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Christian and Buddhist hypocrisy — Bertrand Russell (1930)


“The Buddha was amiable and enlightened; on his death-bed he laughed at his disciples for supposing that he was immortal. But the Buddhist priesthood, as it exists, for example, in Tibet, has been obscurantist, tyrannous, and cruel in the highest degree. There is nothing accidental about this difference between a religion and its founder. As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress.

What is true of Buddhism is equally true of Christianity. Religions may owe their origin to teachers with strong individual convictions, but these teachers have seldom had much influence upon the Churches and Temples that they founded, whereas these organisations have had enormous influence upon the communities in which they flourished. To take the case that is of most interest to members of Western civilization: the teaching of Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians. The most important thing about Christianity, from a social and historical point of view, is not Christ, but the Church, and if we are to judge of Christianity as a social force, we must not go to the Gospels for our material. Christ taught that you should give your goods to the poor, that you should not fight, that you should not go to church, and that you should not punish adultery. Neither Catholics nor Protestants have shown any strong desire to follow his teaching in any of these respects.“

— Bertrand Russell, Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? (1930)


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