Bertrand Russell on The problem of hell

In Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), Bertrand Russell set out what is still one of the sharpest statements of the problem of hell in modern philosophy. For Russell, the doctrine was not a peripheral theological detail but a direct moral indictment of the Christian God — and, more provocatively, of Christ himself. If Jesus genuinely taught eternal conscious punishment, Russell argued, he could not be regarded as the highest exemplar of moral goodness.

Russell pressed the proportionality objection in its starkest form. No finite human life, however badly lived, could possibly merit infinite suffering. To threaten unending torment for temporal offences was, in his words, a doctrine of cruelty — one that had deformed the moral imagination of Western civilisation by persuading generations to accept as just a punishment that, applied by any human authority, would be recognised as monstrous.

He also objected to the effect of the doctrine on believers themselves. Russell believed that fear of hell produced not genuine virtue but a servile morality, in which people behaved well out of terror rather than conscience. A religion sustained by such threats, he argued, was corrosive to the very moral sense it claimed to uphold.