WHY I AM NOT A

CHRISTIAN
An examination of the God-idea and
Christianity

Who is Bertrand Russell?

Born at Trelleck on May 18,

1872
1890: he went to Trinity
College, Cambridge and
obtained a First Class with
distinction in philosophy
1950: received the Nobel
Prize for literature
Died on February 2, 1970

Why I am not a Christian

A 1927 essay by the British

philosopher Bertrand Russell
Hailed by The Independent
as devastating in its use of
cold logic
New York Public Librarys
one of the most influential
books of the 20th century

What is a Christian,
anyway?

A person who attempts to

live a good life?
One must have a certain
amount of definite belief
before one has a right to
call himself/herself a
Christian

Dogmatic nature: you

must believe in God
and immortality / you
must also believe in
Christ
You must believe that
Christ is the best and
wisest of all men

Existence of God
You know, of course, that the Catholic Church
has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of
God can be proved by the unaided reason. This is
a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their
dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one
time the Freethinkers adopted the habit of saying
that there were such and such arguments which
mere reason might urge against the existence of
God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith
that God did exist

a. First cause argument

Everything we see in this world has

a cause

Who made me? Who made God?

If everything must have a cause, then
God must have a cause

There is no reason why the world

could not have come into being
without a cause; nor, on the other
hand, is there any reason why it
should not have always existed.
There is no reason to suppose that
the world had a beginning at all. The
idea that things must have a
beginning is really due to the
poverty of our imagination

b. Natural-law argument

God is the one who set the planets in motion

Nature seemed to behave in a uniform fashion
We now find that a great many things we thought
were Natural Laws are really human conventions
What if the natural law was replaced by the law of
chance?
The whole idea that natural laws imply a law-giver
is due to a confusion between natural and human
laws
Why did God issue just those natural laws and no
others?

If there was a reason for

the laws which God gave,
then God himself was
subject to law, and
therefore you do not get
any advantage by
introducing God as an
intermediary
You really have a law
outside and anterior to
the divine edicts, and God
does not serve your
purpose, because he is
not the ultimate law-giver

c. Argument from design

Everything in the world is made just so that we can

manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever
so little different we could not manage to live in it
Darwin: It is not that their environment was made to
be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable
to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no
evidence of design about it
Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence
and omniscience and millions of years in which to
perfect your world, you could produce nothing better
than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascist, and Mr. Winston
Churchill?

You see in the moon the sort of

thing to which the earth is tending
-- something dead, cold, and
lifeless

Although it is of course a gloomy

view to suppose that life will die
out -- at least I suppose we may
say so, although sometimes when
I contemplate the things that
people do with their lives I think it
is almost a consolation -- it is not
such as to render life miserable. It
merely makes you turn your
attention to other things.

d. Moral arguments for

deity

There would be no right

and wrong unless God
existed
If you are quite sure there
is a difference between
right and wrong, then you
are then in this situation:
is that difference due to
God's fiat or is it not?

If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there

is no difference between right and wrong, and it is
no longer a significant statement to say that God is
good
If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God
is good, you must then say that right and wrong
have some meaning which is independent of God's
fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad
independently of the mere fact that he made them
Agnostics: As a matter of fact this world that we
know was made by the Devil at a moment when
God was not looking

e. Remedying of injustice

the existence of God is

required in order to
bring justice into the
world
they say that there
must be a God, and that
there must be Heaven
and Hell in order that in
the long run there may
be justice

Supposing you got a crate of

oranges that you opened, and
you found all the top layer of
oranges bad, you would not
argue: "The underneath ones
must be good, so as to redress
the balance." You would say:
"Probably the whole lot is a
bad consignment;" and that is
really what a scientific person
would argue about the
universe

Of course I know that the sort of intellectual

arguments that I have been talking to you about
is not really what moves people. What really
moves people to believe in God is not any
intellectual argument at all. Most people believe
in God because they have been taught from early
infancy to do it, and that is the main reason
Then I think that the next most powerful reason is
the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a
big brother who will look after you. That plays a
very profound part in influencing people's desire
for a belief in God

f. Character of Christ

Is Christ really the best and the wisest of all

men?
"Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite
thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the
other also.
"If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that
which thou hast, and give to the poor."

g. Defects in Christs
teachings

Historically, it is quite doubtful

whether Christ ever existed at
all, and if He did we do not
know anything about Him, so
that I am not concerned with
the historical question, which
is a very difficult one
I am concerned with Christ as
He appears in the Gospels,
taking the Gospel narrative as
it stands, and there one does
find some things that do not
seem to be very wise

For one thing, he certainly thought his second coming

would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all
the people who were living at that time
And there are a lot of places where it is quite clear
that He believed His second coming would happen
during the lifetime of many then living. That was the
belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a
good deal of His moral teaching
He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and things
of that sort, it was very largely because He thought
the second coming was going to be very soon, and
that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count

h. The moral problem

There is one very

serious defect to my
mind in Christ's moral
character, and that is
that He believed in hell.
I do not myself feel that
any person that is
really
profoundly
humane can believe in
everlasting punishment

"Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it

shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor
in the world to come."
I really do not think that a person with a proper
degree of kindliness in his nature would have put
fears and terrors of this sort into the world
Then you all, of course, remember about the
sheep and the goats; how at the second coming
He is going to divide the sheep from the goats,
and He is going to say to the goats: "Depart from
me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire."

I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a

punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a
doctrine that put cruelty into the world, and gave the
world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the
Gospels, if you could take Him as his chroniclers
represent Him, would certainly have to be considered
partly responsible for that
There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it
certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils
into them and make them rush down the hill into the
sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and
He could have made the devils simply go away; but He
chose to send them into the pigs
Fig tree story

i. Emotional factor

Erewhon Revisited story

You find as you look around the world that every
single bit of progress of humane feeling, every
improvement in the criminal law, every step
toward the diminution of war, every step toward
better treatment of the colored races, or ever
mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that
there has been in the world, has been consistently
opposed by the organized churches of the world. I
say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as
organized in its churches, has been and still is the
principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

j. How the Churches have retarded progr

"This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay

together for life
There are a great many ways in which at the
present moment the church, by its insistence
upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts
upon all sorts of people undeserved and
unnecessary suffering

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for
righteousness,for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,

for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the
sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

k. Fear, the foundation of

religion

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly

upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown
and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that
you have a kind of elder brother who will stand
by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is
the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the
mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is
the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no
wonder if cruelty and religion have gone handin-hand.

Science can help us to get over this craven fear

in which mankind has lived for so many
generations. Science can teach us, and I think
our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look
around for imaginary supports, no longer to
invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our
own efforts here below to make this world a fit
place to live in, instead of the sort of place that
the churches in all these centuries have made
it

What we must do

We want to stand upon our own feet and look

fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its
bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the
world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer
the world by intelligence and not merely by
being slavishly subdued by the terror that
comes from it

We ought to stand up and look the world

frankly in the face. We ought to make the best
we can of the world, and if it is not so good as
we wish, after all it will still be better than what
these others have made of it in all these ages.
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and
courage; it does not need a regretful hankering
after the past or a fettering of the free
intelligence by the words uttered long ago by
ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a
free intelligence. It needs hope for the future,
not looking back all the time toward a past that
is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by
the future that our intelligence can create