“Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.”
Source: 1930s, Education and the Social Order (1932), p. 107
Context: Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics. A great many young people lose faith in these dogmas at an age at which despair is easy, and thus have to face a much more intense unhappiness than that which falls to the lot of those who have never had a religious upbringing. Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage. The craving for religious faith being largely an outcome of fear, the advocates of faith tend to think that certain kinds of fear are not to be deprecated. In this, to my mind, they are gravely mistaken. To allow oneself to entertain pleasant beliefs as a means of avoiding fear is not to live in the best way. In so far as religion makes its appeal to fear, it is lowering to human dignity.
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Bertrand Russell 562
logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… 1872–1970Related quotes

Quoted in Salazar: biographical study - page 285; of Franco Nogueira - Published by Atlantis Publishing, 1977
Source: speech at the Ceremony for Decorations for Bravery, June 23, 1995.
I Think I'll Sit This One Out (1939)
Context: If I believed that force would ever build a better world, I would be a Marxist revolutionary. But I have no more faith in poor men's animalism than in rich men's. And I want no proletarian revolution until the proletariat has demonstrated devotion to reason which the rich, with larger opportunities to cultivate that virtue, have so universally failed to achieve. I favor the underdog against the upperdog, but I favor something better than a dog above both of them.

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A Better Hope for the Soul, The Watchtower magazine, 8/1 1996.
Preface, pp. x-xi.
The Revival of Aristocracy (1906)

“Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints.”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem