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal
connexions is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates for itself
more or less analogous beings on whose wills and actions these fearful
happenings depend. One's object now is to secure the favour of these beings
by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the
tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make
them well disposed towards a mortal. I am speaking now of the religion of
fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the
formation of a special priestly caste which sets up as a mediator between
the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In
many cases the leader or ruler whose position depends on other factors, or a
privileged class, combines priestly functions with its secular authority in
order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the
priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.

The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of
religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities
are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts
men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of
Providence who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes, the God who,
according to the width of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the
life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life as such, the comforter
in sorrow and unsatisfied longing, who preserves the souls of the dead. This
is the social or moral conception of God.

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the
religion of fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament.
The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the
Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of
fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life. That primitive
religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples
purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The
truth is that they are all intermediate types, with this reservation, that
on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their
conception of God. Only individuals of exceptional endowments and
exceptionally high-minded communities, as a general rule, get in any real
sense beyond this level. But there is a third state of religious experience
which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form,
and which I will call cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to
explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as
there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the