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.
My continent knows more about me than I do myself.
We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.
This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
If God has given you the world's goods in abundance, it is to help you gain those of Heaven and to be a good example of sound teaching to your sons, servants, and relatives.
What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
Not a whole lot of us are wrestling somebody for a canned food item in the supermarket or having an ax fight in the jungle clearing. Instead, we sit and think about taxes and the ozone layer.
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