Why I Am Not a Christian

by Bertrand Russell

That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation.

on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design.

It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation.

as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking.

What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire for a belief in God.

I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty.

Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me.

This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree.

They accept religion on emotional grounds.

That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion.

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.

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.

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 that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

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.

Perhaps you may say that it would be rather a pity if Christian education were to cease, because you would then get no more Rationalists.

It is not gravely sinful because it does anybody harm, and that is not the argument.

should base one's arguments upon the kind of grounds that are accepted in science, and one should not regard anything that one accepts as quite certain, but only as probable in a greater or a less degree.

I never know whether I should say "Agnostic" or whether I should say "Atheist". It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

I cannot prove that either the Christian God or the Homeric gods do not exist, but I do not think that their existence is an alternative that is sufficiently probable to be worth serious consideration.

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

it was held to be certain that conscience, which is the voice of God, is an infallible guide in all practical perplexities.

During the four following years I rejected, successively, free will, immortality, and belief in God, and believed that I suffered much pain in the process, though when it was completed I found myself far happier than I had been while I remained in doubt.

personal God is, in a sense, a contradiction in terms”;

At the end they divided; and Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, on being asked afterwards whether there is a God, replied: “Yes, we had a very good majority.” In those days, democracy ruled even over Heaven.