From now on I’ll
write about my favorite paragraphs of my favorite books every once in a while.
I’ll try to keep it short so you won’t get bored.
I’d like to begin with the one that I respect the
most, Bertrand Russell.
“Why I Am Not
A Christian”
by
Bertrand
Russell
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).
“Why I Am Not A Christian” by Bertrand Russell
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 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.
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. 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.
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 he 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.
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.
*My notes are in color
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