A book that changed me: Why I am not a Christian
Authors: Simon Chapman
Journal: BMJ (2000)

Bertrand Russell

Routledge, £9.99, pp 208

ISBN 0 415 07918 7

In 1969, at the age of 17, and after eight schooners of lager and a night of murderous vomiting to celebrate my final matriculation exam, I left my home in rural New South Wales and moved to a university hall of residence in the parental Gomorrah of Sydney. In the room opposite me was an earnest man from Hong Kong, 10 years my senior, who late at night would tap on my door to invite me to play chess and drink jasmine tea. He was studying for a PhD on the mathematical philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz, 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 title of one burnt into my brain—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 I 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 the age of 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, at about age 10, had asked my parents, “If God made the world, who made God?”—something that Russell now informed me was the naif's way of phrasing the argument from first cause. The imperious canon from our cathedral was invited home for afternoon tea to plug the dyke of the boy's worrying scepticism: staring at me with that look, he said there was simply no need to keep on asking the question—it all just started with God. “Sure . . . right,” I thought. 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 especially 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 my gut level scepticism in fact had whole tribes of authors to support it. Russell's book was soon followed by Joachim Kahl's The Misery of Christianity: Or a Plea for a Humanity Without God. This catalogued the horrors wrought 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. It also gave me a French philosophical badge that I wore as an undergraduate, along with my pretentious Gitanes cigarettes and taste in excruciating films by Bresson, Renoir, Resnais, and Truffaut.

Russell's book, and much of what I learnt about his life, embodied two of the most important things in my later life—passion for justice and intellectual scepticism. It'll be in my own 17 year old's Christmas stocking this year.