A Free Man’s Worship

This educational video – a narrated visualization of Bertrand Russell’s most widely read essay, “A Free Man’s Worship,” – is intended for the handful of my followers who are interested in ideas.

You know who you are.

[NOTE that you will find at the end a helpful summary review in outline form, starting at 9:15.]

For years I taught a course, Great Human Questions, which included a unit surveying various approaches to the topic, “What Is the Meaning of Life?”. Readings were assigned from the perspectives of religious faith, Eastern philosophy – and, in Bertrand Russell’s example, humanism.

Russell’s unenviable task is to confront the following rather pessimistic world view suggested by modern science and find a way to still say “Yes” to life:

“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.“

In the wake of such bleakness does he succeed in injecting hope and even the possibility of beauty, meaning, and nobility of purpose into the human condition?

[NOTE: in this narration of eloquent excerpts from Russell’s essay I have attempted to match illuminating video clips, point by point.]

🙂 🙂 🙂