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Perhaps some people find this book a convincing argument for atheism. Not only do I not find the arguments particularly persuasive, but I wonder if even Mr Russell himself found these arguments convincing.
Okay, I want to be careful here. I generally work on the assumption that everyone, including people that I disagree with completely, mean what they say. I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that anyone who expresses an opinion different from mine must be a liar or a hypocrite.
But sometimes ... well, I lost my faith in Bertrand Russell on page 17 of this book.
Mr Russell notes that it is common for people who are not Christians to say that they believe that Jesus was a good man and a great teacher and so forth, but they just can't believe that he was actually God come in human form. Russell explains why he not only doesn't believe that Jesus was God, but also why he doesn't believe that Jesus was even a particularly good man. His first and main point in the argument is this:
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.A little later he quotes Jesus statement that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the one sin that can never be forgiven, and then he writes:
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. 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.In other words, he says that Jesus was an evil person because he believed in the existence of things that Mr Russell considers evil.
But how would this make Jesus evil? A little later Mr Russell makes some references to slavery. Would it be fair to say that because (as Mr Russell himself agrees) slavery is evil, and as Mr Russell believes in slavery, that therefore Mr Russell is evil? Surely not. I do not hold Mr Russell responsible for the evils of slavery because he did not start it or sustain it. (He wasn't even born until 1872, after slavery had been abolished in the Western world.)
Indeed, most of what Jesus had to say about Hell and blasphemy were warnings to people about how to avoid an unpleasant fate. If I was to give a speech warning people about the dangers of drunk driving and urging them never to drive while drunk, would that make me responsible for drunk driving, and therefore an evil person? Surely just the opposite: to the extent that I succeeded, I would be saving people from this evil. It would surely be an absurd criticism to say that I was a terrible person because I was putting all these "fears and terrors" into the minds of poor alcoholics.
Okay, Mr Russell does not believe there is such a place as Hell, so he does not see Jesus as a hero saving people from its horrors. But if Jesus was completely deluded about the existence of Hell, if he was trying to save people from a danger that didn't really exist, that still doesn't make him evil. You could say he was misguided. You could say he was a lunatic. But he wasn't evil.
Whether or not you believe that some claimed evil really exists in the universe, the fact that someone else does believe it exists tells us nothing about his moral character.
Unless ... unless that person not only believes that the evil exists, but also has some responsibility for making it exist. If Mr Russell had said that Jesus was evil because he created hell and condemned people to go there, and that hell is an evil place, well, we could debate whether it is right or wrong to condemn people to a place like hell, but this argument would at least make sense. But he denies that Jesus is God, and if Jesus isn't God, then it wasn't him who created hell, so he is not responsible for it, right or wrong.
I can't help but wonder if Mr Russell didn't start out thinking that he would say that Jesus was evil because he created hell. But then he realized that he couldn't say this, because he had just finished saying that Jesus was not God but simply an ordinary man. And of course if Jesus was just an ordinary man, then he wouldn't have the power to create hell or send anyone there. And so Mr Russell is left with this mushy argument: Jesus is evil because he talked about an evil thing that somebody else did but that he had nothing to do with, except to warn them to avoid it.
So does Mr Russell believe that Jesus was just an ordinary man, in which case all his arguments about how evil he was for "believing in" hell fall apart? Or does he believe that Jesus did in fact create hell, in which case he must really be God, whether Mr Russell approves of the way he runs the universe or not? He can't have it both ways.
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