Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian: a book that changed me

In 1969 at the age of 17, after eight schooners of lager and a night of murderous vomiting following my final matriculation exam, I left my home in the New South Wales country and moved to a university hall of residence in the parental Gomorrah of Sydney. In the room opposite was an earnest man from Hong Kong, ten years my senior, who late at night would tap on my door to invite me to play chess and drink jasmine tea. He was doing a PhD on the mathematical philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and his room was full of books with titles that both frightened and excited me at the prospect of all I would need to know, now that overnight I was no longer a child. On the first night I entered his room the spine of one burnt into my head: Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian.

Such profanity promised to fit well with other unwritten books that swirled in my callow head: Why I no longer live with my parents; Things to do with naked girls; Mind-altering drugs for beginners. I asked if I could read it, and recall switching off my light at 3.30 am, drunk with excitement at the eloquent defilement that I’d just consumed. Not since I’d wolfed down Lady Chatterley’s lover in an afternoon at 13, after being handed it by a conspiratorial librarian with pearls and hair in a bun, had I had such joy from a book.

I’d been brought up in the high Anglican church and God had been a problem for me ever since I’d asked my parents at around ten, “If God made the world, who made God?” – something Russell now informed me was the naif’s way of phrasing the argument from first cause. The imperious Canon from our cathedral had been invited home for afternoon tea to plug the dyke of the boy’s worrying scepticism. Staring at me with that look, he’d said there was simply no need to keep on asking the question. It all just started with God. Sure . . . right, I thought. How puerile. Church for me had been the pageantry, the lusty singing on cold Sunday mornings, the scented mothers fussing with scones and jam after the service, but particularly the chance to pash choirgirls after practice on Thursday nights. I’d had little truck with the theology and the stuff about heaven seemed patent anthropocentric wish-fulfilment, clasped to the bosoms of the mostly aged parishioners who seemed determined to believe in it all.

The shackles of the afterworld fell off that night, and in rode the exhilarating awareness that gut-level scepticism with all sorts of comfort zones were likely to have whole tribes of authors out there brilliantly dashing the sacrosanct crockery onto the concrete of no-prisoners argument. Russell’s book was soon followed by Joachim Kahl’s The misery of Christianity: or a plea for a humanity without God. This was a catalogue of horrors wrought in the world in the name of religion, while championing the values that many religions wanted to claim as their own. Jean Paul Sartre’s essay Existentialism and humanism consolidated the rift while securing the importance of taking responsibility for your beliefs and values. As an undergraduate, it also gave me a French philosophical badge I could wear along with my pretentious Gitanes cigarettes and taste in excruciating films by Bresson, Renoir, Resnais and Truffaut.

Looking back, Russell’s book and much of what I learnt about his life embodied two of the most important things in my life today: passion for justice and intellectual scepticism. It’ll be in my own 17-year-old’s Christmas stocking this year.