Throughout the long period of religious doubt, I had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual loss of belief, but when the process was completed, I found to my surprise that I was quite glad to be done with the whole subject. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, chap. I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation or creed.
I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.