Russelling, part 2

Bertrand Russell’s 140^th birthday was yesterday. (See yesterday’s entry.)

   “I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue,” Russell wrote. “I think all the great religions of the world—Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam—both untrue and harmful.” 

   

The problem with religion, Russell thought, was that it was based on faith instead of evidence. “A habit of basing convictions on evidence,” he wrote, “…would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering. But at present, in most countries, education aims at preventing the growth of such a habit…” (Are you listening, you purveyors of creation “science”?)

   In 1925, Russell published a small book called What I Believe. In it, he wrote that there were forces making for happiness and ones making for misery in the world, and he classed religion among the latter. He likened religion—religious dogma, that is--to a kind of armor that shielded its wearer against “the shafts of impartial evidence.”    

   “Fear is the basis of religious dogma,” he wrote. Fear of nature gave rise to religion, and the fear of death—and life—perpetuates it. “Religion, since it has its source in terror, has dignified certain kinds of fear and made people think them not disgraceful. In this it has done mankind a great disservice: all fear is bad.” Russell said that while he didn’t welcome death, he had no terror of it, even though he denied the possibility of immortality. “Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.”

   A major defect of religion as Russell saw it was its individualism; the defect, if it is one, is even more glaring today, when everyone claims to have a personal relationship with God. The dialogue, or duologue, between one’s soul and God was, Russell granted, at one time a thing devoutly to be wished, because to do the will of God, which led to virtue, was possible and even desirable in a society dominated by the state.

   “This individualism of the separate soul had its value at certain stages of history,” Russell insisted, “but in the modern world we need rather a social than an individual conception of welfare.”

   In short, Russell might have put it, ask not what God can do for you; ask what you can do for your God.
 

And universities, too

Today is the birthday of Oral Roberts, born in 1918.

"Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens." -- Montaigne.
 
Be prepared for death at all times, Montaigne had said. The writer’s own brother had succumbed to a blow to the side of his head by a tennis ball. How had he put it? Death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.  --  Chapter 39, The Misforgotten.

Chapter 13, maybe

The American philosopher William James was born on this day in 1842. He wrote:


"Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism."

And here is chapter and verse from H. L. Mencken:

"No one knows who created the visible universe, and it is infinitely improbable that anything properly described as evidence on the point will ever be discovered. No one knows what motives or intentions, if any, lie behind what we call natural laws. No one knows why man has his present form. No one knows why sin and suffering were sent into this world--that is, why the fashioning of man was badly botched."

Now go, and sin no more

On this day in 1918, evangelist Billy Graham was born.


"Current evangelism is as far as one can go in the pursuit of faith without works. Graham has brought to perfection the notion of a global parish, that is, no parish at all. He is relieved of the need to make private visits, to gather boxes of old clothes in the church basement, to perform weddings, bury the dead, to encourage rummage-sales and pie-suppers. Not only is he relieved, but the saved are also...

"With their salvation kits, they are like patients making a single visit to a clinic and who are therefore recorded in the cure statistics." -- Elizabeth Hardwick.

   As a child Sully had thought about God only when he’d had to. Church was a dreary enough experience: The pastor’s perpetual pleas for donations, the highly unsatisfactory stories sandwiched in-between. The preacher’s exhortations to think of the Almighty as a friend and mentor were lost on Sully, who considered the whole business of God sending His own son down to suffer and die for his sake a pretty nasty one, not to mention a damn convoluted arrangement.  --  Chapter 13, The Misforgotten.

Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, died on this day in 1910. 

"A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray."  --  Havelock Ellis.

...later he’d got to musing over whether there might be a special circle or at least a cubicle in Hell for those who said fuck you to priests. He’d always been amused by the idea of Heaven and Hell and even more by the incredible fact that most people, apparently, took the idea seriously. God loves me, but He’ll roast me like a peanut forever if I’m bad, was the way they had it figured. Even so, they went on being bad, bad, bad.  --  Chapter 13, The Misforgotten.