Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    God and the State
    God and the State
    God and the State
    Ebook92 pages2 hours

    God and the State

    By Mikhail Bakunin

    5/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This is one of history's most eloquent assertions of anarchist philosophy: religion is fundamentally the impoverishment, servitude, and annihilation of humanity. It is a weapon of the state. According to Bakunin, it had to be abolished before the right to self-determination could be achieved. God and the State remains a mind-opening experience, even for those who are not fundamentally sympathetic to its premise, whether as an introduction to anarchist ideas, an atheist manifesto, or a summation of Bakunin's thought.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Press
    Release dateApr 10, 2021
    ISBN4064066463915

    Read more from Mikhail Bakunin

    Related to God and the State

    Related ebooks

    Religion & Spirituality For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Man United

      Feb 25, 2022

      The philosopher Nina Power believes men are under attack. Western society has done away with “the positive dimensions of patriarchy”, that is, “the protective father, the responsible man, the paternalistic attitude that exhibits care and compassion”.

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Threat of Tribalism

      Sep 13, 2018

      The Threat of Tribalism
      7 min read

    • Article

      Are Lifestyle Politics A Distraction?

      Aug 14, 2022

      TANSY: Of course it’s vital people make the most sustainable choices they can – but this is a small part of the equation and gets too much attention at the expense of collective political and systemic change. The last 40 years have seen a massive ris

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Brief Late-Stage Capitalism Reading List

      Nov 13, 2017

      If you've ever read The Lorax, you get the idea. The post A Brief Late-Stage Capitalism Reading List appeared first on The Millions.

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Case for Abolition

      Jun 19, 2019

      Our belief in abolition is first and foremost philosophical. It grew from watching, experiencing, and opposing decades of reliance on concrete and steel cages as catch-all solutions to social problems. We want a society that centers freedom and justi

      3 min read

    • Article

      'The Hidden Girl' Is Smart, But Not Entirely Human

      Feb 27, 2020

      Ken Liu is an acclaimed author, translator and poet who's won multiple awards for his short fiction. But his new collection doesn't come together — some stories are gorgeous, while others fall flat.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Great Morality Scam

      Jul 30, 2018

      The Great Morality Scam
      5 min read

    • Article

      COMMUNISM Vs FASCISM

      Oct 28, 2021

      COMMUNISM Vs FASCISM
      2 min read

    • Article

      Capitalism American-style: A Financial History Of The United States

      Jun 16, 2021

      “Ages of American Capitalism" by Jonathan Levy sheds light on U.S. history as seen through a financial lens.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Grappling With Evil

      Oct 28, 2021

      Grappling With Evil
      6 min read

    • Article

      Being Human

      Jan 29, 2019

      Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious matters; we laugh at what only di

      3 min read

    • Article

      Errant Thought

      Mar 1, 2023

      If brown rats spoke a human language, they would coin the term rodentism to affirm their conviction that the world is their trash can. Homo sapiens, however, is convinced, with Protagoras, that “Man is the measure of all things,” and so we invented h

      4 min read

    • Article

      Unfamiliar Possibilities

      Apr 25, 2018

      Ours is a high-tech age. There seems to be no end to man’s capacity to discover new truths about himself and the world he lives in. Scientific knowledge has sky-rocketed and technological progress is breathtaking. No other creature has the urge or th

      1 min read

    • Article

      'Enlightenment Now' Says Human Progress Is Real, Remarkable, And Yet Often Unacknowledged

      Feb 27, 2018

      Steven Pinker marshals data from detailed studies that show the stirring extent of progress human beings have achieved since the 18th century.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Our Most Effective Weapon Is Imagination

      Apr 28, 2021

      In his Theaetetus, Plato remarks to Socrates: “This pathos is proper to the philosopher: It is the thaumazein. And philosophy has no other point of departure than this.” The word, which contains the root thauma, the same that appears in thaumaturgy,

      9 min read

    • Article

      Writers’ Circle

      Apr 8, 2020

      Writers’ Circle
      3 min read

    • Article

      We’re Naturally Supernatural

      Jan 5, 2023

      Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities Jeffrey J Kripal University of Chicago Press 2022 Hb, 256p, £28, ISBN 9780226820248 As a young Catholic, Jeffrey Kripal visited some Protestant churches in his American Mid-West town. He was baff

      11 min read

    • Article

      How New Gods Are Made

      Mar 24, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine Anna Della Subin Granta Books 2022 Hb, £20, 460pp, ISBN 9781783785018 Many of the subjects of this delightfully curious book had no

      11 min read

    • Article

      How Posture Makes Us Human

      May 10, 2018

      The very notion of what in the ancient world defines the human being in contrast to all other living things is simple: upright posture. Best known of the ancient commentators is Plato, who, according to legend, is claimed to have seen the human as bi

      12 min read

    • Article

      Humans Are Wired for Goodness

      Aug 22, 2019

      Nicholas Christakis and I are on the same page: We would definitely sacrifice our lives to save a billion strangers, perhaps even several hundred million, plucked at random from Earth’s population. But, for sure, not a thousand strangers, or a millio

      15 min read

    • Article

      10 Brilliant Insights from Daniel Dennett

      May 1, 2024

      Daniel Dennett, who died in April at the age of 82, was a towering figure in the philosophy of mind. Known for his staunch physicalist stance, he argued that minds, like bodies, are the product of evolution. He believed that we are, in a sense, machi

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for God and the State

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      God and the State - Mikhail Bakunin

      Mikhail Bakunin

      God and the State

      Published by Good Press, 2022

      goodpress@okpublishing.info

      EAN 4064066463915

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 1

      Table of Contents

      Who are right, the idealists or the materialists? The question once stated in this way hesitation becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the idealists are wrong and the materialists right. Yes, facts are before ideas; yes, the ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a flower, whose root lies in the material conditions of existence. Yes, the whole history of humanity, intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a reflection of its economic history.

      All branches of modern science, of true and disinterested science, concur in proclaiming this grand truth, fundamental and decisive: The social world, properly speaking, the human world — in short, humanity — is nothing other than the last and supreme development — at least on our planet and as far as we know — the highest manifestation of animality. But as every development necessarily implies a negation, that of its base or point of departure, humanity is at the same time and essentially the deliberate and gradual negation of the animal element in man; and it is precisely this negation, as rational as it is natural, and rational only because natural — at once historical and logical, as inevitable as the development and realization of all the natural laws in the world — that constitutes and creates the ideal, the world of intellectual and moral convictions, ideas.

      Yes, our first ancestors, our Adams and our Eves, were, if not gorillas, very near relatives of gorillas, omnivorous, intelligent and ferocious beasts, endowed in a higher degree than the animals of another species with two precious faculties — the power to think and the desire to rebel.

      These faculties, combining their progressive action in history, represent the essential factor, the negative power in the positive development of human animality, and create consequently all that constitutes humanity in man.

      The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very profound book when considered as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth very naīvely in its myth of original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty — Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

      We know what followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of the divine faculties, should have warned him of what would happen, flew into a terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed Satan, man, and the world created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation, as children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our ancestors themselves, he cursed them in all the generations to come, innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers. Our Catholic and Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just, precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then, remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood, he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he might be killed by men. That is called the mystery of the Redemption, the basis of all the Christian religions. Still, if the divine Savior had saved the human world! But no; in the paradise promised by Christ, as we know, such being the formal announcement, the elect will number very few. The rest, the immense majority of the generations present and to come, will burn eternally in hell. In the meantime, to console us, God, ever just, ever good, hands over the earth to the government of the Napoleon Thirds, of the William Firsts, of the Ferdinands of Austria, and of the Alexanders of all the Russias.

      Such are the absurd tales that are told and the monstrous doctrines that are taught, in the full light of the nineteenth century, in all the public schools of Europe, at the express command of the government. They call this civilizing the people! Is it not plain that all these governments are systematic poisoners, interested stupefies of the masses?

      I have wandered from my subject, because anger gets hold of me whenever I think of the base and criminal means which they employ to keep the nations in perpetual slavery, undoubtedly that they may be the better able to fleece them. Of what consequence are the crimes of all the Tropmanns in the world compared with this crime of treason against humanity committed daily, in broad day, over the whole surface of the civilized world, by those who dare to call themselves the guardians and the fathers of the people? I return to the myth of original sin.

      God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he bad induced them to commit; for, immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said (see Bible): Behold, the man is become as one of the gods, to know good and evil; prevent him, therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life, lest he become immortal like Ourselves.

      Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science — that is, by rebellion and by thought.

      Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental principles constitute the essential conditions of all human development, collective or individual, in history: (1) human animality; (2) thought; and (3) rebellion. To the first properly corresponds social and private economy; to the second, science; to the third, liberty.

      Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and metaphysicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists - unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know — are much offended when told that man, with his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1