Thirty minutes with British philosopher, mathematician, Nobel winner and anti-nuclear activist Bertrand Russell, conducted by the BBC’s John Freeman in 1959. Russell was 86 years old when this was shot. The format of this program, Face to Face, is fascinating, almost like an interrogation, with lighting just as harsh. The camera zooms in on the subject and they rarely cut away.

Among other topics, the famously free-thinking Russell explains why he’s not a Christian, writing his own obituary, his childhood, how the beauty of the planet was being destroyed during his lifetime and how smoking (literally) saved his life.

At the end Freeman asks the great humanist, historian and thinker:

“Suppose, Lord Russell, this film were to be looked at by our descendants, like a Dead Sea scroll in a thousand years’ time. What would you think is worth telling that generation about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned from it?”

Lord Russell gives some very good advice:
 

Portrait of Lord Russell by Norman Rockwell

“Suppose, Lord Russell, this film were to be looked at by our descendants, like a Dead Sea scroll in a thousand years’ time. What would you think is worth telling that generation about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned from it?”

“I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.”

Lord Bertrand Russell’s famous (or infamous if you prefer) 1927 essay “Why I Am Not A Christian” is one of the “classics” of “atheist literature” and one that is still likely to be read to this very day by budding unbelievers trying to inch themselves out of the church pew (It was just such a rite of passage for me, a religious skeptic by the age of twelve).

Russell felt that religion itself was “principal enemy of moral progress.” Saying something like that took a lot of guts back them!

In part, due to his reputation as a “freethinker” and for his controversial positions on matters of sexual morality, Lord Russell, who is today regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest minds and humanitarian activists, was judicially declared “unfit” to teach philosophy at the College of the City of New York in 1940. The great philosopher was defended by a host of intellectuals, including John Dewey and Albert Einstein (Einstein’s famous line that “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds ... ” came from his open letter in support of Lord Russell).

In the clip below, taken from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s archives, Bertrand Russell gives a short but sweet answer to the question he posed himself over 80 years ago, in what is probably today his best-known popular work.
 

 
Happy Easter!