I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.
Interpretation
Russell critiques the official Catholic stance on key social issues, warning of their potential harm to humanity.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell expresses his strong disapproval of the Catholic Church's positions on divorce, birth control, and censorship. He believes that these doctrines are not only restrictive but also pose a danger to human progress and well-being, as they limit personal freedom and hinder societal development. Russell's perspective emphasizes the importance of questioning authoritative beliefs, especially when they can adversely affect people's lives and choices.
In practice
In a lecture on the impact of religious doctrine in modern society.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Money is a miraculous thing. It is your personal energy reduced to a portable form and endowed with power you yourself do not possess. It can go where you cannot go; speak languages you cannot speak; lift burdens you cannot touch with your fingers; save lives with which you cannot deal directly.
No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' β¦ That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.
What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe.
The great enemy of the life of faith in God is not sin, but the good which is not good enough. The good is always the enemy of the best.
Without reflecting that this is the only moment in which you can study character," said the count; "on the steps of the scaffold death tears off the mask that has been worn through life, and the real visage is disclosed.
The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.