There is one very serious defect to my mind in christ's moral character, and that is that he believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to his preaching an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.

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You will find that in the gospels christ said, ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the holy ghost: whosoever speaketh against the holy ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come. That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the holy ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come.

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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. Then christ says, the son of man shall send forth his his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth and he goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. 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 gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats how at the second coming he is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and he is going to say to the goats, depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire. Then he says again, if thy hand offend thee, cut it off it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.

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 ashis chroniclers represent him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that. 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 into the sea. You must remember that he was omnipotent, and he could have made the devils simply go away but he chose to send them into the pigs. He was hungry and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came if haply he might find anything thereon and when he came to it he found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And jesus answered and said unto it: 'no man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever'.

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Saith unto him: 'master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.' 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. 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. As i said before, i do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. 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 worshiped 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 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 in 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 every 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.

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. 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 that state of things should continue. 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.

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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. 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 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 that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

electronic colophon: this electronic edition of why i am not a christian was first made available by bruce macleod on his watchful eye russell page. Lenz for the bertrand russell society. this is an online collection of some of russell rsquo s books and articles. For a complete list of russell rsquo s books and articles see our online bibliography. These essays, mostly book reviews, are russell rsquo s earliest professional writings. 17 jan 1896 , 128 ldquo the a priori in geometry , rdquo proceedings of the aristotelian society. die sozialdemokratischen gewerkschafen in deutschland seit dem sozialisten gesetzes.

39 jul 1901 , 405 7 ldquo the teaching of euclid , rdquo the mathematical gazette 2 may 1902 , 165 7 ldquo the free man rsquo s worship , rdquo the independent review 1 dec 1903 , 415 24 repr. 37 8 ldquo literature of the fiscal controversy , rdquo the independent review 1 jan 1904 , 684 8 lit review review of louis couturat. 49 jan 1904 , 132 3 ldquo the meaning of good , rdquo the independent review 2 mar 1904 , 328 33 review of g.e. Moore, principia ethica ldquo on history , rdquo the independent review 3 jul 1904 , 207 15 repr. pe ldquo religion and metaphysics , rdquo the independent review 9 apr 1906 , 109 16 review of mctaggart, some dogmas of religion ldquo a history of free thought , rdquo the tribune london jun 4 1906, 2 review of robertson, a short history of freethought, ancient and modern ldquo free thought, ancient and modern , rdquo the speaker. 14 aug 4 1906 , 402 3 review of robertson, a short history of freethought ldquo the development of morals , rdquo the independent review 12 feb 1907 , 204 10 review of hobhouse, morals in evolution ldquo the politics of a biologist , rdquo the albany review london n.s.