In 1927, Bertrand Russell gave a talk titled 'Why I am not a Christian.' The problem with it is that, if God exists, we can't know whether or not we are a Christian from God's point of view which, as far as 'final things' are concerned is all that matters.
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.
Actually, Vatican I said something more subtle. Faith may be founded on a mystery which reason could elucidate or illuminate. The problem is that this may be by the Grace of God. Who is to say God does not aid reason? After all, any and every proposition will appear defeasible to some particular person. I may point to a cat and say 'that's a cat'. You may reply, 'That's my little babykins. If anyone here is an animal, it is you. You are a big fat pig. I want a divorce.'.
That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas.
Russell's dogma was that Logicism wasn't a waste of fucking time. By 1927, it was clear he was wrong.
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.
No. Vatican I, despite its rather despotic claims, was finding a via media between Rationalists (for whom study of Scholastic logic would be a precondition for faith properly so called) and the Fideists who, if they had their way, would have banished the study of Theology or Philosophy from Seminaries.
In any case, Russell was speaking to the people of a non-Catholic country. A Quaker or a Unitarian was recognized as a Christian.
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.
This is not true. Vatican I said Faith is ' a supernatural virtue, by means of which, with the grace of God inspiring and assisting us, we believe to be true what He has revealed, not because we perceive its intrinsic truth by the natural light of reason'. In other words, an elderly illiterate woman who has toiled all her life is not in an inferior position to a nobleman who started reading Aristotle in the original when he was five years old.
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 God. 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 that 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.
It can if there actually was a First Cause whose supernatural gift of Faith to us causes us to see everywhere around us nothing but the verification that that Cause is verily the living God or even the sole efficient cause of all that is. Liebniz and Descartes were 'occasionalists' of this sort.
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?"
It can be answered simply enough. Daddy and Mummy made me by doing something utterly gross. They should have restrained their bestial impulses till the stork delivered them a nice baby. Also Adam should not have put his pee pee in Eve's chee chee place. God made them to be better than that. Also, I can never understand why they ate an Apple computer. Believe me, they are not tasty at all.
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 God is a 'thing'. He may not be.
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. It is exactly of the same nature as the Indian'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."
You can have tortoises all the way down.
The argument is really no better than that.
But that isn't the Christian argument. God, as First Cause, may also cause you have to Faith and this Faith can be elucidated by reason.
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.
Nor is there any reason to believe that reason aint shit more particularly if you are a shithead.
The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.
In which case it is like Russell's belief that accepted mathematical principles have 'deductive origins'.
Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
In which case we need not waste time on Logicism.
THE NATURAL LAW ARGUMENT Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favourite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony.
Newton had started work on 'three body problem'. By about the 1740's the great difficulties involved began to be appreciated.
The problem with 'Natural law' or 'Natural religion' is that the thing was arbitrary and no two people could agree as to what such things actually entailed. Newtonian susbstantivism had no difficulty with an arbitrary God. It was Leibniz who had to go to the metaphysical extremes of 'occasionalism' (i.e. God is the only efficient cause) to ensure his monadology would 'synchronize'. For Kant, there was also the problem of 'orientability'. Surely it can't be established within a purely relational system? It wasn't till the Wu experiment in the 1950's that it was discovered that this is indeed the case for 'incongruent counterparts'.
People observed the planets going round 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. 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;
Russell had written a marvellously lucid book on the 'ABC of Relativity'. But he said something foolish there- Only the most abstract knowledge is required for practical manipulation of matter.
No. Practical knowledge is required.
But there is a grave danger when this habit of manipulation based upon mathematical laws is carried over into our dealings with human beings,
On the contrary, great advances in statistical and actuarial sciences and the emerging field of econometrics was very useful indeed.
since they, unlike the telephone wire, are capable of happiness and misery, desire and aversion.
All of these things can be studied statistically and thus reduced to a probability distribution which enables us to help more people with our limited resources.
It would therefore be unfortunate if the habits of mind which are appropriate and right in dealing with material mechanisms were allowed to dominate the administrator’s attempts at social constructiveness.
If the administrators had a bad Structural Causal Model or were relying on bad statistics, the outcome would be bad. But they could course correct.
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.
Unless, as Newton feared, a comet crashed into the Earth and killed off our species.
We now find that a great many things that 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 find that they are much less subject to law than people thought,
Like people, atoms behave in a stochastic fashion.
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.
Dice are man-made. They aren't natural.
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. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a law giver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws.
Just as all ideas involve a confusion between thought and things.
Human laws are behests commanding you to behave in a certain way,
but we know that some percentage of people won't at least some of the time. This is a statistical matter. You don't pass laws regarding things which people never do.
in which way 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,
most of the time, ceteris paribus.
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? 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.
The Law provides 'Hohfeldian' immunities such that there are many things you can do with what is your own for which you need give no account or justification. Some people would say such laws are 'natural'- e.g it is natural that a Mummy gets to keep her baby and to give it lots of kisses even if she also keeps beating her hubby with a frying pan.
If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issued 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 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.
Brouwer was fine with both God and 'lawless' choice sequences which Turing found very useful.
You have really a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate law-giver.
We legislate for ourselves- so to speak. God is welcome to do the same.
In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have.
But Religion is arbitrary but then 'naturality' in this world is far to seek.
I am travelling 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. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.
Like Russell's socio-political ravings.
THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN The next step in this 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.
We may be only a very small part of God's design. But he may have care for all his creatures.
It sometimes takes rather a 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. 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 has been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it.
This is the crux of the matter. Aristocratic Englishman were pleased with God- who was clearly an English gentleman of the best sort- till Darwin upset the apple-cart. Divine Providence might no longer be on the side of the Royal Navy.
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 Fascists, and Mr. Winston Churchill?
British people would come to feel very warmly for Winston Churchill.
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 splendour of those people. Therefore I think that this argument of design is really a very poor argument indeed.
Yet, the feeling that there is a deeper order behind the apparent chaos of life motivated much of the greatest Artistic and Scientific and even Judicial and Political achievements.
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 merely a flash in the pan;
Christians have no problem with the 'Day of Wrath'.
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. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending—something dead, cold, and lifeless. 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 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. 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.
Those things may not be 'at home' in this world. It turns out that it is regret minimizing to have ontologically dysphoric goods and services.
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,
Godel would later revive the ontological argument
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 sceptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee. That illustrates what the psycho-analysts so much emphasize—the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times.
If this were true, Russell would have remained as religious as his grandmother, who brought him up, rather than an atheist like his father.
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 that 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, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not?
No 'fiat' is involved in recognizing that bad consequences follow from bad actions. You may say, God has the power to avert those bad consequences. But to have a power is not itself a reason to use it.
If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong,
A Prince or a Prelate may issue a 'fiat' of this sort. This does not mean there is no difference for the Prince or the Prelate between right and wrong.
and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good.
It is an imperative, not an alethic, statement. It may be the most significant thing you can say. On the other hand, saying it may get your head kicked in by the guy who just spilled his beer on himself.
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.
Theologians distinguish between what is right or wrong in secular matters and those which affect our salvation. God may have decreed that he will only give a certain type of reward to people who perform a certain action which, common sense tells us, is neither good nor bad in itself.
If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong come into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God.
No. You can say the Right and Wrong have no essential as opposed to contingent being. In other words, there is a possible world where they don't exist. Before Adam and Eve took a bite out of the apple of knowledge, there were no such things (save for that very prohibition) in Eden.
You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God who made this world, or you 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.
Sadly, whatever could be said for that could also be said for the notion that my neighbour's cat accidentally set off the Big Bang ten billion years ago.
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, and 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.
Or, like Moh Tzu, you can say 'we must foster belief in ghosts because the village people will steal and rape if they don't believe ghosts are watching them.' This is a perfectly sound Utilitarian argument. Indeed, Soviet Russia, at about this time was turning into a hell-hole precisely because God had been killed along with the Tzar.
That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say: "After all, I know only 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."
The problem here is that anyone can find anything unjust. Why do women have to sit down to pee? How is that fair?
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.
But the reason people buy crates of oranges is that, generally speaking, the oranges are good. If you really think this is a rotten world, why not kill yourself?
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 a deity and not in favour of one."
Sadly, it also affords a moral argument for trying to shove your head up your own backside. After all, if injustice can be removed, the way to do it must be something which has never been successfully done before. No man has shoved his head up his own rectum. If you are truly moral, you must at least make the attempt.
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.
Plenty of people who were brought up as atheists turn to religion as they grow older. Equally, we may have been taught from early infancy not to steal and rape, yet we may end up doing so.
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.
Not to mention a belief in Batman.
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 Lâo-Tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept.
But they didn't say they'd take on your sins and get you to the good place.
I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister, 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 that you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.
No. The Christian could always say 'I beat the shit out of the guy who slapped me because I don't think he is an evil dude. Anyway, maybe he likes hospital food.'
Then there is another point which I consider is excellent. You will remember that Christ said: "judge not lest ye be judged."
This is a Scriptural reference to the fact that when you are on a Jury you must judge as would a dispassionate God. If you aren't on a jury, why judge?
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 they none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did.
Judges don't want people making judgments and taking the law into their own hands. They are paid to do a job. If they don't like it, they can make money some other way.
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.
Christ didn't say 'follow a ruinous fiscal policy so that the country goes bankrupt.'
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."
Who wants to be perfect and as poor as fuck?
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, I am not by way of doing so, and it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.
Christianity is cool because Christ takes on the burden of our sins. We don't have to be perfect.
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;
But to understand the Gospels one has to know the Psalms to which Christ constantly referred to. His audience understood that context which we need to ask our pastor about.
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 come 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.
Maybe The Trinity changed its consubstantial mind about the date of the Katechon. Still, it must be said, the notion of bodily resurrection and a final final Battle seem otiose.
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. 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.
The philosophical workaround for this is to say that Revealed Scripture is wholly imperative and has no alethic component. It's like when Mummy says 'I will break your leg if you climb that tree'. What she means is she is afraid you will fall down and hurt yourself if you climb that tree. Also, you are 40 years old and really should have gotten a job and moved out of the basement.
THE MORAL PROBLEM Then you came 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.
Again, we don't know this precisely because Scripture is imperative.
I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
I don't believe that any person who is profoundly humane can refuse to believe in Santa Claus. This year, he will definitely bring me pressies because I've been a very good boy.
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. You do not, for instance, find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane towards 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.
Both were killed. I'd be indignant if peeps kept offering me hemlock or kept trying to crucify me.
You probably all remember the sort 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. You will find that in the Gospels Christ said "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell."
Because that's how Hebrew prophets talked. They didn't advise you on how best to seduce young boys.
That was said to people who did not like his preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone,
Christ would have benefited from a Public School education. Also, he should have tried harder to be less Jewy.
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."
The context was attributing a miracle of God to some other entity.
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.
Did you know that when you have a wank, there is a chance that your jizz could get in the eye of a ghost? If that ghost is Holy, you are fucked but good.
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.
I disagree. I think a kindly person would have provided the vast majority of us with this splendid type of comedy.
Then Christ says: "The Son of Man shall send forth 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.
Again, this is comedy of a high order. Moreover, for people who have lost their teeth, it is a promise of a better future.
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,
the thing is hilarious. Say what you like, nobody does Stand Up better than the Jews.
or else it would not occur so often. 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."
Sadly, both sheep and goats tend to end up in the oven.
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 their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched."
What he should have demanded was compulsory gender reassignment surgery for heterosexual men. Dicks cause RAPE! Chop them off immediately!
He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty.
It is hilarious.
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 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 to the sea. You must remember that he was omnipotent, and he could have made the devils simply go away; but he chooses to send them into the pigs.
We eat pork. Jews don't. I prefer my sausages to have low devil content.
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."' That is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs,
the Church interprets this to mean that the Jews were not ready to accept the Messiah. They would have a horrible time for the next two thousand years- unless they moved out of shit-holes to somewhere they could be productive.
and you really could not blame the tree. 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.
i.e. the carpenter's son wasn't quite a gentleman. His father really should have sent him to Eton.
THE EMOTIONAL FACTOR As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion is anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
But emotional reasons can cause you to simultaneously accept and reject the very same thing.
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. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there 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 worshipped 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 away quite quietly. That is the idea—that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion.
The same thing might be said about Lenin or Mao if they were resurrected. The Party would say 'it would undermine our control of the country- which, of course, is highly moral- if you said or did anything to make yourself known. Kindly fuck off.'
It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. 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.
It is atheistic regimes in the Twentieth Century which were most horrible.
In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition,
Other religions and ideologies had something similar
with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches;
this was also done in primitive, non-Christian communities.
and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion. You find as you look round the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured 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. 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.
Russell's idea of 'moral progress' involved surrendering to Hitler. Still, if you don't like a particular Christian sect, join another or found your own. At one time, I was planning to attend Pope School (into which my friend Anthony Fernandes promised to get me in return for my comic books) but decided to become Chief Rabbi instead.
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 stay together for life,"
Not necessarily. The girl may be able to get an annulment. Better yet, why not just kill the husband and then gain absolution from a sympathetic confessor? Nobody can say the Church isn't quite elastic in such matters if you have a bit of money or are in a position to blackmail the Bishop. Ultimately, if you kill enough Bishops and Cardinals, Popes tend to want to stay in your good books.
and no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to syphilitic children.
Then quit the Catholic Church. Go to Nevada, as Russell's elder brother did, and get a divorce. Sadly, the laws of the time did not recognize this type of divorce and the second Earl was sent to jail for bigamy.
That is what the Catholic Church says. I say that that is fiendish cruelty, and 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.
Because the right and proper thing is to bash in the old coot's head. Say an African-American gentleman did the ghastly deed using his ginormous cock. No Jury would convict you.
That is only an example. 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.
If you can't even kill a priest, you deserve all you get.
And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and of 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; 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.
It wasn't the Church which sent the Russell brothers to jail. Still, at least they weren't homosexuals.
"What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy. It is to fit them for heaven." It certainly seems to unfit them for this world.
Nonsense! Keep killing priests till the Pope grants you absolution and puts a crown on your head.
FEAR THE FOUNDATION OF RELIGION Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.
No. It is a service industry founded primarily on whether you can make a living from it.
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.
Actually, a clever priest can do a lot for you in this world, if not the next. I suppose the Russell family began their ascent when Kings became less reliant on clergymen. They certainly gained plenty of Church land in the reign of Henry VIII.
Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.
There was plenty for the working people of Devon to fear from the Dukes of Bedford.
Fear is the parent of cruelty,
No it isn't though it may be its child.
and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand.
but so has cruelty and atheism and cruelty and farting loudly.
It is because fear is at the basis of those two things.
Stupidity was at the basis of Russell's thinking. He was relatively poor and should have taken a Directorship or two in the City. His fine mathematical brain would soon have made him very rich and so he wouldn't have had to write tosh.
In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the 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.
And yet, it was Western Christendom which rose so much higher in STEM subjects than Confucian China or Islamic Arabia or Hindu India that, currently, all Science is Western Science. All Mathematics is Western mathematics. But no World Religion originated in Europe.
Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations.
Why fear the Day of Wrath when we can ourselves blow up the World?
Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look round 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.
Either the Churches made Europe the master of the world, or else Churches had no power in Europe.
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.
Most people had always done this. It is a different matter that some may like watching Batman movies while others like going to Church.
Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
Intelligent people do useful things. Russell was merely an entertainer who babbled nonsense to earn a little money.
The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms.
Roman Emperors declared themselves Gods. So did Alexander- a pupil of Aristotle.
It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.
I've often felt my life would be more worthwhile if I were the sex-slave of a gang of super-models. If some kindly God tried to intervene, I'd tell him to fuck the fuck off.
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.
I'm a miserable sinner. I could have easily proved the Reimann Hypothesis and found a cure to cancer if I hadn't been so buys porking your wife. Also your Mum and sisters and daughters. I truly am contemptible.
We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face.
Why not go down on all fours and fart loudly in its face?
We ought to make the best we can of the world,
by earning a little money writing bollocks
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.
Cathedrals are very ugly. Atheists prefer multi-story car parks.
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage;
A bad world needs them more.
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.
like Russell.
It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence.
As opposed to one which shits itself incessantly.
It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
Intelligent people don't waste their time flogging dead horses unless, of course, they can make money or gain power or influence by so doing. I suppose that was the racket Russell got into after failing in philosophy.
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