On Religion: A Dialogue

(Note: these are excerpts from the dialogue, so I have denoted each character at the end of the quotation to provide a way of distinguishing the two perspectives)

"Religion is the metaphysics of the people, which they absolutely must be allowed to keep: and that means you have to show an outward respect for it, since to discredit it is to take it away from them. Just as there is folk-poetry and, in the proverbs, folk-wisdom, so there has to be folk-metaphysics: for men have an absolute need for an interpretation of life, and it has to be one they are capable of understanding. [...] The people have no direct access to truth; the various religions are simply schemata by which they grasp it and picture it, but with which it is inseparably linked." (Demopheles)

"So far as this is concerned, it is a terrible thing that everyone, wherever he may be born, should have certain assertions impressed on him in earliest youth, together with the assurance that to call them in doubt is to imperil his eternal salvation. [...] Throughout the entire Christian era theism has lain like an incubus on all intellectual, especially philosophical endeavour and has prevented or stunted all progress; and when anyone has possessed the rare elasticity of mind which alone can slip free of these fetters, his writings have been burned and sometimes their author with them, as happened to Bruno and Vanini." (Philalethes)

"What matters before all else is to restrain the rude and evil dispositions of the mass of the people and so prevent them from perpetrating acts of violence, cruelty and infamy and the more extreme forms of injustice: and if you delayed doing that until they had come to recognize and understand truth, you would infallibly have to wait for ever. For even supposing truth had already been discovered, they would be incapable of grasping it: they would still need to have it clothed in allegory, parable, myth." (Demopheles)

"I understand: what it comes down to is that truth is to be clothed in lies. But that is an alliance which will ruin it: for what a dangerous weapon you place in a man's hands when you grant him the right to employ untruth as a vehicle for truth! If that is allowed, then I fear untruth will do more harm than the truth it carries will ever do good." (Philalethes)

"Naked truth does not belong before the eyes of the profane vulgar: it must appear before them heavily veiled. Hence it is quite unreasonable to require of a religion that it shall be true sensu proprio." (Demopheles)

"Even if a really true philosophy had taken the place of religion, nine-tenths of mankind at the very least would receive it on authority, so that it too would be a matter of belief. Authority, however, can be established only by time and circumstance: it cannot be bestowed upon that which has only reasons in its favour." (Demopheles)

"For, as you know, religions are like glow-worms: they need darkness in order to shine. A certain degree of general ignorance is the condition for the existence of any religion, the element in which alone it is able to live." (Philalethes)

- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Religion: A Dialogue," in Essays and Aphorisms