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{DOWNLOAD} Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays On WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, AND OTHER ESSAYS ON RELIGION AND RELATED SUBJECTS PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Bertrand Russell | 266 pages | 01 Jan 1986 | SIMON & SCHUSTER | 9780671203238 | English | New York, United States Why I Am Not a Christian - Wikipedia While its tone is playful and frivolous, this book poses tough questions over the nature of religion and belief. Religion provides comfortable responses to the questions that have always beset humankind - why are we here, what is the point of being alive, how ought we to behave? Russell snatches that comfort away, leaving us instead with other, more troublesome alternatives: responsibility, autonomy, self-awareness. He tells us that the time to live is now, the place to live is here, and the way to be happy is to ensure others are happy. Home 1 Books 2. Read an excerpt of this book! Add to Wishlist. Sign in to Purchase Instantly. Members save with free shipping everyday! See details. Overview While its tone is playful and frivolous, this book poses tough questions over the nature of religion and belief. Product Details. Pages: Product dimensions: 5. Related Searches. A Brief Instruction in Christian Religion. View Product. The Christian religion is justified of her children. This means that it is Justified from Justified from the censures of its enemies, and2. Justified from the infirmities and miscarriages of its friends. If a doctor prescribes an excellent remedy, and the patient observes Scholars unanimously agree that Africa is the birth place of Christian religious life. The part of this doctrine which concerns the present life is pretty certainly false. The matter of the body is continually changing by processes of nutriment and wastage. Even if it were not, atoms in physics are no longer supposed to have continuous existence; there is no sense in saying: this is the same atom as the one that existed a few minutes ago. The continuity of a human body is a matter of appearance and behaviour, not of substance. The mental continuity of a person is a continuity of habit and memory: there was yesterday one person whose feel- ings I can remember, and that person I regard as myself of yes- terday; but in fact, myself of yesterday was only certain mental occurrences which are now remembered, and are regarded as part of the person who now recollects them. All that constitutes a person is a series of experiences connected by memory and by certain similarities of the sort we call habit. If, therefore, we are to believe that a person survives death, we must believe that the memories and habits which constitute the person will continue to be exhibited in a new set of occurrences. No one can prove that this will not happen. But it is easy to see that it is very unlikely. Our memories and habits are bound up with the structure of the brain, in much the same way in which a river is connected with the river-bed. The water in the river is always changing, but it keeps to the same course because previ- ous rains have worn a channel. This is the cause of memory and mental habits. But the brain, as a structure, is dissolved at death, and memory there- fore may be expected to be also dissolved. There is no more reason to think otherwise than to expect a river to persist in its old course after an earthquake has raised a mountain where a valley used to be. All memory, and therefore one may say all minds, depend upon a property which is very noticeable in certain kinds of material structures, but exists little if at all in other kinds. This is the property of forming habits as a result of frequent similar occurrences. This is a fact about the brain and nervous system, that is to say, about a certain material struc- ture. It will be found that exactly similar facts explain our response to language and our use of it, our memories and the emotions they arouse, our moral or immoral habits of behaviour, and indeed everything that constitutes our mental personality, except the part determined by heredity. The part determined by heredity is handed on to our posterity, but cannot, in the indi- vidual, survive the disintegration of the body. Thus both the hereditary and the acquired parts of a personality are, so far as our experience goes, bound up with the characteristics of cer- tain bodily structures. We all know that memory may be obliter- ated by an injury to the brain, that a virtuous person may be rendered vicious by encephalitis lethargica, and that a clever child can be turned into an idiot by lack of iodine. In view of such familiar facts, it seems scarcely probable that the mind survives the total destruction of brain structure which occurs at death. It is not rational arguments, but emotions, that cause belief in a future life. The most important of these emotions is fear of death, which is instinctive and biologically useful. If we genuinely and whole- heartedly believe in the future life, we should cease completely to fear death. Another emotion which encourages the belief in survival is admiration of the excellence of man. He can build Westminster Abbey. He can make an aeroplane. He can calculate the distance of the sun. Shall, then, man at death perish utterly? Does that incomparable instrument, his mind, vanish when life ceases? To this argument there are many answers. It used to be thought that the heavenly bodies must move in circles because the circle is the most perfect curve, that species must be immutable because God would only create what was perfect and what therefore stood in no need of improvement, that it was useless to combat epidemics except by repentance because they were sent as a punishment for sin, and so on. The universe may have a purpose, but nothing that we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours. Nor is there in this anything surprising. Which men? Those who have the best poison gas will have the ethic of the future, and will therefore be the immortal ones. Our feelings and beliefs on the subject of good and evil are, like everything else about us, natural facts, developed in the struggle for existence, and not having any divine or supernatural origin. Could Mr Baldwin do it? Could Ramsay Mac do it? Why, NO. Moreover, it is only when we think abstractly that we have such a high opinion of Man. Of men in the concrete, most of us think the vast majority very bad. Are these abominations, and the ethical doctrines by which they are prompted, really evidence of an intelligent Creator? Although his opposition to religion was not in those days as pronounced as it has been since the First World War, some of his criticisms were based on the same grounds. Philosophy, in the days when it was still fat and prosperous, claimed to perform, for its votaries, a variety of the most important services. No wonder if the Younger Brother, when an instance of its uses was presented to him, exclaimed with the enthusiasm of youth: How charming is divine Philosophy! Moral perplexities—which, until recently, were unhesitatingly assigned by philosophers to their own domain— have been abandoned by McTaggart and Mr Bradley to the whimsies of statistics and common sense. But the power of giving comfort and consolation—the last power of the powerless—is still supposed by McTaggart to belong to philosophy. It is this last possession of which, tonight, I wish to rob the decrepit parent of our modern gods. As I do not wish to discuss the truth of philosophy, but only its emotional value, I shall assume a metaphysic which rests on the distinction between Appearance and Reality, and regards the lat- ter as timeless and perfect. The principle of any such metaphysic may be put in a nutshell. But it seems to be supposed that, since He is in His heaven, and always has been there, we may expect Him some day to descend to earth—if not to judge the quick and the dead, at least to reward the faith of the philo- sophers. The emotional value of a doctrine, as a comfort in adversity, appears to depend upon its prediction of the future. The future, emotionally speaking, is more important than the past, or even than the present. It would be unkind to urge this contradiction, as it is mainly McTaggart himself who has made me aware of it. But what I do wish to urge is, that any comfort which may be derived from the doctrine that Reality is timeless and eternally good, is derived only and exclusively by means of this contradic- tion. All our experience is bound up with time, nor is it possible to imagine a timeless experience. But even if it were possible, we could not, without contradiction, suppose that we ever shall have such an experience. All experience, therefore, for aught that philosophy can show, is likely to resemble the experience we know—if this seems bad to us, no doctrine of a Reality dis- tinguished from Appearances can give us hope of anything better. We fall, indeed, into a hopeless dualism; on the one side we have the world we know, with its events, pleasant and unpleasant, its deaths and failures and disasters; on the other hand an imaginary world, which we christen the world of Real- ity, atoning, by the largeness of the Reality, for the absence of every other sign that there really is such a world.
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