"Why I Am Not a Christian" by Bertrand Russell

• It [Christian] is used in these days in a very loose sense by a great many people.
• I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian.
• I think that there are two different items which are quite essential to anyone calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature--namely, that you must believe in a God and immortality. Then, further than that, as the 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.
• Belief in eternal hell fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times.
• If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.
• There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed.
• The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to a poverty of our imagination.
• Where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find that they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance.
• They [the laws of nature] are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes the whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was.
• The whole idea that natural laws imply a law-giver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave in a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and, being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that.
• The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.
• Since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaption. There is no evidence of design about it.
• Nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen in this world millions and millions of years hence.
• 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 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.
• You will remember that He [Christ] said: “Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy 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.
• He [Christ] says, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor.” That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say it is not much practiced.
• Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one.
• I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise.
• For one thing, he [Christ] certainly thought his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at the time. There are a great many texts that prove that.
• When He [Christ] said, “Take no thought for the morrow,” and things of that sort, it was largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count.
• There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is He believed in Hell. I do not myself feel that any person that is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
• 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.
• I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.
• 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.
• 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 even 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.
• 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.
• 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 fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.
• Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
• A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the pastor a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence.