Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (Paperback)

The magnificent intellectual Bertrand Russell more than meets the task of unmasking supersticious nonsense such as a belief in God and an afterlife in this classic work, which should be required reading for all those who wake up early each Sunday and proudly trudge off to one or another house of worship. Freethinkers should be rejoicing given that over the last few decades church attendance has been in a steady decline. That these most successful cults in world history are suffering in membership is cause for celebration.

Russell points out that most people believe in God simply because they have been taught from infancy to do so. Also during troubling times a spiritual belief gives them the reassuring feeling of an older brother type figure watching over them. It is emotional rather than scientific reasons that lead people to make this leap of faith. Sometimes one wonders why these dutiful Christians hold Jesus in such high regard given some of his more sadistic views. Why I Am Not a Christian is loaded with insightful quotes from Jesus demonstrating his more sadistic side such as everlasting punishment and turning family members against one another.

Russell demolishes the well worn First-cause argument by logically reducing it to the question of "Who made God?". He points out the leap of faith involved when someone believes in God. It is clearly a question that lies outside the realm of probable knowledge where there is as much a likelihood the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy exist as a God or afterlife; as the late Carl Sagan wrote: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Russell goes on to discuss simple biological reasons for rejecting a belief in an afterlife. Since what constitutes a person is a series of experiences connected by memory, and the brain is rendered useless at death (obviously memory along with it), it is preposterous to assume a person survives death and enters a heaven or hell.

During the first three centuries of the Christian era individuals were powerless to have an effect on the politico-economic climate under which they existed. Why I Am Not a Christian accurately remarks that this is why much of Christian doctrine is largely obsessed with making an individual perfect in an imperfect world and that the good life has little to do with external social conditions. It should be noted that the church opposed the abolition of slavery for ages. The only reason some contemporary Christians still do not adhere to some of their more outlandish tenets is due to the debt we owe to the generations of freethinkers who from the Renaissance to the present day have made religionists embarrassed over some of their traditional beliefs. Russell mentions that cruelty in society has always ran in direct correlation with the amount of dogmatic religious belief. All one has to do is look at the Inquisition and the plethora of women burned as witches to come to this rather pragmatic conclusion.

Perhaps one of Christianity's most pernicious effects on the world is its war against knowledge. Because knowledge can be a force to bring about universal happiness - religion is the chief impediment to achieving this goal. Russell points out that (...)

Why I Am Not a Christian is an absolutely outstanding book that some day may be more widely read. It is an obvious classic for rational people who adhere to a scientific outlook. Hopefully as the culture in the United States slowly evolves out of what can accurately be described as a pre-Enlightenment society, a great thinker like Russell will be given his proper due. In a nation where Pascal's Wager is keeping a large amount of religious worshippers in tow, and where a subtantial percentage of the population has a literal belief in the devil, it cannot happen soon enough.

The Amazon review of this book mentioned that some of the essays included herein are outdated, since they deal with contemporary social and ethical concerns of the early twentieth century. That may be true, but I still found them to be very interesting reading. Reading about the social character of an age through the eyes of someone like Russell, rather than in a book of history, seems to make that part of our past all the more real. It's interesting to see what the world was like at the time, and where Russell thought it was going. Sometimes there are surprises about what's gotten better and what's gotten worse.

In addition to Russell's essays, the book includes an appendix which details the manner in which Russell was prevented from teaching philosophy at New York City College, which is also interesting reading, if rather disturbing. The number and the zealotry of those calumniators to whom the idea of a prominent atheist teaching philosophy was such anathema were simply disgusting.

If you're interested in reading the freethinker's point of view, you could do little better than Russell. He is far more engaging than most philosophers, and all of these essays are thoughtful and well worth your time.