Analysis: Why I Am NOT A Christian, by Bertrand Russell

Why I Am Not A Christian by Bertrand Russell (Note 1)
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Introductory note: Russell delivered this lecture on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall. Published in pamphlet form in that same year, the essay subsequently achieved new fame with Paul Edwards' edition of Russell's book, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays ... (1957). [This is part of the article, not written by me; ed.]
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As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is "Why I Am Not a Christian." Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word Christian. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians -- all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on -- are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian.

[The deduction of a sentient causal agent for the universe is not blind belief; denial of that deduction, on the other hand, has no supporting deduction of its own other than denialism, and thus has more blind belief, itself, than does accepting the conclusion of a valid, grounded, disciplined deduction].

The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.

[This presumes that there were no Christians who questioned, no Christians who created Theodicies, No Christians who could ever assert the truth of their convictions logically over the assertion of falseness by the non-believers. First, Russell cannot possibly know this. Second, the existence of Aristotelian argumentation in religion betrays the falseness of this assertion, which is intended to portray a believer as being an automaton repeating its instructions over and over; it is a false and prejudicial statement.]

What Is a Christian?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature -- namely, that you must believe in God and immortality.

[These, a deity and immortality both are deduced, and are not blind beliefs; so they are not dogmatic, they are rational.]

If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there is another sense, which you find in Whitaker's Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers, and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. The geography books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore .Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness.

[Russell here assumes the mantle of elite moral authority, such that he passes judgment on Jesus; Russell himself was a philanderer and a moral failure on the international scene, siding with the enemies of human freedom. He had moral authority only in his own mind.]

But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included the belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell-fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.

[His purported generosity belies his functional and moral inability to grant such relief.

The Existence of God
To come to this question of the existence of God: it is a large and serious question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. 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. That 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. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few.

The First-cause Argument
Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.)

[This is NOT, of course the argument being made by anyone other than Russell and Atheists in need of a Straw Man Argument to knock down as if it had meaning; however, it does not have meaning. The correct argument to discuss is the Aristotle/Aquinas Prime Mover Argument]

That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity.

[Why? “you can see” is not a reason, nor is it reasoning.]

I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.

[The argument is false; it implies the necessity of an infinite regress where logically no such regress is necessary. To attack it is to attack an argument not even being made, except by Atheists intent on attacking straw men. This is the same futile argument which Dawkins claims led him as an adolescent to Atheism. But as they all three, Mill, Russell and Dawkins, claim rationality and logic and philosophical robustness, they should at least attack the correct argument, but they do not.]

It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. 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.

[Unfortunately for Russell, in 1931 Lemaitre showed that the universal expansion, discovered in 1924 by Hubble, pointed directly to a caused event: the origin of the universe from a singularity]

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. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

[Philosophy is supposed to be about the deduction of true ideas, not imaginary excuses which fall away to subsequent science.]

The Natural-law Argument
Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced.

[No, Einstein has not produced an understanding of gravitation; so Russell’s next hasty retreat is timely]

I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was.

[So Scientism takes a hit at this point, it would appear]

Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there were, you are then faced with the question "Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others?"

[To pretend to answer this question is an exercise in absurdity: if there actually IS a god, then Bertrand Russell is not privy to his motives, first as a human, second as a rejecter of the deity, third as a denier of the validity of revealed information.]

If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted.

[How is that the case? This is stated as fact without any attempt to support it. With out support, why should anyone take this as fact? And it does not appear to be the case, anyway, unless you actually expect an infinite hierarchy of natural laws. Is that an expectation for Russell? Or is it just an excuse for stopping the thought process right there?]

If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it -- if there were 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

[This is completely non sequitur. There is no reason to connect the conclusion, God is subject to law, with the premise, there is a reason for the laws which God gave. The reasons could necessarily and sufficiently be the creation of God for the use in his other creations. This appears to be another Straw Man.]

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 lawgiver.

[Still non sequitur]

In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies.

[He has yet to demonstrate a single fallacy inherent in any valid argument.]

As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.

The Argument from Design
The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the 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. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. 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.

[And there is no material evidence for evolution which fits a scientific paradigm: objectively demonstrable deterministic causality. Nor can it be deduced from its origins in mineral-only existence. Neither can it be used to predict actual outcomes, neglecting the prediction of locations of certain fossil types. Russell has not tried to understand evolution beyond its advertisements, because it is a paradigm which is useful to his Atheism. Analytical philosophy stops cold at the ideological boundary barriers.]

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it.

[Defects? Or consequences of freedom of motion and agency in an entropic universe (necessary for the flow of time)? Atheists usually claim that the universe just is, and its inhabitants also just are, all as a consequence of natural determinism. So what “defects” does the determinist think exist? And is he not merely pretending to be God himself as he indulges in this judgment? Of Course, read on.]

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 or the Fascisti and Winston Churchill?

[No free will then? Automatons only, to behave exactly to specifications of Goodness? Except of course for yourself, Bertrand, as you philander your way through your life, while criticizing the morality of the rest of the world. Because the world is not a perfect Leftist paradise, then it is certainly defective – in the eyes of the Leftist.]

Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: “Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe.” I am not very much impressed by the splendor of those people.

[This embodies no logic at all. It is merely a personal attack the resembles a Red Herring Fallacy inside an Ad Hominem Abusive Fallacy. The fact is that the least splendid person on earth is a magnificent creation, of multiple autonomous systems that sustain life while the person goes about exercising free will as intelligence and intuition guide him. Russell’s statement here is without merit, in spades.]

Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system.

[In Russell’s scenario, life just happens; it must be that way, because he certainly can’t explain abiogenesis.]

You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

[The Atheist/Leftist fantasy universe is always, always heaven on earth, permanent of course, and with themselves as the deities in full charge of everyone else’s life and fate.]

I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves.

[So you brought it up… why? Red Herring?]

They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, 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.

[Still: why did you bother to bring this up? It doesn’t even relate to the subject, which was your perfect design as a better god for the flawed universe.]

The Moral Arguments for Deity
Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what are called the moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee.

[Cheap shot; Ad hominem used to Poison the Well.]

That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize -- the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times.

[And yet his own Atheist convictions were acquired at adolescence, well before the frontal cortex is developed and when rebellion is hormonally likely. Special Pleading]

Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are 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. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God.

[this is Russell’s attempt to state the Euthyphro Dilemma, which of course is a false dilemma.]

You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world, or could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up -- a line which I often thought was a very plausible one -- that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

[What Atheists actually hate is that it was not themselves who made the world, and it is not up to them to change it because the rest of the humans refuse to acknowledge the deity-like eliteness of these self-elect intellects. Thus, although the universe just is, the elites are forced to live in it and hate it. And their own impotence angers them even more than the proposed omnipotence of a creating deity.]

The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice
Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be Heaven and Hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say, "After all, I only know this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also."

[Justice is not amenable to science, and that is not a scientific view. It is nothing more than an opinion, based on false use of probability and induction.]

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. He would say, "Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one."

[This is valid only for certain imaginary concepts of “deity”, none of which apply to the Christian concept. It applies to a figmental deity which is focused entirely on making the world comfortable and easy for humans. This is the role which the AtheoLeftist messiah class gives themselves, because an actual deity does not perform to the will of man. Further it is not useful for the development of character in man, and is demeaning to man.]

Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not what really 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.

[Scientific, objective empirical data for that? No? I thought not. This is a further Poisoning of the Well, demeaning the Other. Russell is talking to an enthusiastically anti-Christian audience, and is probably playing to their prejudices as well as revealing his own.]

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.

[See previous comment. These are attempts to demean and belittle (Poison the Well) without actual comprehension: extensions of onerous opinions on issues of which Russell is ignorant. Even if these accusations are true for a portion of Christians, it is not a valid assault on Christianity as a theological proposition.]

The Character of Christ
I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said, "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present prime minister [Stanley Baldwin], for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.


Then there is another point which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged." That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, "Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away." That is a very good principle. Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion. .


Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.

[Christians admit to the inability to achieve perfection, contra Russell’s implied expectation that they will be perfect if they are Christian. Russell undoubtedly knows better than that, but he goes into defamation mode continually throughout this speech.]

Defects in Christ's Teaching
Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. 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 that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come." Then he says, "There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom"; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed that 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. When He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought that the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count.

[Here Russell, who previously claimed it likely that Jesus did not even exist, pretends to know what Jesus thought and how his thoughts motivated his recorded statements. He cannot know this, and the knowledge claim he makes is absurd.

Further, Russell is wrong about the facts reported in the bible. Jesus did, in fact return during their lifetimes; he returned from the dead to appear to hundreds; then he returned to “His kingdom” at the ascension. This entire attack is obtuse in its selectivity and lack of comprehension of the entire narrative.]

I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden.

[Jesus in fact said that no one knows the time; that is the biblical position.]

The early Christians did really believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In that respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise.

[Russell clearly is sufficiently emboldened at this point to make up “facts” ad hoc: he has no knowledge whatsoever of what early Christians planted in their gardens.]

The Moral Problem
Then you come to moral questions. 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 who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

[Actually, what Russell thinks is “humane” has no bearing on the existence of a Christian God, or what it is that a Christian God might think; Russell is asserting his own perceived perfection as an elite worthy of godship himself – a theme common throughout this speech, and throughout Atheism. Russell is still advocating for heaven on earth as he defines it.]

Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence.

[Again he imputes motivation (vindictive fury) which he presumes to have knowledge of but cannot and further which is not justified by the actual passages; and he takes the implied position that humans, at least himself, should have no consequences for their, or at least his, actions. All part of the same theme: a Russell God would create heaven on earth, and rob humans of mind, agency and character in favor of eternal happiness and bliss.

But the real point here is that Russell denies any real authority to Jesus other than preaching, and then judges Jesus as merely a human preacher. He cannot support his claim that Jesus is not deity, and ignores the return to life, ascension, etc. possibly because he cannot impugn those with attacks of false knowledge claims.]

You do not, for instance find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation.

[Perfectly absurd on two counts: first Socrates was so offensively arrogant that he was killed; second, if what Jesus said was true, then there was no indignation, only serious warning of consequences for actions.].

You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.

[Socrates said that the people to whom he spoke made knowledge claims for things they did not actually know, as opposed to himself who knew nothing; so his claim was always superior to theirs. What do you suppose Socrates would say after reading this speech by Russell?]

You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching.

[This statement is a complete bastardization of the actual narrative. Jesus was speaking to the literalists who arrogantly promoted literal law over love, thereby losing the intent of the law. Russell is worse than a literalist in that he twists the event (out of context) to his own defaming purpose.]

It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or 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 that sort into the world.

[Russell complained about justice before and now he complains about kindliness when faced with a deity-defined justice; no wonder – it applies to himself, and likely the fears and terrors he probably faced when he first asserted his freedom from absolutes. So this is, in all likelihood, just projection. An Atheist cannot be threatened by non-existent punishment, and a Christian will not likely defame the Holy Ghost, so the actual subject is moot.

Further, Christian historians claim that the passage refers to the practice of claiming that Jesus’ miracles were actually acts of Satan, a heresy against Jesus’ actions during his life. Russell is again guilty of literalism without intending to comprehend, rather than comprehending in the historical context under literacy, rather than literalism. Most of Jesus’ teaching was in parables, metaphors and similes, not literal declaration – a fact lost on literalist Russell.]

Then Christ says, "The Son of Man shall send forth his His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often.

[At least Russell takes pleasure in it, as he joyfully ridicules it. But he again fails to attach any meaning to consequences for actions, a concept he would eliminate were he the deity, which of course he is not.]

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." He continues, "And these shall go away into everlasting fire." Then He says again, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." He repeats that again and again also.

[The concept of metaphor (for burning misery and regret) is again lost on the literalist Russell. However, he is right in claiming that the literal use of these terms is not correct and leads to incorrect suppositions. But he uses the literal translation himself, anyway.]

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;

[This is possibly partially the case, yet it makes the case for literary translation rather than literal. However, cruelty was not placed in the world by Christianity; Christianity teaches not cruelty but love and respect, whether Christians always achieve that or not. The use of the “doctrine”, as Russell calls it, is a false use and is not part of the “love thy neighbor as thyself” doctrine, which is the actual doctrine. Note that Russell spends no time on love. Rather he attacks hell-fire as a punishment for sin, which is not the doctrine: forgiveness is the doctrine; separation is the consequence of not accepting forgiveness. Russell’s version of Christianity is corrupt at its core.]

…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.

[It is the case that Jesus points to consequences for actions; it is Russell’s doctrine that to do so is cruel, based only on his own authority and opinion.]

There are other things of less importance. 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.

[Actually he chose to allow the earth to remain under the control of Satan for the time being, rather than to start demolishing Satan’s empire during his stay. Probably Russell ate pork and actually had little to complain about in regard to the treatment of pigs.]

Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever' . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree.

[Really? Not the right time of year for figs? What is the evidence base for this knowledge claim? And does not the lesson of the event have any meaning for Russell? Apparently it is lost to him as he views this as cruelty to trees, while sitting at his wood desk.]

I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.

[Russell is entitled to his opinion. Others are entitled to theirs. For some reason, Russell’s opinion is kept alive, as if it has rational value, which it is easily demonstrated not to have. But the entire exercise is an appeal to Russell's authority.]

The Emotional Factor
As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.

[Actually there are many rationally valid reasons to consider Christianity valid; Russell’s charge is projection again because he has only non-empirical, emotional reasons for rejecting Christianity, and does not address a single valid deduction from theist scholars. Atheism is purely emotional, without any rational tenets attached to it; it is pure rejectionism, with reasons, when given which is rare, based on hating certain aspects of Christianity which present restrictions on personal liberties to do whatever without moral or intellectual consequences. Notice that all Atheist “moralities” are without consequences for the Atheist.]

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

[Russell is using sarcasm to garner laughs; apparently his speech garnered many laughs at what would today be called “snark”.]

You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhonthere is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshiped under the name of the "Sun Child," and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says, "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told, "You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into Heaven they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away

[This a long analogy, one which fails as do all analogies. This one fails late, since it takes a while to get to the point, which is that a physical person cannot be a god, and that wickedness requires false belief. Russell could not have said this with any minutest particle or degree of honesty, had he witnessed the Atheist Communist assaults on humanity which distinguish the 20th century. In fact, the Atheist French Revolution which was so beloved by Lenin and a model for the Russian revolution in 1917, both occurred well in advance of Russell’s speech. There is little doubt that Russell knew and ignored the consequence of godlessness. Yet here he makes his own claims to the moral benefits of godlessness, despite all evidence to the contrary.]

That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked.

[A blanket condemnation out of spite only, not fact. And the statement is Tu Quoque, and holds no evidence against the concept.]

You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs.

[This claim is blatantly false, to the point of being a conscious lie; it is not a “curious fact” it is a purposeful falsehood, proven in spades in the Atheist era of the 20th century.]

In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures;

[The Inquisition produced far fewer tortures than Atheists would have you believe; and it is quite a reach back to get to this accusation against Christianity. Further, it is an inverted “No True Scotsman” issue, because nowhere does Jesus advocate such things.]

…there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches;

[Millions? Really? Data for that? And its relationship to the teaching of Jesus is…?]

…and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

[Some of that did happen, although not likely to the extremes which Russell claims as fact. False teachers show up all the time. How does that bear on the concept of Jesus as god, god as creating entity? It does not.]

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in 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 every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world.

[Another purposeful lie. Slavery was fought against by Christians led by Christian Wilberforce, who managed the banishment of slavery in Britain. Slavery in the USA was ended by Lincoln, who quoted Bible verses and attributed acts to God.

Diminution of war? Under Russell's tuteledge we would all be NAZIs now, unless the Russian Communists defeated them first. And Russell ignored again the French and Russian revolutions and failed to appreciate the impact of Atheism on the people of the USSR and China who endured non-“humane” massacres, tortures and purposeful starvation at the hands of Atheists. Further, it’s not clear that Russell actually ever condemned Communism; there is a condemnation floating around the web, but it is not referenced on the Russell Society site, so I suspect that it is bogus. Next we’ll discuss what is meant by “moral progress”.]

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.

[Obviously Russell does NOT mean to include his own lying and demonizing as moral issues when he cites lack of moral progress; nor does he mean to include womanizing/philandering, nor the seizure of control of the herd, as we will see. As a devout Leftist, to Russell moral progress means the messiahist control of consequences which the masses, the herd, endure. This is social justice, and is the opposite of personal justice which Russell hates.]

How the Churches Have Retarded Progress
You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, "This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children." Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.
That is only an example.

[I am not sure that the Catholic Church actually takes that position. However, divorce is sanctioned in the bible, e.g., in Deuteronomy, and Jesus himself pardons the woman at the well who would, by stated standards, be condemned due to her five husbands and her current concubinage, yet was not condemned by Jesus. Again, the overall literary narrative of the Bible shows the fallacy of literal translations of individual verses at the expense of both ameliorations and the overall narrative. Further, the use of Russell's particular example, which is unlikely but remotely possible, shows the effort he must have taken to find a case amenable to his position.]

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. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness;

[Suffering is hereby defined as having a rule-based ideology. Happiness is hereby defined as the singular human Good. Not intellect, agency, or character; only happiness. So what if it makes me happy to kill half of the USSR or China or Laos or Cambodia or Viet Nam or Cuba or…? No, human happiness will be defined FOR you, not BY you. And the definition will be malleable and hardly knowable, being relativistic.]

…and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."

[And that is the case, regardless of Russell’s opinion otherwise. The definition of the term “moral” does NOT include the concept of happiness.]

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.

[There is precisely no basis for this judgment, except to demean. Russell has not presented a principled analysis of any actual legitimate theist arguments, and has instead created Straw Men, False Analogies, and deprecations of the above sort. He presents not an analysis but illegitimate demeaning.]

Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand.

[Another blatant lie. Cruelty has occurred in Christianty but it is far from the norm and further from the underlying tenets demonstrated in the biblical red print. Russell at this point feels comfortable in the audience acceptance of his earlier distortions and lies, and proceeds with completely false statements as if they were factual knowledge claims; they are not.]

It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts.

[False attribution of moral knowledge to science; science cannot demonstrate “oughts”, which are the basis for morality. What Russell hopes to prove is that science can do just that, by merely declaring it so: he makes another knowledge claim which cannot possibly be knowledge.]

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 better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

[Yes. The elites will “scientifically” reform the world into the paradisical eden which the elites define as Good; they will be the messiahs who save the world from moral consequences with the use of Consequentialism. They will provide salvation for the benighted herd. They alone know what is Good.]

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.

[Intelligence is the new Savior. "Intellectuals" are the new messiahs.]

The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms.

[What? This knowledge claim is absurd; it cannot be known to be a fact, and it doesn’t even make sense anthropologically.]

It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.

[Of course Russell has no humility and sees humility as degrading, so he parodies it in a caricature and then deems the caricature contemptible. What he thinks free men deserve is contrary to what most free men think.]

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.

[They will make it to suit their own concept of “better”, of course. That was the focus of the Humanist Manifesto (number 1): to seize all institutions and remake them to Atheist – Consequentialist – Socialist specifications.]

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.

[Actually, he is recommending the fettering of free intelligence by the dictates of a current crop of arrogant self-anointed elites.]

It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence.

[Yes, but unfettered by the dictatorship of elitist dictation of what is “Good” for the rest of us. Yet in actuality at least fettered by disciplined logic and the humble abeyance of ideology to rational conclusions rather than elitist dictates.]

It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead,

[So he claims history need not be understood or referenced; this has been accomplished in Leftist government schools, where history, if taught at all is taught as modified to fit the ideology, and the ideology is Hope and Change without defining either.]

…which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

[Yes. The elitist faith is stated here. Intelligence is the new creator, savior, and possession of the elites.]

Notes:
Note 1: Attribution: Electronic colophon: This electronic edition of "Why I Am Not a Christian" was first made available by Bruce MacLeod on his "Watchful Eye Russell Page." It was newly corrected (from Edwards, NY 1957) in July 1996 by John R. Lenz for the Bertrand Russell Society.