My Personal Russell Paradox

 

"I can respect the men who argue that religion is true and therefore ought to be believed, but I can only feel profound moral reprobation for those who say that religion ought to be believed because it is useful, and that to ask whether it is true is a waste of time."

This quote by Bertrand Russell highlights his disdain for organized religion. Of course it was not so long ago that feudal kingdoms often used religion as a way of disuading the masses into accepting long term or short term contracts with the king or aristocracy, in return for protection from war or famine, one would just call upon the Pope in the holy see to arrange for all sorts of legal jurisdictions from marriage, deaths, births, transference of money during holy weeks and for special occasions, especially in the higher nobility. Many times, religion was used as a tool to declare Casus Belli upon other kingdoms or to arrange partnerships, whether royal or business related, one might wonder what Prof. Russell thought about science, Since during his time epistemology was going through all sorts of divisions and changes in its groundwork, and the positivism of Auguste Comte loomed large over the logical positivists of Vienna and London. However, if anything, Russell was a libertarian socialist, who did not believe that nations, which came from the liberal principles of the French revolution, after the kings had been disposed of, and led much of Europe on a conquest of reason. That being regarded, what do you think Russell might have harbored over the idea of lands governed by logical science might have looked like? Noting that much of nowadays culture has been sublimated by technology, with the idea of techno-automatons and learned AI taking the reigns of work and labor and leadership, the latter something I fear a great deal. If we end up being ruled by robots, we might not get to have a choice in which policies might get appointed, certain races and people (such as myself) would end up on the outskirts of the legal realm (Giorgio Agamben talks a great deal about this in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign And Bare Life). Extralegality, such as how involuntary celibates are being cast out left and right of society, which would cause the numbers of dissastified individuals to rise in number, would only spell doom for a society that would care to mold its values on science and technology, not only that but the lessening of freedoms for all people could be greatly reduced. I'm all for logical and nominal laws, but at the heart of these laws must be great humans, those with the ability to show care and concern for his lessers, not an AI which is alienated from the populace at large and has no idea what it might be like to be human. However I'm sure Prof. Russell wouldn't have wanted it this way, but swapping out religion for science, even using science as a mere tool, at least in Russell's narrow-focused humanitarian view, is not in any way a viable alternative. Nietzsche spoke out against both sides, and Nietzsche, who was indeed NOT admired by Russell, call unto questions whether Russell had ulterior motives to be skeptical of religion but not call out the intense advancements of his peers in Vienna. The inverse of one dogma begets another. 

    Of course there is no law stating that one can use science as a tool to further spirituality, in the ways the ancient writing systems of the Egyptians was used to spread the influence of paganism, the same way televangelists used the television to spread Christianity, where there is a will, there is way and using technology and science to further the spread of one's beliefs, by transcendental means, dialectically, can speed up the accumulation of something like, say, Jihad in the case of Islam where weapons were used to spread their religion globally. science can then as well be used as a means to bring about a revival of the "zeitgeist" in all corners of the earth. the more violent, the more public-eye-persona, the revival of the spectacle that Debord despised. online, in your face, in your space, worldwide. But if science is used simply for universal secular humanist means, it will be the highest stage of impiousness, kind of like how Mark David Chapman's "target" advocated for the same irreverent principles laid down by Russell and his contemporaries. never again.

                                                                                                    J./Adolf Stalin