Bertrand Russell on God & Religion

Wittgenstein's lectures on religious belief come to mind. I do wonder if Bertrand knew anything about the guy.

Bertrand keeps his eyes down and to the left 100 percent of the time while talking, which supposedly means he is 'talking to himself'. Like he is reassuring himself.

That aside, I've heard this language elsewhere. '(Certain)Religious people lie!' they claim. To a religious point of view, it is the only thing they are certain of. In fact, losing one's faith is seen as more profound than gaining one's.

I hope "Silence" will be a good flick.

Bertrand Russell was Wittgenstein's philosophy teacher.

Along with G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein's examiner for his Ph.D. dissertation: The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus at Cambridge University. Wittgenstein passed, and as the three of them walked out of the examination room together he was heard saying to Russell, "I am afraid you will never understand it".

Maybe I missed something, but I don't see how anything Russell said has anything to do with Wittgenstein :perplexed:

Russell had a lot to say about an entity he did not believe in namely; God

Russell did not say or believe that god is/was an entity at all.
Are you implying that, if we can talk about a described object then that object must exist??
That does not work for 'the present king of France' nor does it work for any 'god'.

There is no confirmed truth about the Christian or Islamic gods at all.
Indeed, because of the contradictions that have been asserted about these gods, their existence is impossible.

To exist is to have at least one confirmed truth about it.

imo, Religions are childish superstitions at best.

The interviewer was to the left, so that is why he looked to the left. But regardless of that, do you seriously imagine that the direction he is looking affects the truth or falsehood of what he is saying? Do you imagine that if a man looks down and to the left, he is a liar and wrong, and if he looks up and to the right, he is telling the truth?

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It is called a "red herring". Rather like talking about the direction he was looking, too.

We can expect, of course, that someone may wish to say, "but Wittgenstein wrote some things about religion." That, of course, is true. But so have a lot of other people, and merely mentioning their names does not provide any reason to believe anything. It is here being used to dismiss Russell without bothering to actually deal with anything he says.

Well, for the guy who once said Wittgenstein was the purest example of genius he had ever seen, he sure did miss out on all the things he said.

In that sense I can say Wittgenstein said some things on religion (and imply that Bertrand Russell should have heard).

The thing about the eyes was not to note he was lying, but that he was not thinking when he was speaking. But I guess one could take that from his writings as well. ;P

As to what Russell said, what can one say? That he was confident that there was no God?

Well, Russell never did surpass Pierce in logic, never mind Wittgenstein. What took Russell 42 steps in the logic of Pierce took Pierce 7 steps. Should we say Pierce was 6 times smarter?

Seems logical.

Wittgenstein thought much more deeply about religion than did Russell. But I think that was probably more a result of temperament than intelligence.

The end of my last post was supposed to be humorous. I would venture you need to hear what Russell thought about political situations.

I didn't understand your post and assume that it wasn't directed at me.

Russell's atheism is a reaction to institutionalised systems of beleaf (christianity in his case), and the harm they have caused to human progress. But I think it is outdated, since many people today chose freely to beleave or not to beleave according to their own expereance and morality. His positivism has influenced and helped many people to free themselves from the tyranny of religeous dogma but Russell has also led others to go overboard and embrace science and rationality as some sort of religion. Today we know it is our blind faith in science that has caused the mess we are all in today, (mass destruction, polution,etc.). He is the kind of atheist I compare to a child watching a movie and saying "it's not real blood, it's just paint...she's not really dead, she's an actress and is just pretending"... we will tell him, "just shut up and try to follow the story!"...Einstein had a better outlook on the subject, he didn't use logic all the time as if there is no other way to "grasp" the complexity of reality. I would say to Russell that science had to wait genetics to figure out how we make babies but humanity always "knew" the basics of reproduction though it lacked the technology to prove it. So sometimes we just can't wait for science to prove something, sometimes we must satisfy ourselves with intuition which is just another way of figuring things out. Today scientists are more humble, less arrogant and many refuse to discuss religion because it simply does not belong to the field of scientific inquiry. Gone are the days when faith is beleaved to be a scientific "sin".