BERTRAND RUSSELL #4 - Progress

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

How the Churches Have Retarded Progress

You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, "This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children." Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.
That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."

(from Bertrand Russell's lecture

Why I Am Not A Christian, March 6, 1927,

later published with other essays in 1957)

Find the full text of Why I am Not a Christian HERE.

EVERETT DEAN MARTIN

MARTIN, EVERETT DEAN, American writer, (1880-1941)*

    • “In the Twentieth Century, every person who achieves self-criticism or discrimination in matters of thought, intellectual honesty, and skepticism of popular slogans, is really a friend of liberty.” (Liberty, 1930)
    • “Christian liberty is a contradiction in terms. It means nothing more than the liberty to be a Christian ... And even this could scarcely be called liberty, for it has never been left to choice when the church has had power enough to coerce men into conformity.”
    • “Christianity... has brought about stagnation wherever it has been supreme.” (Liberty, 1930)
    • “Has not official Christianity been almost uniformly on the reactionary side in the struggle for freedom and progress? Has it not time and again instigated bloodshed and persecution? Has it not sought to give the authority of God to precisely the most oppressive governments in Europe, and divine blessing to armies marching out to kill and oppress? Why, there is not a single freedom modern man enjoys that he has not won in defiance of the churches!” (Liberty, 1930)
    • “Morality cannot exist one minute without freedom... Only a free man can possibly be moral. Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance.” (Liberty, 1930)
    • "Our people have little of the philosophy of freedom. . . . The things which we take for granted are the things for which we no longer fight. But when a populace becomes indifferent to its freedom, it begins to lose it." (as quoted in Time, “On Keeping Free”, 06/09/1930)
    • “Since October, 1917, revolutionary movements, whether Communist, Fascist or Nazi, are arrayed against precisely those objectives which have inspired revolutions since 1642. Present-day revolution is therefore a crowd movement against liberal democracy. It openly avows itself as such and in this respect both the Communist and the Fascist are the same. (Farewell to Revolution, 1935)
    • "Tolerance is a better guarantee of freedom than brotherly love; for a man may love his brother so much that he feels himself thereby appointed his brother’s keeper." (Liberty, 1930)

*READ MORE:
Archived Time article about Everett Dean Martin, 06/09/1930

The article describes Martin in 1930:
Everett Dean Martin, 50, tall, loose-jointed, has poppy, kindly eyes, a mouth like Irvin Cobb's. He became associated with the People's Institute in 1916, was made Director in 1922. Other books: The Behavior of Crowds, Psychology, The Meaning of a Liberal Education, The Mystery of Religion.

In 1930, Martin’s book Liberty was selling new for $3. It is still available at amazon.com for about the same price (used) plus shipping. This is a great book. A friend of mine loaned it to me about 30 years ago. I had never heard of Martin before that. I am surprised he is not better known because what he wrote in 1930 is still relevant today.