Category: Philosophy & Ethics

On the Prospects of Christianity Bernard Shaw's Preface to Androcles and the Lion

Why not give Christianity a Trial? Why Jesus more than Another? Was Jesus a Coward? Was Jesus a Martyr? The Gospels without Prejudice The Gospels now unintelligible to Novices Worldliness of the Majority Religion of the Minority. Salvationism The Difference between Atonement a...

Chapters

2. Part 2

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that wh...

6. Part 6

Against this comes the protest of the Sunday School theorists "Why not distribute according to merit?" Here one imagines Jesus, whose smile has been broadening down the ages as...

5. Part 5

Now matters of taste are mostly also matters of fashion. We are conscious of a difference between medieval fashions in belief and modern fashions. For instance, though we are mo...

7. Part 7

This was the beginning and the end of the objection of Jesus to marriage and family ties, and the explanation of his conception of heaven as a place where there should be neithe...

3. Part 3

So much for his personal life and temperament. His public career as a popular preacher carries him equally far beyond John the Baptist. He lays no stress on baptism or vows, and...

1. Part 1

Why not give Christianity a Trial? Why Jesus more than Another? Was Jesus a Coward? Was Jesus a Martyr? The Gospels without Prejudice The Gospels now unintelligible to Novices W...

8. Part 8

Paul's theory of original sin was to some extent idiosyncratic. He tells us definitely that he finds himself quite well able to avoid the sinfulness of sex by practising celibac...

9. Part 9

It must therefore be taken as a flat fundamental modern fact, whether we like it or not, that whilst many of us cannot believe that Jesus got his curious grip of our souls by me...

4. Part 4

Luke's romantic shrinking from unpleasantness, and his sentimentality, are illustrated by his version of the woman with the ointment. Matthew and Mark describe it as taking plac...

10. Part 10

The position is perhaps graver for France than for England, because the sixty-five per cent of French subjects who are neither French nor Christian nor Modernist includes some t...