Listen to ‘Why I Am Not a Christian,’ Bertrand Russell’s Powerful Critique of Religion (1927)

The Eng­lish logi­cian and philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell was con­vinced that the reli­gions of the world are not mere­ly untrue, but that they do griev­ous harm to peo­ple. That con­vic­tion is very much in evi­dence in his 1927 speech, “Why I Am Not a Chris­t­ian,” read here in its com­plete form by the British actor Ter­rence Hardi­man.

Rus­sell begins by estab­lish­ing a very gen­er­al and inclu­sive def­i­n­i­tion of the term “Chris­t­ian.” A Chris­t­ian, for the pur­pos­es of Rus­sel­l’s argu­ment, is one who believes in God and immor­tal­i­ty and also in Christ. “I think you must have at the very low­est a belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wis­est of men,” says Rus­sell. “If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not believe you have any right to call your­self a Chris­t­ian.”

Begin­ning with the belief in God, Rus­sell points out the log­i­cal fal­lac­i­es in sev­er­al of the most pop­u­lar argu­ments for the exis­tence of God, start­ing with the ear­ly ratio­nal argu­ments and mov­ing along what he sees as the “intel­lec­tu­al descent” of Chris­t­ian apolo­get­ics to some of the more recent argu­ments that have “become less respectable intel­lec­tu­al­ly and more and more affect­ed by a kind of mor­al­iz­ing vague­ness.” Rus­sell then goes on to explain why Jesus, as depict­ed in the Gospels, has nei­ther superla­tive wis­dom nor superla­tive good­ness. Although Rus­sell grants Christ “a very high degree of moral good­ness,” he asserts that there have been wis­er and bet­ter men.

The speech was pub­lished in 1957 in the book Why I am Not a Chris­t­ian and Oth­er Essays on Reli­gion and Relat­ed Sub­jects. The text is avail­able online, and you can click here to open it in a new win­dow. This record­ing will be added to our Free Audio Books col­lec­tion. Although Rus­sell is address­ing the major­i­ty reli­gion of his own coun­try, he is equal­ly crit­i­cal of all reli­gions. He leaves off with these words:

The whole con­cep­tion of God is a con­cep­tion derived from the ancient Ori­en­tal despo­tisms. It is a con­cep­tion quite unwor­thy of free men. When you hear peo­ple in church debas­ing them­selves and say­ing that they are mis­er­able sin­ners, and all the rest of it, it seems con­temptible and not wor­thy of self-respect­ing human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be bet­ter than what these oth­ers have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowl­edge, kind­li­ness, and courage; it does not need a regret­ful han­ker­ing after the past or a fet­ter­ing of the free intel­li­gence by the words uttered long ago by igno­rant men. It needs a fear­less out­look and free intel­li­gence. It needs hope for the future, not look­ing back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far sur­passed by the future that our intel­li­gence can cre­ate.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

Face to Face with Bertrand Rus­sell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish’

Bertrand Rus­sell and F.C. Cople­ston Debate the Exis­tence of God, 1948

Bertrand Rus­sel­l’s ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty: The Clas­sic Intro­duc­tion to Ein­stein

J.R.R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952)

Hav­ing not seen the first install­ment of Peter Jackson’s The Hob­bit tril­o­gy, I am required to with­hold judg­ment. As a Tolkien read­er from the first time I could strug­gle through the prose, I’ll admit, I’ve been on ten­ter­hooks (and not all reviews fill me with hope). In any case, I plan, like many a fan, to re-read Tolkien’s fairy tale nov­el before see­ing Jack­son’s film. It was my first expo­sure to Tolkien, and the per­fect book for a young read­er ready to dive into moral com­plex­i­ty and a ful­ly-real­ized fic­tion­al world.

And what bet­ter guide could there be through The Hob­bit than Tolkien him­self, read­ing (above) from the 1937 work? In this 1952 record­ing in two parts (part 2 is below), the ven­er­a­ble fan­ta­sist and schol­ar reads from his own work for the first time on tape. Some duti­ful fan has added a back­ground score and a slideshow of images of the author, as well as artists’ ren­der­ings of his char­ac­ters (includ­ing stills from Jackson’s Rings films).

Tolkien begins with a pas­sage that first describes the crea­ture Gol­lum; lis­ten­ing to this descrip­tion again, I am struck by how much dif­fer­ent­ly I imag­ined him when I first read the book. No doubt Andy Serkis deserves all the praise for his por­tray­al, but the Gol­lum of The Hob­bit seems some­how so much hoari­er and more mon­strous than the slip­pery crea­ture in Peter Jackson’s films. This is a minor point and not a crit­i­cism, but per­haps a com­ment on how nec­es­sary it is to return to the source of a myth­ic world as rich as Tolkien’s, even, or espe­cial­ly, when it’s been so well-real­ized in oth­er media. No one, after all, knows Mid­dle Earth bet­ter than its cre­ator.

These read­ings were part of a much longer record­ing ses­sion, dur­ing which Tolkien also read (and sang!) exten­sive­ly from The Lord of the Rings. A YouTube user has col­lect­ed, in sev­er­al parts, a radio broad­cast of that full ses­sion here, and it’s cer­tain­ly worth your time to lis­ten to it all the way through. It’s also worth know­ing the neat con­text of the record­ing. Here’s the text that accom­pa­nies the video on YouTube:

When Tolkien vis­it­ed a friend in August of 1952 to retrieve a man­u­script of The Lord of the Rings, he was shown a “tape recorder”. Hav­ing nev­er seen one before, he asked how it worked and was then delight­ed to have his voice record­ed and hear him­self played back for the first time. His friend then asked him to read from The Hob­bit, and Tolkien did so in this one incred­i­ble take.

Also, it may inter­est you to know what Tolkien’s posthu­mous edi­tor, his youngest son Christo­pher, thinks of the adap­ta­tions of his dad’s beloved books, among many oth­er things Mid­dle Earth. Read Christo­pher Tolkien’s first press inter­view in forty years here, and watch him below read­ing the end­ing of the Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio books from Audible.com–including, for exam­ple The Hob­bit? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Lis­ten to J.R.R. Tolkien Read Poems from The Fel­low­ship of the Ring, in Elvish and Eng­lish (1952)

Down­load Eight Free Lec­tures on The Hob­bit by “The Tolkien Pro­fes­sor,” Corey Olsen

Free Audio: Down­load the Com­plete Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia by C.S. Lewis

Fan­tas­tic Footage of J.R.R. Tolkien in 1968

500 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Josh Jones is a writer and schol­ar cur­rent­ly com­plet­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion on land­scape, lit­er­a­ture, and labor.

Fill Your New Kindle, iPad, iPhone with Free eBooks, Movies, Audio Books, Online Courses & More

San­ta left a new Kin­dle, iPad or oth­er media play­er under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intel­li­gent media — great books, movies, cours­es, and all of the rest. And if you did­n’t get a new gad­get, fear not. You can access all of these mate­ri­als on the good old fash­ioned com­put­er. Here we go:

Free eBooks: You have always want­ed to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks col­lec­tion you will find 375 great works by some clas­sic writ­ers (Dick­ens, Dos­to­evsky, Shake­speare and Tol­stoy) and con­tem­po­rary writ­ers (F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asi­mov, and Kurt Von­negut). The col­lec­tion also gives you access to the 51-vol­ume Har­vard Clas­sics.

If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the down­load process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kin­dle and Nook users will gen­er­al­ly want to click the “Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats links” to down­load ebook files, but we’d sug­gest watch­ing these instruc­tion­al videos (Kin­dle –Nook) before­hand.

Free Audio Books: What bet­ter way to spend your free time than lis­ten­ing to some of the great­est books ever writ­ten? This page con­tains a vast num­ber of free audio books, includ­ing works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writ­ers — Ita­lo Calvi­no, Vladimir Nabokov, Ray­mond Carv­er, etc. You can down­load these clas­sic books straight to your gagdets, then lis­ten as you go.

[Note: If you’re look­ing for a con­tem­po­rary book, you can down­load one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audi­ble’s no-strings-attached deal here.]

Free Online Cours­es: This list brings togeth­er over 600 free online cours­es from lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, UC Berke­ley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged cours­es range across all dis­ci­plines — his­to­ryphysicsphi­los­o­phypsy­chol­o­gy and beyond. Most all of these cours­es are avail­able in audio, and rough­ly 75% are avail­able in video. You can’t receive cred­its or cer­tifi­cates for these cours­es (click here for cours­es that do offer cer­tifi­cates. But the amount of per­son­al enrich­ment you will derive is immea­sur­able.

Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 500 great movies. The col­lec­tion hosts many clas­sics, west­erns, indies, doc­u­men­taries, silent films and film noir favorites. It fea­tures work by some of our great direc­tors (Alfred Hitch­cock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stan­ley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and per­for­mances by cin­e­ma leg­ends: John Wayne, Jack Nichol­son, Audrey Hep­burn, Char­lie Chap­lin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thou­sands of hours of cin­e­ma bliss.

Free Lan­guage Lessons: Per­haps learn­ing a new lan­guage is high on your list of 2013 New Year’s res­o­lu­tions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 lan­guages, includ­ing Span­ish, French, Ital­ian, Man­darin, Eng­lish, Russ­ian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yid­dish and Esperan­to. These lessons are all free and ready to down­load.

Free Text­books: And one last item for the life­long learn­ers among you. We have scoured the web and pulled togeth­er a list of 150 Free Text­books. It’s a great resource par­tic­u­lar­ly if you’re look­ing to learn math, com­put­er sci­ence or physics on your own. There might be a dia­mond in the rough here for you.

Thank San­ta, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device.…

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Orson Welles Reads ‘The Secret Sharer,’ by Joseph Conrad

Today is the birth­day of the writer Joseph Con­rad. He was born Józef Teodor Kon­rad Korzniows­ki on Decem­ber 3, 1857 in Berdichev, in the Pol­ish Ukraine. As a young man he trav­eled the world as a mer­chant sail­er, an expe­ri­ence that fur­nished mate­r­i­al and inspi­ra­tion for his Eng­lish-lan­guage books, which include such clas­sics as Nos­tro­mo, Lord Jim and Heart of Dark­ness.

To mark the occa­sion we bring you a record­ing of Orson Welles read­ing (lis­ten to it here) Con­rad’s short sto­ry “The Secret Shar­er” in 1985 as one of his selec­tions for The Orson Welles Library. “I think I’m made for Con­rad,” Welles once said. “I think every Con­rad sto­ry is a movie.” Con­rad wrote “The Secret Shar­er” in 1909. The sto­ry is told by the cap­tain of a ship. One night, while on watch in waters near the Gulf of Siam, the cap­tain dis­cov­ers a naked swim­mer cling­ing des­per­ate­ly to the side of the ship. He helps the mys­te­ri­ous man aboard and learns his sto­ry. The cap­tain is then faced with a dilem­ma: Should he help the man, or turn him over to the peo­ple who are look­ing for him?

You can find “The Secret Shar­er” and oth­er works by Joseph Con­rad in our col­lec­tions of  Free Audio Books and Free eBooks. And for more read­ings by Welles, please see our meta post: Orson Welles Nar­rates Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry, Kafka’s Para­ble, and Free­dom Riv­er.

h/t The Writer’s Almanac

Download a Free, New Halloween Story by Neil Gaiman (and Help Charities Along the Way)

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured the free, down­load­able sto­ries and nov­els by author Neil Gaiman avail­able online in video, audio, and text for­mat. This is a won­der­ful thing, to be sure; Gaiman’s a fan­tas­tic writer of dark fan­ta­sy for chil­dren and adults alike, so who bet­ter to inau­gu­rate this year’s Hal­loween cel­e­bra­tions with a new free sto­ry, avail­able for down­load through Audible.com and read by Neil him­self?

Gaiman’s new sto­ry, enti­tled “Click-Clack the Rat­tle­bag,” is creepy, for sure, but that’s all I’m going say about it. You’ll need to down­load it your­self to find out more, and you real­ly should because for every down­load of the sto­ry, Audi­ble has agreed to donate a dol­lar to one of two char­i­ties that Neil has chosen—one for the U.S. and one for the U.K.. Gaiman has more infor­ma­tion on his per­son­al web­site, where he describes his nego­ti­a­tions with Audi­ble in set­ting up the dona­tions and the process of record­ing the sto­ry. He writes:

The sto­ry is unpub­lished (it will be pub­lished in a forth­com­ing anthol­o­gy called Impos­si­ble Mon­sters, edit­ed by Kasey Lans­dale and com­ing out from Sub­ter­ranean Press). It’s fun­ny, a lit­tle bit, and it’s scary, just enough for Hal­lowe’en, I hope.

Gaiman also has a few requests: first, you need to down­load the sto­ry by Hal­loween in order to make the dona­tion; sec­ond, please don’t give the sto­ry away—encourage peo­ple to go down­load it for them­selves; and last­ly, “wait to lis­ten to it until after dark.” Atmos­phere mat­ters.

You do not need an Audi­ble account to down­load the sto­ry, but you do need to give them your email address to prove you’re a human. U.S. read­ers should go to www.audible.com/ScareUs and U.K. read­ers to www.audible.co.uk/ScareUs. (Gaiman pro­vides no instruc­tions for read­ers in oth­er coun­tries; I sup­pose they could go to either site). So don’t wait—help Audi­ble raise mon­ey for some wor­thy edu­ca­tion­al char­i­ties and get in the spir­it with some great new fic­tion from one of the most imag­i­na­tive writ­ers work­ing today. Final­ly, if you’re look­ing for more scary reads this Hal­loween, down­load Gaiman’s “All Hal­low’s Read” book rec­om­men­da­tions in a .pdf.

Note: Do you want to lis­ten to oth­er free audio books by Neil Gaiman? Just head over to Audible.com and reg­is­ter for a 30-day free tri­al. You can down­load any audio­book for free. Then, when the tri­al is over, you can con­tin­ue your Audi­ble sub­scrip­tion, or can­cel it, and still keep the audio book. The choice is entire­ly yours. And, in full dis­clo­sure, let me tell you that we have a nice arrange­ment with Audi­ble. When­ev­er some­one signs up for a free tri­al, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Final­ly, we also sug­gest that you explore our col­lec­tion of 450 Free Audio Books. It’s loaded with great clas­sics.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Hear Paul Auster Read the Entirety of The Red Notebook, an Early Collection of Stories

Nov­el­ist, screen­writer, poet, and trans­la­tor Paul Auster has carved out a place for him­self over the past sev­er­al decades as a decid­ed­ly writer’s writer, a Brook­lyn Borges of a sort, whose metafic­tion­al tales are often intri­cate­ly con­struct­ed sto­ries with­in sto­ries (with­in sto­ries). Auster is also known for writ­ing and co-direct­ing (with Wayne Wang) 1995 sleep­er indie hit Smoke, a film about the denizens of a Brook­lyn cig­ar shop. As with much of Auster’s fic­tion, a cen­tral char­ac­ter in Smoke is a bro­ken-heart­ed, soli­tary writer (played by William Hurt). Auster’s 2002 nov­el The Book of Illu­sions is cen­tered around a sim­i­lar char­ac­ter, a writer deep in mourn­ing. On April 11, 2001, Auster stopped by the Kel­ly Writ­ers House at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia to give a read­ing from The Book of Illu­sions. Below, you can hear him read the first two pages of the nov­el:

The com­plete UPenn event, includ­ing intro­duc­tion and a lengthy read­ing from the sec­ond chap­ter is avail­able here.

Penn Sound, which hosts the above read­ing, also has audio of Auster read­ing the entire­ly of an ear­ly col­lec­tion of sto­ries, The Red Note­book: True Sto­ries, at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Buf­fa­lo in April of 1995. Auster has argued that fic­tion is “mag­nif­i­cent­ly use­less,” but valu­able nonethe­less for the joy it brings both writ­ers and read­ers. In The Red Note­book he nar­rates what he claims are true events from his life. The col­lec­tion is divid­ed into four short sec­tions: “The Red Note­book,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” “Acci­dent Report,” and, the final nar­ra­tive, “Why Write?” His answers to this final question–whether they’re real­ly “true” or just mag­nif­i­cent­ly use­less inventions–show us sur­pris­ing coin­ci­dences and odd pat­terns in the seem­ing­ly ran­dom busi­ness of dai­ly life. Lis­ten to the first install­ment below. You can find the com­plete audio, with intro­duc­tion by Robert Cree­ley, here.

Penn Sound is a “cen­ter for pro­grams in con­tem­po­rary writ­ing” at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia and fea­tures a large archive of record­ed audio and video read­ings and dis­cus­sions on con­tem­po­rary poet­ry, fic­tion, and more.

The read­ing of The Red Note­book appears in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads From Shakespeare’s Othello (c.1940)

When F. Scott Fitzger­ald died in 1940, his New York Times obit­u­ary claimed, “the promise of his bril­liant career was nev­er ful­filled.” This is a sen­tence that may puz­zle mod­ern-day lovers of Fitzgerald’s endur­ing­ly-rel­e­vant fic­tion, but it was the judg­ment of the time on the exhaust­ed, alco­holic writer’s career. And it was a judg­ment he often applied to him­self, as he demon­strat­ed pub­licly in his 1936 essay “The Crack-Up,” about his depres­sion. Reduced at the end of his life to writ­ing film scripts for mon­ey, a task he found degrad­ing for a “suc­cess­ful lit­er­ary man” such as him­self, Fitzger­ald also, at some time near his final year, made record­ings of him­self read­ing the work of Shake­speare, Keats, and oth­ers, pre­sum­ably also for mon­ey, though it’s not exact­ly clear who pro­duced the record­ings or why.

In the first video (above), lis­ten to Fitzger­ald deliv­er a dig­ni­fied read­ing of Othello’s speech to the Venet­ian Sen­a­tors from Act 1, Scene 3 of Oth­el­lo. Fitzger­ald stum­bles and slurs occa­sion­al­ly, and the speech may in fact be com­posed of sev­er­al dif­fer­ent takes edit­ed togeth­er, sug­gest­ing that he may have had dif­fi­cul­ty mak­ing it through. Nonethe­less, his voice is seduc­tive and sonorous; he reads the speech as a lit­er­ary mono­logue, rather than a dec­la­ra­tion. Hear more of him below, read­ing an edit­ed ver­sion of John Masefield’s “On Grow­ing Old,” a poem which may have had par­tic­u­lar poignan­cy to the man who wrote in 1936, “of course all life is in a process of break­ing down.” But even in decline, Fitzger­ald was worth lis­ten­ing to. You can find major works by F. Scott Fitzger­ald in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

F. Scott Fitzger­ald Cre­ates a List of 22 Essen­tial Books, 1936

Sev­en Tips From F. Scott Fitzger­ald on How to Write Fic­tion

Rare Footage of Scott and Zel­da Fitzger­ald From the 1920s

The Moby Dick Big Read: Tilda Swinton & Others Read a Chapter a Day from the Great American Novel

“Moby-Dick is the great Amer­i­can nov­el. But it is also the great unread Amer­i­can nov­el. Sprawl­ing, mag­nif­i­cent, deliri­ous­ly digres­sive, it stands over and above all oth­er works of fic­tion, since it is bare­ly a work of fic­tion itself. Rather, it is an explo­sive expo­si­tion of one man’s inves­ti­ga­tion into the world of the whale, and the way humans have relat­ed to it. Yet it is so much more than that.”

That’s how Ply­mouth Uni­ver­si­ty intro­duces Her­man Melville’s clas­sic tale from 1851. And it’s what sets the stage for their web project launched ear­li­er this week. It’s called The Moby Dick Big Read, and it fea­tures celebri­ties and less­er known fig­ures read­ing all 135 chap­ters from Moby Dick — chap­ters that you can start down­load­ing (as free audio files) on a rolling, dai­ly basis. Find them on iTunesSound­cloud, RSS Feed, or the Big Read web site itself.

The project start­ed with the first chap­ters being read by Til­da Swin­ton (Chap­ter 1), Cap­tain R.N. Hone (Chap­ter 2), Nigel Williams (Chap­ter 3), Caleb Crain (Chap­ter 4), Musa Okwon­ga (Chap­ter 5), and Mary Nor­ris (Chap­ter 6). John Waters, Stephen Fry, Simon Cal­low and even Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron will read future chap­ters, which often find them­selves accom­pa­nied by con­tem­po­rary art­work inspired by the nov­el.

If you want to read the nov­el as you go along, find the text in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks. We also have ver­sions read by one nar­ra­tor in our Free Audio Books col­lec­tion. Til­da Swin­ton’s nar­ra­tion of Chap­ter 1 appears right below:

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