On Religion, Russell, and the Bloody Business of Being Human

When I get a few days together, I read Russell. Not the entirety of a book, of course, but certain parts. It helps me remember, root my thoughts, reroute my vision on certain aspects of life, and sometimes, even think further about what life could have been.

Anyway, the only other philosopher who brings me that kind of discovery, those unexpected angles that send me down new rabbit holes and eventually lead to further writing, is Nietzsche. Between the two of them, there is usually enough intellectual provocation to keep me occupied and enough discomfort to remind me that thinking is not always a pleasant business.

Here I go about religion.

The twenty first century is truly fucked. We have smartphones that can photograph a black hole, artificial intelligence that can compose essays, and rockets that can send machines to Mars. Yet, when it comes to religion, large sections of humanity seem determined to drag us back to the intellectual neighbourhoods we inhabited a thousand years ago. India, in particular, has perfected the art of travelling backwards while congratulating itself on the journey. WhatsApp uncles now dominate conversations everywhere, armed with half cooked thoughts, suspicious historical claims, forwarded videos, and the unshakeable confidence of men whose craniums appear to have been furnished without the inconvenience of actual thinking. God, I abhor this species of intellectual laziness. I often find myself having to exercise considerable restraint to prevent my irritation from travelling somewhere between the neck and the back of the head.

The problem, however, is not religion alone. It is the human appetite for certainty, the extraordinary comfort of believing that we have already figured everything out, and the dangerous pleasure of belonging to a group that has supposedly figured it out better than everybody else. Religion merely gives this appetite a respectable vocabulary, an ancient pedigree, and, occasionally, divine authorisation.

Which brings me to Bertrand Russell and Russell on Religion, edited by Louis Greenspan and Stefan Andersson.

What I find particularly wonderful about this book is that it refuses to reduce Russell to the familiar caricature of the angry atheist standing at the gates of religion with a philosophical hammer. Yes, Russell could be devastatingly dismissive of religious dogma. Yes, Why I Am Not a Christian remains one of the great intellectual expressions of irreverence. And yes, there is something deeply satisfying about watching a first rate mind dismantle arguments that have survived for centuries largely because questioning them has been treated as a moral failing.

But this collection offers something more interesting than a collection of intellectual takedowns.

It allows us to encounter Russell across several dimensions: the philosopher questioning the existence and nature of God, the rationalist examining the relationship between science and religion, the social critic interrogating the moral authority of churches, and the historian studying the ways religious ideas have shaped civilisations. The book moves through personal statements, philosophy, science, morality, and history. It brings together writings from different periods of Russell's life, making it possible to trace not merely what he believed, but how his thinking developed, shifted, and occasionally contradicted itself.

That last bit matters. A philosopher who never changes his mind is either extraordinarily fortunate in having been right about everything from the beginning or insufficiently acquainted with the possibility of being wrong.

Russell is interesting because he is not always easy to contain within a single ideological box. His early writings sometimes explore a form of spiritual experience that does not depend on conventional religious belief. His later polemics are far more uncompromising in their criticism of organised religion and its claims to authority. Yet his concern with compassion, the reduction of human suffering, and the possibility of a life that reaches beyond the narrow demands of the ego persists.

In other words, Russell's scepticism does not necessarily lead to nihilism. He can reject the machinery of religious certainty without abandoning the search for meaning. He can question the existence of God while remaining deeply concerned about how human beings ought to live.

That is a distinction worth remembering, especially in a world where people routinely confuse the rejection of religious dogma with the rejection of morality itself.

One of the most compelling aspects of this collection is its insistence that religion cannot be understood merely as a set of private beliefs about the existence of a supernatural being. Religion is also an institution, a political force, a source of collective identity, and a system through which authority can be legitimised. The moment someone claims to speak for an absolute truth, the question of who gets to interpret that truth becomes unavoidable. And when the interpreters acquire power, we have to ask what prevents them from using it to serve themselves.

This is where Russell becomes particularly relevant to our times.

Look around. Across the world, political leaders have discovered the extraordinary usefulness of turning identity into a weapon. Religious affiliation, national belonging, ethnic pride, and civilisational nostalgia are repeatedly mobilised to divide populations into those who supposedly belong and those who must constantly prove that they do. The political vocabulary changes from country to country, but the underlying mechanism is depressingly familiar: manufacture an enemy, exaggerate the threat, sanctify the cause, and convince people that questioning the leadership amounts to betraying the community.

India knows this script rather well. Religion is increasingly dragged into political conversations that ought to be about education, employment, public health, economic security, social justice, and the ordinary business of making a decent life possible. Historical grievances are revived selectively, identities are sharpened into weapons, and every disagreement threatens to become a referendum on patriotism or religious loyalty. A WhatsApp forward acquires the status of historical evidence, a communal rumour becomes a political instrument, and the person who asks for verification is accused of having questionable intentions.

It would be funny if the consequences were not so serious.

And this is not an exclusively Indian problem. The protests sweeping France and other European countries in October 2026, driven by anger over the cost of living, economic insecurity, and public services, remind us that beneath the grand political theatre, people are struggling with rather material concerns. In India, the youth led protests earlier this year over alleged examination irregularities expanded into a wider expression of frustration over unemployment, corruption, and the future available to young people. The immediate circumstances differ, and the political contexts cannot simply be equated. But the underlying question is worth asking: what happens when people feel that the institutions governing their lives are no longer listening to them?

People take to the streets for many reasons. Some protest against economic hardship, some against political repression, some against discrimination, and some because they have simply had enough of being told to accept circumstances that those in power would never tolerate for themselves. These protests are not all the same, nor are all governments equally culpable. But they expose a recurring tension between the promises made by institutions and the lives people are actually living.

Meanwhile, inequality continues to make a mockery of the language of equal opportunity. Governments speak of growth while millions struggle with the costs of housing, education, healthcare, and basic necessities. Political leaders invoke the people while protecting arrangements that concentrate wealth and influence in relatively few hands. Public anger is then managed through the familiar combination of spectacle, selective outrage, cultural warfare, and the occasional patriotic sermon.

And religion, when recruited into this arrangement, can become a particularly efficient distraction.

Why argue about who deserves dignity when we can argue about whose god deserves recognition? Why examine the distribution of wealth when we can fight over the symbols of cultural supremacy? Why demand accountability from those who govern us when we can spend our evenings abusing strangers on the internet for failing an imaginary test of religious loyalty?

The point is not that religion invariably serves power, or that every religious person is manipulated, or that every protest represents a morally uncomplicated struggle for justice. That would be another form of intellectual laziness. Religion has inspired compassion, solidarity, resistance, and acts of extraordinary courage. Religious traditions have also furnished authorities with justifications for persecution, exclusion, and obedience. Russell himself recognises a complicated historical picture, acknowledging contributions made by religious traditions even as he criticises their dogmas, institutions, and political consequences.

That complexity is precisely what makes the book worth reading.

Russell is not asking us merely to replace one set of unquestionable beliefs with another. He is asking us to examine the claims we accept, the authorities we obey, and the consequences of allowing convictions to escape the discipline of criticism. His writing on the relationship between religion and morality is especially provocative because it challenges the assumption that without religious authority, human beings would somehow lose the capacity to distinguish right from wrong. If morality depends entirely on the threat of divine punishment or the promise of eternal reward, what does that tell us about the moral character of the person behaving well?

More importantly, what happens when people believe that their own moral certainty entitles them to humiliate, exclude, or harm others?

This is where I find myself returning to Nietzsche as well. Both thinkers, in their very different ways, understood that inherited values deserve examination rather than automatic reverence. Both were interested in the psychological and social forces concealed beneath our professed convictions. But their approaches are not interchangeable, and neither philosopher should be treated as a convenient mascot for whatever opinion we happen to hold. Reading them properly means allowing them to complicate our assumptions, not merely decorating those assumptions with impressive quotations.

That, for me, is the real pleasure of reading philosophy. It is not the satisfaction of finding someone clever enough to agree with me. It is the unsettling discovery that an argument I had dismissed may contain something worth considering, or that an opinion I held with great confidence requires considerably more work than I had imagined.

And Russell on Religion offers plenty of that work.

It is also a useful reminder that the conflict between reason and dogma is not restricted to religion. We can reject religious fundamentalism and still become fundamentalists about nationalism, political ideology, markets, technology, or our own supposedly enlightened identities. We can laugh at the WhatsApp uncle who forwards nonsense about ancient science while uncritically sharing political propaganda that confirms our existing prejudices. We can congratulate ourselves on being rational while refusing to examine the emotional investments that determine what we consider rational in the first place.

The human capacity for self deception is remarkably democratic.

Russell's wider political and social concerns make this point especially significant. The removal of religious authority would not, by itself, produce a just society. Nationalism, authoritarianism, economic exploitation, and the pursuit of power can thrive perfectly well in a secular environment. A government does not need divine sanction to mistreat its citizens. It only needs sufficient power, a convenient justification, and a population willing to look elsewhere.

Which is why I do not think the most useful question is simply whether religion is true or false, although Russell gives us ample reason to examine the arguments for religious belief. We must also ask what our beliefs do to us, what they permit us to do to other people, and whether they make us more capable of confronting suffering or merely more comfortable explaining it away.

If our convictions make us indifferent to the suffering of strangers, there is something deeply wrong with the way we have constructed our moral world. If our devotion makes us less curious, less compassionate, and more eager to punish dissent, then we ought to have the courage to examine that devotion. And if we invoke the sacred to protect the powerful from criticism, perhaps the sacred is not the only thing that deserves our scrutiny.

I do not expect a book written by a twentieth century philosopher to solve the political and economic crises of the twenty first century. That would be asking rather a lot of a dead man, even one as formidable as Russell. Nor do I expect everyone to arrive at the same conclusions after reading him. In fact, a world in which everyone read Russell and emerged agreeing with Russell would be rather disappointing.

What I do hope is that more people might recover the habit of thinking before declaring, questioning before condemning, and distinguishing evidence from whatever happens to flatter their prejudices. We need less certainty masquerading as wisdom and more willingness to sit with difficult questions. We need fewer people who believe that belonging to the right community absolves them of the responsibility to think, and more people who understand that intellectual honesty begins with the possibility that they might be wrong.

Above all, we need to stop treating disagreement as a threat to our existence. A society in which every challenge to an inherited belief is interpreted as an attack on one's identity has very little room left for genuine inquiry. It can produce slogans, outrage, loyalty tests, and an impressive number of people shouting simultaneously. What it struggles to produce is understanding.

So, yes, I recommend Russell on Religion. Read it in sections, if that is how your time permits. Read the arguments that infuriate you. Read the ones that seem persuasive. Then read them again when you are less certain of yourself. The collection is particularly valuable because it allows us to follow Russell's changing thought rather than encounter him as a collection of quotable one liners.

And perhaps, while reading, spare a thought for the possibility that the person forwarding the next absurd WhatsApp message is not necessarily beyond redemption. Though, in the interest of intellectual honesty, I reserve the right to mute the group.

The world is already full of people who believe they possess the truth. What it desperately needs are more people willing to examine how they arrived at it.

That, at least, seems like a reasonable place to begin. Reading List

1. Why I Am Not a Christian — Bertrand Russell

2. The Antichrist — Friedrich Nietzsche

3. The Future of an Illusion — Sigmund Freud

4. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life — Émile Durkheim

5. The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere — Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and Cornel West

6. The Righteous Mind — Jonathan Haidt

7. The Age of Anger — Pankaj Mishra
   

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