We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. 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. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. Although Russell is addressing the majority religion of his own country, he is equally critical of all religions.
This recording will be added to our Free Audio Books collection. The text is available online, and you can click here to open it in a new window. The speech was published in 1957 in the book Why I am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. Although Russell grants Christ “a very high degree of moral goodness,” he asserts that there have been wiser and better men. Beginning with the belief in God, Russell points out the logical fallacies in several of the most popular arguments for the existence of God, starting with the early rational arguments and moving along what he sees as the “intellectual descent” of Christian apologetics to some of the more recent arguments that have “become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.” Russell then goes on to explain why Jesus, as depicted in the Gospels, has neither superlative wisdom nor superlative goodness.
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