Why I Am Not A Christian
by Bertrand Russell
March 6, 1927
National Secular Society, South London branch
Battersea Town Hall
The Emotional Factor
As I said before, I do not think that the real reason
that people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation.
They accept religion on emotional grounds.
One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to do 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 of 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.
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.
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.
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;
there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches;
and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people
in the name of religion.
You find as you look around the world
that every single bit of progress of 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 ever 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.
How The Churches Have Retarded Progress
어떻게 교회가 세상의 진보를 지연시켰는가?
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 this state of things should continue.
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.
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;
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."
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.
Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore
it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand.
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 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.
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 the churches
in all these centuries have made it.
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.
The whole conception of a 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 so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than
what these others have made of it in all these ages.
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.
It needs a fearless outlook and a 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.
THE END
Why I Am Not A Christian
by Bertrand Russell
March 6, 1927
National Secular Society, South London branch
Battersea Town Hall