Bertrand Arthur William Russell, OM, FRS (1872-1970)
3rd Earl Russell
1950 Nobel Laureate for Literature
Influential writer on politics, religion, logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics
(Wikimedia CC public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
A thought for the season\u00a0from the most prominent English-speaking atheist of the twentieth century:<\/p>\n
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That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man\u2019s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins \u2014 all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul\u2019s habitation henceforth be safely built.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nBertrand Russell, \u201cThe Free Man\u2019s Worship\u201d (1903)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 \u00a0 A thought for the season\u00a0from the most prominent English-speaking atheist of the twentieth century: \u00a0 That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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