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Why I am not a Christian From the lecture by Bertrand Russell, delivered on March 6, 1927, at Battersea Town Hall under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society.
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. ... Then, further than that, as a name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. 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. ... 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. Three intellectual arguments for the existence of God (The First-cause Argument, The Natural-law Argument, and The Argument from Design) 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: there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. 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? 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. ... You could, of course, if you liked, 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 the moment when God was not looking. |
The question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of man It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree 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. You will remember that He said, Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the 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. Then there are another points which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said: Judge not lest ye be judged. Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. 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. 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. In that respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise. 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. You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell. 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. 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 terror of that sort into the world. 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. 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. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him as His chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that. |
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