The Dignity of Atheism

I recently read an essay: ‘The Indignity of Atheism.” Obviously the
author, (Rabbi Avi Shafron) never properly read the bible or read
any of the works written by Bertrand Russell - mathematician Logician,
philosopher, Noel Prize winner, and a world famous atheist.

Here’s Bertrand Russell’s introductory remarks to his autobiography:

What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my
ife: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable
pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds,
have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great
ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so
great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for
a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves
loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering
consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold
unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in
the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring
vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what
I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is
what - at last - I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to
understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars
shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which
number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I
have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward
the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries
of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured
by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the
whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what
human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot,
and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly
live it again if the chance were offered me. Poch Suzara