Bertrand Russell

(originally published March 20, 2012)
I've often contemplated changing my Religious Views from "All comparative religion courses should be renamed Agnosticism" to "read Bertrand Russell."  In hindsight, the statements are essentially the same, and equally illustrative of my personal (spiritual?) beliefs.

I'm guilty of a kind of hero worship of Russell, for many of the same reasons as some of my intellectual god fathers, [anonymous] included.

Russell's legacy with regards to religious, if I were a reductionist, was simply to inject some mathematician's/historian's rationality into the discussion of religion and belief.  Arguably, that's all I do in my Social Justice and Peace Studies seminars these days.

Russell, if one briefly consults his Wikipedia page, "was a prominent anti-war activist; he championed free trade and anti-imperialism[6][7] and went to prison for his pacifism during World War I.[8] Later, he campaigned against Adolf Hitler, then criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the United States of America's involvement in the Vietnam War, and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.[9] One of his last acts was to issue a statement which condemned Israeli aggression in the Middle East.[10]"  If I didn't know any better, he sounds just like your average Catholic Social Justice and Peace Studies student, minus his stance on free-trade - which was a response to his times.

Russell demonstrated something I find profound, that one does not need to know or not know the existence of a God, Gods, or a creator in order to understand or recognize the inherent dignity of all life. There's this weird causation that some fundamentalist Christians harbour that we'll suddenly start eating babies if we don't have faith in God's existence.

Let me say this, without any caveats or "but"s.  Morality is not subject to God;  God is subject to morality.  This is how we have different kinds of Gods interpreted from the same book(s).

Nietzsche championed this idea, but it's worth repeating: you don't need belief in order to have morals, and further, those without belief have a greater onus in justifying their morality.  Believe me, I struggle every moment of every day to justify my morality, and you can be damn sure I have no idea whether or not God(s) exist(s).  It's one thing to follow a set of principles, it's another to put them together from scratch.

Here's one advantage agnostics will always have over the faithful/submissive.  At the end of the day, our values will be more universal, because we questioned them every step of the way.