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.
Fair... You'd be amazed how often I hear that word, Frank Zhang,and how meaningless it is. Is it fair your life will burn so short and bright? Was it fair when I guided your mother to the Underworld? No, not fair. And yet it was her time. There is no fairness in Death. If you free me, I will do my duty.
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.
Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.
The Little Mute Boy The little boy was looking for his voice. (The king of the crickets had it.) In a drop of water the little boy was looking for his voice. I do not want it for speaking with; I will make a ring of it so that he may wear my silence on his little finger In a drop of water the little boy was looking for his voice. (The captive voice, far away, put on a cricket's clothes.) Translated by William S. Merwin
If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.
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