Honorary Knight Commander
"The Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the
principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
PRINCIPAL ENEMYYou 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. 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.
Bertrand Russell, "Why I'm Not a Christian"
EDUCATION
I am afraid that education is conceived more in terms of indoctrination by most school officials than in terms of enlightenment. My own belief is that education must be subversive if it is to be meaningful. By this I mean that it must challenge all the things we take for granted, examine all accepted assumptions, tamper with every sacred cow, and instill a desire to question and doubt. Without this the mere instruction to memorise data is empty. The attempt to enforce conventional mediocrity on the young is criminal.
Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the Government.
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
REALITY
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 not be afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely being slavishly subdued by the terror which comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. 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. 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 as good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.
My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
A good world needs knowledge, kindness and courage, it does not need regretful hankering after the past or fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by the ignorant. It needs a fearless outlook and free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
NEW TRUTH
Those to whom intellectual freedom is personally important may be a minority in the community, but among them are the men of most importance to the future. We have seen the importance of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin in the history of mankind, and it is not to be supposed that the future will produce no more such men. If they are prevented from doing their work and having their due effect, the human race will stagnate, and a new Dark Age will succeed, as the earlier Dark Age succeeded the brilliant period of antiquity. New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruelty and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species.
To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.
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