One group of existentialists Sartre discusses, which includes Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Since Christian existentialists believe (in Dostoyevsky’s words) that, “if God does not exist, everything is permissible,” they decide to believe in God even if they lack concrete evidence for their beliefs just so that there are moral parameters for human life. Sartre is critical of this attitude, since he does not understand how Christian existentialists could decide that the Christian God deserves true faith while other improvable belief systems do not; Sartre expresses this concern when he addresses the story of Abraham and Isaac as Kierkegaard retells it in his book Fear and Trembling.
The Christian Existentialists Quotes in Existentialism Is a Humanism
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Existentialism Is a Humanism
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Dostoyevsky once wrote: “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.” This is the starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and man is consequently abandoned, for he cannot find anything to rely on—neither within nor without.
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Jean-Paul Sartre (speaker), The Christian Existentialists, God
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Existentialism Is a Humanism
...he reminds the audience that existentialism is “strictly intended for specialists and philosophers.” Sartre distinguishes Christian existentialists from atheist existentialists like himself, but he declares that their commonality is the concept that...
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