[Caesar88]

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Russell may have been a very intelligent man, but I never got this quote of his:

"Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race."

"Fear is the parent of cruelty, therefore it is no wonder if religion and cruelty have gone hand-in-hand."

I never got the quote because I never had this fear he is talking about.

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This is starting to get off topic. This was a thread about the greatest people, not another place to dissect religion. However, I will help you with this.

The fear that he is talking about can be attributed to three things. The first is the God of the Old Testament. Although I'm not religious in any way I understand that this God was spiteful and vengeful, and gave us the term 'wrath of God.' Perhaps your idea of God is someone who is benevolent. However others who read these documents may come up with another view. Even those who believe in God disagree over what he is like.

The second aspect of this fear can be attributed to when and how you live. Man has only just started to live comfortably, in terms of how you live today. Back when we did not live so comfortably, the common people's only comfort was their religion. Many people lived under cruel dictatorships and suffered. Others still had to work extremely hard, much harder than we have to today. Comfort could not be found in this life, so it had to be based upon the next. The fear comes in when you realise that because you [censored] up one little thing, you won't be going to that next life. Today with our modern luxiouries this isn't so much of an issue, as most of our lives do not suck like this. But 200+ years ago it definitely was. Your church or state saying you weren't going to heaven would put a large amount of fear in you.

The third aspect of this fear is the concept of death. Many people cannot handle the idea of death being 'it,' and convert for this reason. Many others will convert on their deathbeds out of fear of everything ending. They do this not so much as a result of true belief, but as a result of their fears. It's like how your body reacts to a virus, it triggers the things it needs to get rid of it. The same can be said of deathbed conversions; people cannot mentally fathom what is about to happen so the body gives them emotional comfort by making them believe in something they did not up until then. This kind of fear can also affect religious people, but in a different way, in that fear of hell forces them to never do anything wrong. But I suspect that this fear is alot less common than anything previously stated here.

Again, however, this is not the right place to discuss this, I just wanted to show you something you could not understand.