Friday 16 September 2011

There is a God: Flew

Time Magazine in April of 1980 wrote
"In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anyone would have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback. Most intriguingly this is happening... in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers."


Katharine Tait (Bertrand Russell's daughter) writes in 'My Father, Bertrand Russell':
"I would have liked to convince my father that I had found what he had been looking for, the ineffable something he had longed for all his life. I would have liked to persuade him that the search for God does not have to be vain. But it was hopeless. He had known too many blind Christians, bleak moralists who sucked the joy from life and persecuted their opponents; he would never have been able to see the truth they were hiding."

She goes on to say:
"My father's whole life was a search for God... Somewhere at the back of my father's mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul, there was an empty space that had once been filled by God, and he never found anything else to put in it. He had the ghost like feeling of not belonging, of having no home in this world."


In a poignant passage, Russell once said:
"Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached."


The excesses and atrocities of organized religion have no bearing whatsoever on the existence of God, just as the threat of nuclear proliferation has no bearing on the question of whether E=mc2

Socrates in the Republic is quoted by Plato as saying
'We must follow the argument wherever it may lead.'

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