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http://theglutengal.com/gluten-free-recipes/poultry/savory-italian-chicken/ There is a fine little collection of essays about atheism by Bertrand Russell, entitled Why I Am Not A Christian, which I read on subway rides about the city the past week.  It is light reading, and his mature essays are in a lucid style which offers no difficulties (some of his earlier essays, such as “A Free Man’s Worship” are a tad flyblown but such is the prerogative of youth).

prophetically The book contains nothing profound, but may be taken as a clear exposition of modern atheism.  If you were to add in a self-important confession of an angst-ridden atheistic epiphany sometime in the second half of high school the book might make a fairly decent summa of the beliefs of the average European graduate student, though Russell has the passion of being in the vanguard, while we moderns are in the tired position of being epigones even in our atheism.

His attack on religion generally is in two parts, answering religious apologists who argue for religion’s veracity or utility: “I think all the great religions of the world – Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism – both untrue and harmful.”  On larger issues, he is culpably partial in his argumentation and I would describe him, in general, as not intellectually serious.  His ideas are certainly no challenge to a believer and I think his book is a good read and offers useful criticisms, provided you treat him with appropriate condescension.  If a chimneysweep had come up to Michelangelo as he was painting the Sistine Chapel and said, “There was no Adam and Eve, so get your bee-hind down from there and get a real job.  And if you put a piece of glass in front of your eyes while you work the paint won’t get in your eyes,” my recommendation to Michelangelo would be to take the sweep’s advice – on the latter point.

Russell does not spend a great deal of time on the claim that religion is untrue, but he does address some of the logical arguments about the existence of God.  As always these seem fruitless.  Believers want to believe them; disbelievers want to disbelieve them.  Russell thinks the First Cause argument merely begs the question, “What caused God?”  Theologians have certainly addressed this problem before, and the concept of God as another type of existence without time that can summon time (and hence causality) into being is not addressed by Russell.  I find it useless to say you are refuting arguments without plumbing them to their depth, but the point really is that Russell does not care about this argument and hence is really not worried about it.  Later he says something of note along these lines, “Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence.  Even if they think they are worrying about that, they are really deceiving themselves.  They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion.”  I think there are such people who worry about things impossibly distant; Dostoevsky said man must have a connection with the infinite, or he will dash his brains out.  This is true, but only for Dostoevskies.  As for the first cause argument, it takes its force from the eternity/time problem suggested by the idea of a “first” cause of anything.  Current astrophysical theory which suggests a Big Bang but no Big Crunch – meaning that the universe as we know it had a beginning and will have an end – makes this traditional theological problem seem more real rather than less.  Russell suggests the universe needs no cause at all, that it could be eternal all by itself.  This is possible of course.  It is not suggested by current cosmology, but current cosmology is a bad place to hide an immutable God, because current cosmology tends to change.  But in truth on such vast concerns all rationalism is insufferable: you can stump a rationalist merely by asking, “What is time?”  Concerns such as death and causality are merely incidents in our subjection to this mystery.  That time is ubiquitous and inexplicable, experienced but not understood, mundane but utterly mysterious, and so enmeshed, even in this argument, with the human conception of the divinity, strikes me as humiliation enough for the human mind.  I sense that Russell’s response to this is incuriosity.  Scientifically you can treat time as a number, t=x, and use it accurately in your calculations; and eternity you cannot put in your calculations at all; that is enough.

This is, in short, the problem with Russell: like all good pragmatists he can’t be bothered with getting beneath the surface.  If he found you crying he might vow to go the lab tomorrow to research how to chemically dry tear-ducts.  Perhaps Pepto-Bismol might work, for it is probably “merely a bad digestion.”  I should probably not make fun of this too much, for the world belongs to such as these, and if not the world, at least the pharmaceutical industry.  A great deal of good is done by scientists who have no concern for the deeper questions but merely want to solve problems.  I do not feel it necessary myself to write a book “Why I Am Not a Scientist,” and explain why these problem-solvers are bad, how scientific “advancements” have caused suffering and might just destroy the world.  But I suppose religion picked this fight a few hundred years ago and the scientists are still swinging.  Insofar as there are forms of religion that threaten the work of problem-solvers like Russell or Dawkins, I have to applaud their efforts.  All that needs to be said is that Russell is a polemicist, not a thinker.  He is utterly, in this regard, like Dawkins and Hitchens.  If he is counted as a philosopher, it will have to be as a logician.

By far his better contributions are on the question of whether religion is harmful.  In this, again, his larger arguments are not such as to be a credit to him, or convincing to the impartial, for they are “like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.”  He makes, in his essay “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?” which is on this topic and hence might reasonably be expected to represent his thoughts on it, the following statement:

It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them.  These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others. (24)

Dawkins and Hitchens say similar things, which is to me most curious.  I heard a similar thing from a person who counts as educated at a bar once.  When he held forth against organized religion, that it had, in so many words, “made no useful contributions to civilization,” I responded that in my own case I went to the only free private high school in the country, which was a religious institution; that I went to a religiously founded university – that indeed the entire Western university system was the work of the churches, and the primary and secondary schools as well; that the very word “hospital” was a Christian term, the thing a Christian institution, and most of the ones in my city were private and religiously founded; that even such anti-Christian philosophers such as Nietzsche had put the blame on Christianity for transforming human ethics in favor of the poor and wretched (I thought this a good thing); that Homer, Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Michelangelo, Raphael, Handel, Bach, and Tolstoy (and innumerable others) all worked from religious inspiration; that all Hebrew and Arabic and Indian literature and philosophy was religious; that if you subtracted from the world all the stupas, cathedrals, pagodas, mosques, altars, temples, churches, madrassas, yeshivas, ashrams, chapels, synagogues, and shrines, and all the things ever made for them, you would take nine-tenths (or more?) of man’s artistic inheritance with them; but beyond schools, hospitals, egalitarian morals, philosophy and literature, and art, no, I couldn’t think of any useful contributions either.  You can go on for days in this vein.  “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

How Russell could be so purblind in this regard I do not know.  I’m sure that almost all the hospitals of England in his day were religiously founded, and most of the schools as well.  That the state has recently (in human history) taken on this role cannot excuse ignorance here.  My interlocutor at the bar replied that these things were not religion per se; if a group of clerics found Oxford as a seminary they are doing something for education, but it should not be seen as religious.  This is to me about as useful as saying that Harvard does not pertain to education, because everything done there is speaking, reading, writing, seeing, hearing, or doing, and should be discussed under those terms, not education.  The fact is that organized religion organizes social improvements on a massive scale, and inspires and directs action on a personal level.  Only government and the profit motive can compare with religion in this way.  Indeed, those two are the best parallels for this question.  Both the state and business have been enormously harmful, and I say that of all the forces in the world they pose by far the greatest danger to human civilization.  Numberless examples can be adduced of the damages they have wrought.  But they have also done great good, and it would be considered jejune and infantile to ignore or deny this – hardly anyone would give any credence to a polemicist so irrational.  Discussing whether we would be best off creating an utterly new type of humanity without government, religion, or greed is fair enough, but Russell’s claim that religion is nothing but bad news is not the claim of an empiricist.

Russell does not impress with his command of details outside his field of observation either, which makes him occasionally embarrassing to read.  This is strange in a professor, for typically such a man is trained to be cautious whenever wandering from his narrow specialty.  But Russell, like many other professors, cannot maintain professional standards in the face of an opportunity to bloviate about religion.  For example, he writes that due to early Christians’ lack of social power, “it led to a conception of personal holiness as something quite independent of beneficent action, since holiness had to be something that could be achieved by people who were impotent in action.  Social virtue came therefore to be excluded from Christian ethics.”  There is something here, but Christian ethics is of course dominated by the idea of “good works,” which does have fewer syllables but is otherwise indistinguishable from “beneficent action.”  It is true that the Christian conception requires personal involvement, at least at the highest levels: hence there are many saints who founded hospitals and schools, but all of them also worked in them; merely to write the check or to vote to pass a law is not traditionally considered sanctity – and I agree with this – though it is considered a good work.  There is almost no church on earth which does not have an organized “social virtue” component.  Yoga or Zen might be part of a “personal holiness quite independent of beneficent action” – and do not get me wrong, this recommends them – but Christianity might just as well be accused of the opposite, of encouraging busybody social improvement (“let’s go see if anyone is visiting the abortion clinic today”) as a substitute for personal spiritual growth.  Other religions have similar “good works” policies: Islam is notable for this, where there is hardly an old well in the Dar el-Islam without a pious inscription written by its builder.

The above may be taken more or less as a reason for why I am not persuaded by Russell’s arguments; they are not in-depth enough to persuade anyone informed on the topic.  I will also confess to being less than enamored of Russell’s ideal for the future, as articulated in these essays; his vision is more or less mid-20th-century-European rationalistic futuristic statism, of the sort that Aldous Huxley treated of dystopically.  In his essay “The New Generation,” he writes of the family, “the rearing of children in the home is of a piece with the spinning wheel, and is equally uneconomic.”  Russell might have known that Gandhi – a religious man, whom I find a far more congenial model for the future than Russell – took the spinning wheel as a symbol of all he was working for.  Russell cannot let things like the family stand: “With the growth of knowledge, more and more departments of child nurture have to be taken away from the home.”  He recommends raising children in state-run institutions.  More follows:

Assuming the breakup of the family and the establishment of rationally conducted state institutions for children, it will probably be found necessary to go a step further in the substitution of regulation for instinct.  Women accustomed to birth control and not allowed to keep their own children would have little motive for enduring the discomfort of gestation and the pain of childbirth.  Consequently, in order to keep up the population it would probably be necessary to make childbearing a well-paid profession, not of course to be undertaken by all women or even a majority, but only by a certain percentage who would have to pass tests as to their fitness from a stock-breeding point of view.  (165)

A charming vision.  Why this is such a great improvement I do not know.  Of college life he says:

I am sure that university life would be better, both intellectually and morally, if most university students had temporary childless marriages.  This would afford a solution to the sexual urge neither restless not surreptitious, neither mercenary nor casual, and of such a nature that it need not take up time which ought to be given to work. (230)

This is not too far from what has developed naturally as a substitute for the older solution (prostitution), but being a statist he imagines them as marriages, i.e. something you still need to get a license for from somebody.  But this entire notion of love (you must pardon my romanticism in using the term) as something which “need not take up time which ought to be given to work” is frankly repulsive to me.  A friend told me the following story: she met a good-looking, educated, successful young man at a party.  He hit on her and she liked him.  He wanted to sleep with her that night.  She demurred, but finding out that he had a business trip to go on the next day and both would pass through Grand Central, she said, “How about I meet you tomorrow morning on the platform, and I will bring you a cup of coffee for your journey?”  He said maybe.  They parted ways for the night.  “Then he didn’t even text me or call the next morning.  Nothing.  Like I was just a slab of meat for him to get off on.  It’s disgusting, really.”

I agree with her, but Russell I suppose would congratulate the young man on not wasting his time, which he ought to be giving to his work, on such an emotional/irrational sexual partner.  Again, his ideals are not mine; and I find it more useful to draw wisdom from his contemporaries such as Jung, whose ideal was not reason or economy but wholeness.  But I do recommend reading Russell; in fact when he merely offers his observations drawn from his own experience, and remains a critic who tacitly acknowledges that he is himself incapable of generative thought, he can be quite excellent.

I draw from him four especially useful criticisms of religion.  First and most important, he criticizes the tendency of religious people towards epistemic closure: their unwillingness to learn and their unthinking obedience to authority.

The attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices. (30-1)

I agree that this is a serious problem and it is especially endemic to religion.  Its causes I do not quite understand, to be quite frank, but they are particularly acute in Christianity, which has a good seventeen hundred year history of emphasizing intellectual adherence to a creed as the prime phenomenon of religion.  I think this is a mistake and I have written about the empirical, contemplative religion I myself practice.  The two are not always at variance, i.e. time spent with traditional religion more often than not confirms its precepts, many of which developed through spiritual practice and have value (though not in all cases).  But I take the religious virtue, faith, to mean not certainty but the capacity to live fully despite uncertainty – if it were certainty it wouldn’t have to be faith.  And I applaud skeptics like Russell who attack religious certitude.  An unwillingness to see reality – an unwillingness to be truly contemplative (in Greek theoretical, from theoria, observation) – is the highest impiety.

Secondly, Russell accurately accuses Church social teaching of impeding moral progress:

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in human 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. (20-1)

The word “every” here is a sign of puerile thinking but there is a great deal of truth here.  The organized churches – I will except the Quakers, who are a bit different – have defined themselves as conservatives, and teach (at least by example) that the Gospel may be summed up thus: “live as much as possible as your grandfathers lived.”  I do not find this an acceptable interpretation.  And neither does Russell.  He gives a few revealing and representative examples of what the “teaching authority of the church” has been used for for eons:

When, a few years ago, a plebiscite was taken in Germany as to whether the deposed royal houses should still be allowed to enjoy their private property, the churches in Germany officially stated that it would be contrary to the teaching of Christianity to deprive them of it.  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 toward economic justice.  The Pope has officially condemned Socialism. (26)

While there are occasional instances of hierarchical courage, the record is not impressive.  Excommunication may be used against theologians who say God is female just as much as male, but not against Hitler or Mussolini or the slave trade or Jim Crow; the churches are silent, or on the wrong side, in almost all the great moral crises of world history.  In part this is because churches are rich, and the rich do not jeopardize their possessions; but Russell gives more existential reasons for this, which I think are valid:

There is nothing accidental about this difference between a church and its founder.  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.  They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress.  The church opposed Galileo and Darwin; in our own days it opposes Freud.  In the days of its greatest power it went further in its opposition to the intellectual life.  Pope Gregory the Great wrote to a certain bishop a letter beginning: “A report has reached us which we cannot mention without blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends.”  The bishop was compelled by pontifical authority to desist from this wicked labor.  (25-6)

I blush myself whenever hearing accusations like this, though we know of course there are thousands more similar cases.  Islam and Protestantism have to defend Muhammed and the Bible against all progress; Catholics perhaps have it worst of all, as they have two thousand years of bad examples (the “seamless garment,” the “Deposit of Faith,” the “inerrancy of the Church governed by the Holy Spirit”) to defend.  God bless them, they defend them the only possible way, which is by not knowing a thing about them.  I applaud Russell for pointing this out, and I believe the only solution is for Christians to accept two distinct ethical standards and be willing to continually revise and compare them.  One is Christ’s; the other is the Church’s.  The Church’s will be compromised by expediency and tainted by secular thought.  For example: Christ taught nonviolence.  Church positions on this have ranged from just war to Crusade.  As moral standards progress church positions actually approach Christ’s morality more closely, but in order to do this consistently the churches need to acknowledge that all they live and preach are old compromises, not eternal truths.  I myself accept compromising as necessary.  Americans are quick to cite World War II as a “just war.”  Future Christians may be astonished to discover that we considered our killing tens of millions of Germans, Japanese, and Italians perfectly just, but they did not have to live through those days.  Hopefully a day will come when war itself would be considered an astonishing barbarity.  But the churches must recognize that they do not teach “the truth,” but only a compromise, while they are the keepers of a higher ideal which has not yet been tried, is hence not fully understood, and in the face of which all compromises must be revisited.  To quote Russell: “religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.”  This is utterly true and needs to be heeded.

Third, Russell teaches that human happiness needs to be the centerpiece of all ethics.

It is not only intellectually but also morally that religion is pernicious.  I mean by this that it teaches ethical codes which are not conducive to human happiness. (26)

[Christianity] is in its major part an opponent still of progress and of 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 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.”  (22)

Religious people tend to be moralists, and consider one of God’s characteristics to be that of lawgiver.  The question they need to ask is why God would do such a thing.  The answer must be something like “so people can be happy” – God is not likely to be looking to be impressed by our law-fulfilling achievements.  Jesus’s summa of this is “The Sabbath was made for man” – i.e., for his enjoyment, for his health, for his happiness – “not man for the Sabbath.”  (On the Sabbath, Russell makes the pithy observation, “We are told not to work on Saturdays, and Protestants take this to mean that we are not to play on Sundays.  But the same sublime authority is attributed to the new prohibition as to the old.”  This is the kind of thing he is good at).  When the Law becomes a serious obstacle to human happiness, one must wonder whether it really has a divine origin, as it appears to conflict with the divine purpose.  The above objections – that God’s morals are not created to make people happy – cannot be squared with Gospel preaching of the loving nature of God, nor with the Gospel injunction to love God rather than merely obey.  If God does not care for our happiness, the relationship will never be one of love.  In short, Russell’s ethic is correct  (and he goes to great length to explain how he differs from mere self-interest or hedonism) and should be used to temper fanatic religious legalism.  The law is a means to God’s end, not an end in itself.  In Abu Yazid’s words, it is a favor from God: “Allah has granted his servants favors for the purpose of bringing them closer to Him. Instead they are fascinated with the favors and are drifting farther from Him.”

Last but not least, Russell makes a number of sage observations about Christianity and sexuality.  One might even say this is an obsession of his.  Many of his recommendations – sexual education in schools, open discussion of sex in public, toleration of most or all consensual sexual activity, prophylactics against unwanted pregnancies and the spread of disease – are now social norms in much of the world, and are opposed almost solely (as Russell would have predicted) by the religious.  When religious people cannot get nonbelievers to accept a particular moral teaching, they should closely examine their own reasoning.  I cannot see why the ethical systems of religious and nonreligious people should have different goals – and hence they should be able to achieve substantial harmony.  On sex, as I have noted before, Russell’s mechanical vision of sex divorced from affection is not mine, but still I am moved by his efforts to open the doors of superstition, that the light of reason might enter in.

Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals.  They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.  They all condemn sexual relations between unmarried people who are fond of each other but not yet sure they wish to live together all their lives.  Most of them condemn birth control [this is now true only of Catholics, Muslims, and some orthodox Jews].  None of them condemn the brutality of a husband who causes his wife to die of too frequent pregnancies.  I knew a fashionable clergyman whose wife had nine children in nine years.  The doctors told him that if she had another she would die.  Next year she had another and died.  No one condemned him; he retained his benefice and married again. (68)

The fact that everyone I know would find this repulsive, while at the time it was respectable, is a sign of the progress of the times.  We no longer look at sexuality as utterly divorced from the rest of our lives.  If another person could die from our actions, then it is our responsibility, even if it is a result of that mysterium tremendum, sex.  I heard an extremely severe Catholic reproving even the rhythm method of birth control, as being contraceptive in conception, because it attempted to put human agency in what he said, to use his words, was “God’s show” and “God’s special moment.”  Perhaps the clergyman above felt similarly – that God alone had say about the outcome of sexuality, so he himself could not be held responsible.  Injecting your wife with arsenic would get you hanged, but if she died from a pregnancy you caused that was God’s business and it was our duty not to look into it.  This is barbarism and is now treated as such, thanks in part to men like Russell.  Religious ignorance about sex is about as wise, though not so entertaining, as blues singer R.L. Burnside’s legal defense in his murder case, “I didn’t mean to kill him.  I just wanted to shoot that sonofabitch in the head.  Him dying was between him and the Lord.”  He went to jail.

Russell’s humanely recommends overthrowing the Pauline doctrine of the “conjugal debt,” by which sex in marriage was viewed as the key item in a contractual relationship, whose nature was “irrevocable consent” and gave the man (in theory both parties, but in practice, the man) unlimited license to use his wife’s body at his pleasure.  Muhammed’s teaching is similar (“your women are your ploughed fields; you may enter them whenever you wish”).

Boys and girls should be taught that nothing can justify sexual intercourse unless there is mutual inclination.  This is contrary to the teaching of the church, which holds that, provided the parties are married and the man desires another child, sexual intercourse is justified, however great may be the reluctance of the wife. (69)

This is, again, normative territory for moderns – almost all governments have outlawed spousal rape now that the Christian religion is not so great an influence on legislation – but Russell was a pioneer here and he deserves credit for it.  Russell’s goal was pleasure; but the Christian’s goal should be love, whereas traditionally it has been contracts, debts, rights, or progeny.  I recommend Russell’s essay “Our Sexual Ethics,” which contains most of his thoughts, now generally accepted, on this topic.  In fact now this sexual enlightenment is so established that it is itself a threat to the religions that oppose it, rather than vice versa; “he who falls on this rock will be smashed, while him on whom it falls will be crushed.”  The Catholic Church in particular is in danger here, waging a battle against an enemy I am quite certain God has not condemned.

All in all, I recommend reading Russell for his criticisms more than his ideals.  I am inclined to think, with Russell, that almost all the improvement in Christian behavior has come from the criticisms of its opponents; a reason to love your enemies indeed:

It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not believe all the absurdities that were believed 150 years ago.  The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as a result of the onslaughts of freethinkers. (37)

This is because the organized churches resist correction of the sort that was traditionally done by the prophets.  You cannot replace prophets with priests; it does not work.  Within the Catholic Church in particular almost all the changes have come as a result of  pressure from outside the system.

Russell himself notes time and again how little the teaching of Christ can be correlated with the social teaching of the churches.

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.  Christ taught that you should give your goods to the poor, that you should not fight, that you should not go to church, and that you should not punish adultery  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.  Or, again, consider such a text as “judge not, that ye be not judged,” and ask yourself what influence such a text has had upon the Inquisition. (25)

You will remember that He said, “Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on they 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.  I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister, for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on the cheek.  I think you might find he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.  Then there is another point which I consider excellent.  You will remember that Christ said, “Judge not lest ye be judged.”  That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries [perhaps the Christianists should try to put this up in courthouses instead of the Ten Commandments?].  I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did.  Then Christ says, “Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.”  That is a very good principle.  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.  He 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.  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. (14-5)

This is cheeky, but a more serious commitment to the Gospel could actually be the result of such criticisms.  If they go on long enough, a few Christians may actually give Christianity a try, perhaps just out of spite.  And real Christians might not be so unpalatable to Russell.  He says in “What I Believe,” as his ultimate credo, “the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”  This is not so far off from the founder of Christianity, who, I swear, taught that there were in truth two commandments, “to love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength,” and “to love your neighbor as yourself.”  Russell’s vision, when he starts to put it into practice, seems far less dedicated to love than perhaps he imagines – parents who do not love their children, children who do not love their parents, adults who use each other sexually so they can get back to work without distraction – but if it is love that he really desires, then Christians should be his allies and not his foes.  But I acknowledge that the churches, built by accommodation to power and vice on a foundation of ignorance, may themselves be no allies to love, and may be swept away as people become better educated and the tide of consciousness rises.  And insofar as these churches do not care for the teaching of Christ, I cannot see it as an irremediable loss.  But I will still hope to see these churches converted to the Gospel instead of razed to the ground.  “The waters rose and the winds blew, and great was the ruin of that house.”