Russell why im not a christian

It doesn't get tedious, at all. Take "The argument of design", for instance. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti, and Mr. Winston Churchill? Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe.

You could then talk about free will and that is acceptable; we could discuss it until we reach the point of uncomfortable silence because we both know we are not going to change our minds, and then we'll have a cup of coffee, a piece of pie and never leave the safe "weather conversation" zone, again.

Or, at least, for a couple of days. Because, if I am one of the products on which design in the universe is based That is something only my mom would say. Anyway, my point is, he is that clear. His thoughts are written with the wit and simplicity of great philosophers. The moral and emotional questions are a key ingredient in this brilliant essay that tries to explain "a religion based primarily and mainly upon fear".

You can like it or not, but it is still a memorable work. By the time I read this book, I was already not a Christian, but it was still hard for me to read. It was kinda like accidentally figuring out a magician's trick. That said, this is a great book. It's not without bite, but it's also not bitter. Having been a big fan of Russell's epistemological books, I was impressed that this book displayed the same clarity of thought and communication.

His logical proofs against God were a great review for me I'd heard those in different forms for many years and the section about religion and its benefit or lack thereof to humankind was something I hadn't considered to that depth. I think this is a must-read. After reading most of the "new Atheist" books -- I read the ones by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens -- this old one by Betrand Russell is still miles better than they. To be sure, I disagree with most of what he says, but his writing is much more clear-headed and articulate than the new ones.

There really aren't many new arguments the new generation of atheists bring to the table, therefore I think it is reasonably fair to use Russell's as the standard bearer for them all. The basic thesis is that religion -- with particular emphasis on Christianity -- has caused great harm throughout civilization, and that if we could collectively only cast aside our flimsy superstitions and vain hope for eternal life, we could propel society to new heights of happiness.

His whole argument rests on the premise that man is basically good, and were it not for the at the time universal brainwashing of innocent children with hurtful religious ideas, we could better engineer society to be more peaceful, and less worried about taboos like sex. To Russell, the main barriers to creating more common interests between communities, societies, and nations are religious in nature, and if we could somehow erode those "false" beliefs, we could all get along better and be happier in our individual lives as well.

Here are some quotes in his book which I think illustrate his main points: - "Religion is based Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder Science can help us to get over this craven fear.

The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. The Pope has officially condemned Socialism.

The purpose of religion These educational reforms must be the basis, since men who feel hate and fear will also admire these emotions and wish to perpetuate them, although this admiration and wish will probably be unconscious, as it is in the ordinary Christian.

An education designed to eliminate fear is by no means difficult to create. It is only necessary to treat a child with kindness, to put him in an environment where initiative is possible without disastrous results, and to save him from contact with adults who have irrational terrors, whether of the dark, of mice, or of social revolution.

Perhaps his view that man has no free will leads him to think man can be entirely governed by the social forces and coercion. He not only notes that Darwin explains the observed facts better through evolutionary theory but also points out how terrible some of the design choices are if they were, in fact, choices.

He asks the audience:. After looking at a few others, he concludes that the arguments for the existence of a God are all lacking in rigor. He gives several examples of events in the gospels where Jesus acts very strangely. He describes the bizarreness of two of these events here:. You must remember that Christ was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chooses to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree , which always rather puzzled me.

You remember what happened about the fig-tree. Russell also argues that no person who believes in eternal torture in hell, as Jesus did, can be all that great of a moral exemplar, as it smacks of a cruel and sadistic side. Russell finally claims that the statements of Christ and behavior of the disciples suggest that the second coming was expected to occur in their lifetimes. To remove any doubt on the issue, he explains that he finds both the Buddha and Socrates to be wiser and more moral than Christ was.

He instead thinks that dogma and religiosity tend to make us worse people, noting how the times in European history which were the least pleasant to live in were the ones which had the most intense religious belief.

I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence.

Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence.

Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which 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, and that quite convinced him.

That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasise—the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times. Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question.

If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God who made this world, or could 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 a moment when God was not looking.

There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth.

So they say that there must be a God, and there must be heaven and hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also.

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.

It is generally taken for granted that we shall all agree that 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. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much farther than most professing Christians can. It was used by Lao-Tze and Buddha some five or six hundred years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept.

I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister,1 [footnote 1. Stanley Baldwin. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.

Then there is another point which I consider is excellent. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and they none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.

Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to.

I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian. 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 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.

There are a great many texts that prove that. That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden.

I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature.

And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it for- merly was.

Quite apart from that, which represents the moment- ary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a law-giver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues He had a reason for giving those laws rather than others—the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it— if there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God Himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary.

You have really a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because He is not the ultimate law- giver. In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have.

I am travelling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. That is the argument from design. It some- times takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because 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 to be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience has been able to pro- duce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku-Klux-Klan or the Fascists?

You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending—something dead, cold, and lifeless. I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that they would not be able to go on living.

Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence.

Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I sup- pose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable.

It merely makes you turn your attention to other things. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which 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, and that quite convinced him.

Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the exist- ence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God who made this world, or could 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 a moment when God was not looking.

There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be heaven and hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also.

What really moves people to believe in God is not any intel- lectual 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. It is generally taken for granted that we shall all agree that 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.

I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much farther than most professing Christians can. I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister,1 for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. Then there is another point which I consider is excellent. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and they none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did.

Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general elec- tion was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn 1 Stanley Baldwin. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian. 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. There are a great many texts that prove that.

That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians did really believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent.

In that respect clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and he was certainly not superlatively wise. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.

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 gnash- ing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill to the sea.

You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chooses to send them into the pigs. 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 his- tory. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous.

So I am told; I have not noticed it. 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.

In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its complete- ness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organised in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. 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. You must stay together for life. That is what the Catholic Church says. That is only an example.

The object of morals is not to make people happy. 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 has 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 help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the Churches, and against the oppos- ition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations.

The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despot- isms. 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. 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 towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilisation. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others. This use of the word is quite unhistorical. Religion is primarily a social phenomenon. To take the case that is of most interest to members of Western civilisation: the teaching of Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians.

The most important thing about Christianity, from a social and historical point of view, is not Christ but the Church, and if we are to judge of Christianity as a social force we must not go to the Gospels for our material. Neither Catholics nor Protestants have shown any strong desire to follow His teaching in any of these respects. Some of the Franciscans, it is true, attempted to teach the doctrine of apostolic poverty, but the Pope condemned them, and their doctrine was declared heretical.

What is true of Christianity is equally true of Buddhism. The Buddha was amiable and enlightened; on his death-bed he laughed at his disciples for supposing that he was immortal. But the Buddhist priesthood—as it exists, for example, in Tibet—has been obscurantist, tyrannous, and cruel in the highest degree.

As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth.

Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. The Church opposed Galileo and Darwin; in our own day it opposes Freud. In the days of its greatest power it went further in its opposition to the intellectual life. It is not only intellectually, but also morally, that religion is pernicious. I mean by this that it teaches ethical codes which are not con- ducive to human happiness.

The Churches, as everyone knows, opposed the abolition of slavery as long as they dared, and with a few well-advertised exceptions they oppose at the present day every movement towards eco- nomic justice. This is one of the grossest per- versions of history that it is possible to make. Women cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered of the utmost importance that they should not infringe a very rigid moral code.

By making marriage indissoluble, and by stamping out all knowledge of the ars amandi, the Church did what it could to secure that the only form of sex which it permit- ted should involve very little pleasure and a great deal of pain. The opposition to birth control has, in fact, the same motive: if a woman has a child a year until she dies worn out, it is not to be supposed that she will derive much pleasure from her married life; therefore birth control must be discouraged.

Take, for example, the question of the prevention of syphilis. It is known that, by precautions taken in advance, the danger of contracting this disease can be made negligible. Christians, however, object to the dissemination of knowledge of this fact, since they hold it good that sinners should be punished.

They hold this so good that they are even willing that punishment should extend to the wives and children of sinners. It is not only in regard to sexual behaviour, but also in regard to knowledge on sex subjects, that the attitude of Christians is dangerous to human welfare. I do not think there can be any defence for the view that knowledge is ever undesirable.

I should not put barriers in the way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age. But in the particular case of sex knowledge there are much weightier arguments in its favour than in the case of most other know- ledge. A person is much less likely to act wisely when he is ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to give young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an important matter.

Every boy is interested in trains. The result would not be that he would cease to be interested in trains; on the contrary, he would become more interested than ever, but would have a morbid sense of sin, because this interest had been represented to him as improper. Every boy of active intelligence could by this means be rendered in a greater or less degree neurasthenic.

This is precisely what is done in the matter of sex; but, as sex is more interesting than trains, the results are worse. Almost every adult in a Christian community is more or less diseased nervously as a result of the taboo on sex knowledge when he or she was young. There is no rational ground of any sort or kind for keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter. And we shall never get a sane population until this fact is recognised in early education, which is impossible so long as the Churches are able to control educational politics.

The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man.

This argument is, of course, only a rationalisation of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. One question cannot, however, well be decided without the other. Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favour, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.

We cannot, there- fore, really decide whether religion does good without investi- gating the question whether religion is true. To Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews the most fundamental question involved in the truth of religion is the existence of God.

It is hardly conceivable that so much intelligence and virtue could have come about by chance. There must, therefore, be someone at least as intelligent and virtuous as we are, who set the cosmic machinery in motion with a view to producing us.

The universe is large; yet, if we are to believe Eddington, there are probably nowhere else in the universe beings as intelligent as men. Of course, I am aware that many divines are far more marvellous than I am, and that I cannot wholly appreciate merits so far transcending my own. Nevertheless, even after making allowances under this head, I cannot but think that Omnipotence operating through all eter- nity might have produced something better.

The earth will not always remain habitable; the human race will die out, and if the cosmic process is to justify itself hereafter it will have to do so elsewhere than on the surface of our planet.

And even if this should occur, it must stop sooner or later. The second law of thermodynamics makes it scarcely possible to doubt that the universe is running down, and that ultimately nothing of the slightest interest will be possible anywhere.

If this is to be taken as evidence of purpose, I can only say that the purpose is one that does not appeal to me. I see no reason therefore to believe in any sort of God, however vague and however attenuated. I leave on one side the old metaphysical arguments, since religious apologists themselves have thrown them over. It is a doctrine fundamentally akin to that of the Stoics, arising as theirs did in communities that could no longer cherish political hopes.

Social virtue came therefore to be excluded from Christian ethics. To this day conventional Christians think an adulterer more wicked than a politician who takes bribes, although the latter probably does a thousand times as much harm. The mediaeval conception of virtue, as one sees in their pictures, was of something wishy-washy, feeble, and senti- mental.

Such mere contributions to human welfare would be regarded as of no importance. I do not believe there is a single saint in the whole calendar whose saint- ship is due to work of public utility. With this separation between the social and the moral person there went an increas- ing separation between soul and body, which has survived in Christian metaphysics and in the systems derived from Descartes. One may say, broadly speaking, that the body repre- sents the social and public part of a man, whereas the soul repre- sents the private part.

In emphasising the soul Christian ethics has made itself completely individualistic. I think it is clear that the net result of all the centuries of Christianity has been to make men more egotistic, more shut up in themselves, than nature made them; for the impulses that naturally take a man outside the walls of his ego are those of sex, parenthood, and patriotism or herd instinct.

The polemic against the family in the Gospels is a matter that has not received the attention it deserves. The Church treats the Mother of Christ with reverence, but He Himself showed little of this attitude. He says also that He has come to set a man at variance against his father, the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and that he that loveth father and mother more than Him is not worthy of Him Matt.

All this means the break-up of the biological family tie for the sake of creed—an attitude which had a great deal to do with the intolerance that came into the world with the spread of Christianity. For example, if you died immediately after a priest had sprinkled water upon you while pronouncing certain words, you inherited eternal bliss; whereas, if after a long and virtuous life you happened to be struck by lightning at a moment when you were using bad language because you had broken a bootlace, you would inherit eternal torment.

The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptise Indian infants, and then immediately dash their brains out: by this means they secured that these infants went to Heaven. Why the Jews should have had these peculiar- ities I do not know. They seem to have developed during the captivity as a reaction against the attempt to absorb the Jews into alien populations. However that may be, the Jews, and more especially the prophets, invented emphasis upon personal right- eousness and the idea that it is wicked to tolerate any religion except one.

This persecution, however, was slight and intermittent and wholly political. Before the rise of Christianity this persecuting attitude was unknown to the ancient world except among the Jews. Sometimes, it is true, a peculiarly barbar- ous custom may shock him, but in general he is hospitable to foreign gods and foreign customs.

This attitude has been reserved for Christians. It is true that the modern Christian is less robust, but that is not thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the generations of Freethinkers, who, from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their traditional beliefs.

It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is, and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians. Nobody nowadays believes that the world was created in bc; but not so very long ago scepticism on this point was thought an abominable crime.

My great-great- grandfather, after observing the depth of the lava on the slopes of Etna, came to the conclusion that the world must be older than the orthodox supposed, and published this opinion in a book. Had he been a man in humbler circumstances, his pun- ishment would doubtless have been more severe. It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities that were believed years ago.

There was, on the one hand, the doctrine of free-will, in which the great majority of Christians believed; and this doctrine required that the acts of human beings at least should not be subject to natural law. There was, on the other hand, especially in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries, a belief in God as the Lawgiver and in natural law as one of the main evidences of the existence of a Creator.

If this be so, whatever may be left for our unfettered volitions is of little value. If, when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other.

There might in certain metaphysical systems remain a region of pure thought in which the will would be free; but, since that can be communicated to others only by means of bodily movement, the realm of freedom would be one that could never be the subject of communication, and could never have any social importance. Therefore, in order to safeguard free-will in man, they have objected to every attempt at explaining the behaviour of living matter in terms of physical and chemical laws.

The doctrine of continuity makes them inclined to go a step further still and maintain that even what is called dead matter is not rigidly gov- erned in its behaviour by unalterable laws. They seem to have overlooked the fact that, if you abolish the reign of law, you also abolish the possibility of miracles, since miracles are acts of God which contravene the laws governing ordinary phenomena.