RELIGION: A set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual.
Interpretation
Religion is often based on doctrines that influence life decisions and behaviors, regardless of empirical evidence.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell critiques the nature of religion by highlighting how it is constructed on unyielding beliefs that guide people's lives often in defiance of rational evidence. He suggests that religious beliefs are instilled through emotional or authoritarian means rather than through rational, intellectual discourse, thereby shaping human conduct in profound ways.
In practice
In a speech on the importance of critical thinking, one might use this quote to highlight the need for evidence-based beliefs.
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.
Much like a subtle spider which doth sit_x000D_ _x000D_ In middle of her web, which spreadeth wide;_x000D_ _x000D_ If aught do touch the utmost thread of it,_x000D_ _x000D_ She feels it instantly on every side.
We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood
Veganism is the application of the principle of abolition in your own life; it represents your recognition that animals are not things. Veganism is the recognition of the moral personhood of nonhuman animals.
Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.
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