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.
Just because you believe in something does not mean that it is true.
When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.
Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.
The subway in New York is a great social experiment; there are so many races and ways of life sitting together on each car.
I don't like people who speak or think in terms of gaining anybody's confidence. If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception. The person who craves a moral blank check of that kind, has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to himself or not.
I don't feel the slightest interest in the next world; I think it's here. And I think anything good that you're going to do, you should do for other people here and not so you can try to have a happy time in the next world.
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