Russell on Fideistic Faith: Pusillanimous and sniveling?

A redated post. 

There is something pusillanimous and sniveling about this point of view, that makes me scarcely able to consider it with patience. To refuse to face facts merely because they are unpleasant is considered the mark of a weak character, except in the sphere of religion. I do not see how it can be ignoble to yield to the tyranny of fear in all terrestrial matters, but noble and virtuous to do the same things where God and the future life are concerned.

Bertrand Russell, The Value of Free Thought (1944).

Lowder's Is "Freethinker" Synonymous with Nontheist?

A redated post.

Nominating oneself for intellectual sainthood

A redated post. 

One feature of freethought literature that has always annoyed me is the way in which nonbelievers tend to nominate themselves for intellectual sainthood. This is something I noticed going all the way back to reading Russell's "The Value of Free Thought," an essay that, in one sense, has influenced me more than any other piece of philosophy or theology that I have ever read. I have spent a lifetime working hard at being intellectually honest, with mixed results. Russell promises that you can be a free thinker if you just liberate yourself from the force of tradition and the tyranny of your passions, but from what I read of Russell's life, he wouldn't have been happy on Vulcan. "I thank God (figuratively, of course) that I am not as other men. I apportion my beliefs to the evidence."

It is all well and good to point out the emotional underpinnings of religous belief. But to suggest that unbelief has no emotional underpinnings is to indulge in a massive self-deception. This links to Telic Thoughts discussion of P. Z. Myers.