Harmfulness of Fanatical Creeds
Bertrand Russell in his essay "Science and Values" says that all fanatical creeds are harmful to mankind. The desire for a fanatical creed is one of the greatest evils in human history. The examples of fanatical creeds are: "All Catholics will go to Hell" as said by the Protestants and "All Protestants will go to Hell" as asserted by the Catholics; "All Muslims are infidels" as said by the Christians and "All Christians are infidels" as alleged by the Muslims; "All Jews belong to the worst race on earth" as claimed by the German Nazis while "All Jews are the salt of the earth as professed by the Jews.
Such fanatical creeds have caused nothing but bloodshed and massacre. This has happened in its worst shape in the late Roman Empire whose climax turned into a permanent downfall in 476 AD. Next the same ugly situation arose in the Renaissance of the 16th century. The fanatical creeds of Plotinus took their origin in Plato's utopia of eternal world. The worshipers of Mithra founded their fanatical creeds in a solar paradise. The early Christians even started persecuting each other for minor deviations of their fanatical creeds. The supporters of Trotsky founded their fanatical creeds in the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 for the forcible enforcement of communism. All these totally different fanatical creeds of Christians Catholicism and Russian Communism have been claiming heavenly salvation at the cost of earthly salvation.
However, science on the other hand aims at the spread of earthly salvation on the condition of all kinds of tolerance for each other.
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