BERTRAND RUSSELL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 379, 27 September 1946, Page 5

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Sir,-I think Russell’s "shocking fallacy" would be the approval of compulsory uniformity of doctrine. Perhaps G.H.D. has not given us enough of the context. All religious sects purport to make conviction a necessity of membership, a silly attempt, as no two organic

products are similar, no two leaves or sheep or persons or minds. This notion of conviction becomes farcical, and worse, when we note the frequency with which, in past ages, a conquered people would be given the choice of death or recanting, and the multitudes of the latter, received into the victor’s denomination and ignorant of the new articles of faith, would make conviction an absurdity. G.H.D. closes with a boost quite open to criticism. Dubbing Russell a prater he gives his assurance that our western love of liberty is "the fruit of an age-long acceptance of a Catholic dogma." This seems to me a good example of putting the cart’ before the horse. The dogma, by no means exclusive to the Roman Catholic faith, asserts that each has his own eternal destiny to be worked out by his freewill. As to "eternal," what proof is there that it is so? As to "destiny" should not this include the gene pattern, biological, antiCatholic, and anti-freewill? Or it may imply some final goal, determined (note the word and cut out freewill) by some supernatural power, whose relations with man would again demand the whole range of theology. Also the pretty picture of unrolling "destiny" would often be shattered by environmental trouble.

CRITIC

(Rangiora).