Dear Fred
Thanks for your email.
I wish you a happy third day of Christmas - with or without 3 French hens!
Here is the Russell link. https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/12/how-to-grow-old-by-bertrand-russell.html
I have a curious "relationship" with Russell.
Although he is dismissive of religiosity, the rest of his thinking strikes me as remarkably sound.
Notably, Russell has helped me see the colossal downside - and intrinsic cruelty - of "eternal punishment."
At minimum, a loving God would insure that "the damned" "pass out of existence,"the "equivalent" of medically-induced coma.
But then, we humans are more merciful - more compassionate - than the "Christian" God of fire and brimstone.
What can the purpose of punishment be if it offers no hope... of hope?
The Thinking Housewife: "We Can Be Pretty Sure That Many Good People Are Roasting In Hell"
(Alan: Note that The Thinking Housewife is content to roast GOOD people in Hell.)
Bertrand Russell
Wikiquote
On Russell's Wikiquote page, I encourage you to key-word search "religion."
"I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have really no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life. I have not the parson's comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven.
My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter."
Greek Exercises (1888), written two days after his sixteenth birthday.
Trump's America Is A Deliberately Cruel Place & "Christian" "Conservatives" Are The Cruelest
Although the following quotation is not Russell's, it is pertinent.
Have you noticed that conservative Christians want "easy salvation" by "armchair" proclamation: "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior."
They call such salvation "salvation by the cross."
Why is it that Yeshua spent 3 years teaching-and-modeling "right attitude" and "right behavior" (to use Buddhist terminology), and only spend three hours on the cross?
But Lo!
Three years teaching-and-modeling mean NOTHING whereas "coming forward" at a "Billy Graham rally" to mouthe "the magic formula" means everything.
The formula washes them clean in "the blood of the Lamb" - once and for all!
"The Soul-Crushing Burden Of Billy Graham," The Rolling Stone
Here in The Bible Belt, your family tree may not fork, but you are "Saved!"
Christian Conservatism: The Saved, The Damned, The Rich, The Poor
"Has America Lost Its Mind?" 1A's Brilliant Interview With "Fantasyland's" Kurt Andersen
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
Televangelist Jim Bakker Resurrected: If This Doesn't Scare The Bejesus Out Of You, Repent For Your End Is Near!
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
Many Christians Live In An Unbreakable Bubble Of Biblical And Theological Dunderheadedness
"My Gripe With Christianity"
The Christian Doctrine Of Damnation... And The Destruction Of Christ-Spirit
The Christian Doctrine Of Damnation... And The Destruction Of Christ-Spirit
Compendium Of Best Pax Posts On Organized Religion And The Everyday Validation Of Violence
The Obsolescence Of God:
Good Religion And Bad
Most "Christians" of traditionally religious orientation are terrified of "eternal punishment" and find the simple expedient of "salvation assurance" -- "salvation by the cross" -- captivating by its simplicity and inter-relatedly by the need to do NOTHING but "proclaim."
In fact, not only do you do nothing in exchange for "Certain Salvation," you get to be cruel - and feel good about it!
Trump's America Is A Deliberately Cruel Place & "Christian" "Conservatives" Are The Cruelest
"The Short List" Of Best Trump Memes Created By "Pax On Both Houses"
Pax et amore
Alan
PS Here is how Christianity tries to combine "punishment" and "goodness."
In ancient Israel, the word for "hell" (within the Jewish "Jesus Sect") was "Gehenna" - Jerusalem's municipal dump, "the place where fires never went out."
I remember the town dump in Honeoye, New York (where my family spent summers), a dump that was caretaken-and-scavenged by two aging bachelor brothers living in an adjacent shack.
The Honeoye dump was, literally, the place where the fires never went out: mostly they emerged as smoke from subterranean fumaroles... but were "always" breaking out in fire - first here, then there.
Although the following article is ultimately a defense of "eternal punishment," it contains a remarkably thorough review of Gehenna in Old and New Testamental scripture.
On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 1:31 AM Fred Owens wrote:
This Bertrand Russell piece is quite profound....please send me a link
On Tuesday, December 25, 2018, Alan Archibald <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Marsh, Patrick and Steve,
You might enjoy this parody of "Away In A Manger." https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/12/away- in-manger-2018-parody.html Setting parody aside, check out Bruce Cockburn's "Christmas" album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzs-tXZqsv8 Bruce's self-composed Christmas song, "Shepherds," is one of my favorites."Cry Of A Tiny Baby" is another of Bruce's Christmas songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmZlYiMCvSc And although the following song by America's most (?) under-appreciated composer-musician, Tom Russell, is not a Christmas song, it comes close...
"California Snow"Wishing you and yours a Merry Christmas.Pax
Alan
On Sun, Dec 23, 2018 at 11:59 AM Marsh Hardy ARA/RISK <mhardy@ara.com> wrote:May be worth reading some or all aloud in a group.
“How to Grow Old” by Bertrand Russell
In spite of the title, this article will really be on how not to grow
old, which, at my time of life, is a much more important subject. My
first advice would be to choose your ancestors carefully. Although both
my parents died young, I have done well in this respect as regards my
other ancestors. My maternal grandfather, it is true, was cut off in the
flower of his youth at the age of sixty-seven, but my other three
grandparents all lived to be over eighty. Of remoter ancestors I can
only discover one who did not live to a great age, and he died of a
disease which is now rare, namely, having his head cut off. A
great-grandmother of mine, who was a friend of Gibbon, lived to the age
of ninety-two, and to her last day remained a terror to all her
descendants. My maternal grandmother, after having nine children who
survived, one who died in infancy, and many miscarriages, as soon as she
became a widow devoted herself to women’s higher education. She was one
of the founders of Girton College, and worked hard at opening the
medical profession to women. She used to tell of how she met in Italy an
elderly gentleman who was looking very sad. She asked him why he was so
melancholy and he said that he had just parted from his two
grandchildren. ‘Good gracious,’ she exclaimed, ‘I have seventy-two
grandchildren, and if I were sad each time I parted from one of them, I
should have a miserable existence!’ ‘Madre snaturale!,’ he replied. But
speaking as one of the seventy-two, I prefer her recipe. After the age
of eighty she found she had some difficulty in getting to sleep, so she
habitually spent the hours from midnight to 3 a.m. in reading popular
science. I do not believe that she ever had time to notice that she was
growing old. This, I think, is the proper recipe for remaining young. If
you have wide and keen interests and activities in which you can still
be effective, you will have no reason to think about the merely
statistical fact of the number of years you have already lived, still
less of the probable shortness of your future. As regards health, I have
nothing useful to say as I have little experience of illness. I eat and
drink whatever I like, and sleep when I cannot keep awake. I never do
anything whatever on the ground that it is good for health, though in
actual fact the things I like doing are mostly wholesome.
Psychologically there are two dangers to be guarded against in old age.
One of these is undue absorption in the past. It does not do to live in
memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends
who are dead. One’s thoughts must be directed to the future, and to
things about which there is something to be done. This is not always
easy; one’s own past is a gradually increasing weight. It is easy to
think to oneself that one’s emotions used to be more vivid than they
are, and one’s mind more keen. If this is true it should be forgotten,
and if it is forgotten it will probably not be true.
The other thing to be avoided is clinging to youth in the hope of
sucking vigour from its vitality. When your children are grown up they
want to live their own lives, and if you continue to be as interested in
them as you were when they were young, you are likely to become a burden
to them, unless they are unusually callous. I do not mean that one
should be without interest in them, but one’s interest should be
contemplative and, if possible, philanthropic, but not unduly emotional.
Animals become indifferent to their young as soon as their young can
look after themselves, but human beings, owing to the length of infancy,
find this difficult.
I think that a successful old age is easiest for those who have strong
impersonal interests involving appropriate activities. It is in this
sphere that long experience is really fruitful, and it is in this sphere
that the wisdom born of experience can be exercised without being
oppressive. It is no use telling grownup children not to make mistakes,
both because they will not believe you, and because mistakes are an
essential part of education. But if you are one of those who are
incapable of impersonal interests, you may find that your life will be
empty unless you concern yourself with your children and grandchildren.
In that case you must realise that while you can still render them
material services, such as making them an allowance or knitting them
jumpers, you must not expect that they will enjoy your company.
Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young,
there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to
fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in
the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has
to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and
has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is
somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it -so at least it
seems to me- is to make your interests gradually wider and more
impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life
becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human
existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained
within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over
waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the
waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break,
they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual
being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not
suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will
continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the
thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still
at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and
content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
[from “Portraits From Memory And Other Essays”]
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