What I believe… 100 years later

Imagine I tell you that there’s a tiny teapot floating somewhere between Earth and Mars. ☕🪐

You can’t see it through a telescope, but I swear it’s there.

Now — can you prove me wrong? Not really. But that doesn’t mean you should believe me either!

Point is - the burden of proof is on the person making the wild claim — not on everyone else to disprove it.

So when someone says, “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist,” you can say —

“Sure, but you also can’t prove there’s no teapot orbiting Mars.”

This analogy is called Russell’s teapot and it was formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell  to remind us that Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, not blind faith — no matter how charming the teapot sounds.

Why does this still matter? Because a hundred years later, the world’s still full of teapots — invisible ones.

Political teapots, wellness teapots, conspiracy teapots, Instagram gurus with spiritual teapots — everyone’s selling certainty, nobody’s selling doubt.

And Russell reminds us: doubt is healthy. It’s the immune system of the mind.

Every century or so, someone tries to answer the biggest question in the simplest way: what do I actually believe?

Bertrand Russell did it exactly 100 years ago — and somehow, it still sounds like it was written for the internet age: full of certainty, sarcasm, and a tiny teapot floating through space.

The title What I Believe wasn’t even Russell’s idea. Forty years earlier, a Russian aristocrat — Leo Tolstoy — had already used it for his own spiritual manifesto.

Tolstoy wrote it after a nervous breakdown and a midlife crisis; Russell wrote his after a world war and a nervous breakdown about humanity itself.

Tolstoy’s What I Believe is a deeply religious, moral work — his personal reinterpretation of Christianity. He rejects church dogma and miracles but embraces Jesus’ ethical teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount: non-violence, love for enemies, refusal to judge or resist evil. It’s basically the foundation of his later pacifism and influence on Gandhi.

Bertrand Russell’s What I Believe (1925), written forty years later, is almost a mirror opposite: a secular, humanistic manifesto. Russell replaces faith with reason, revelation with science, and salvation with kindness and curiosity.

I have searched google to the page 100 but have not found any works that would explore this connection, though it’s unmistakingly there like two sides of the same coin.

By 1925, when Bertrand Russell wrote What I Believe, Tolstoy’s What I Believe (1884) was already famous in English translation. Russell, a voracious reader with a deep knowledge of moral philosophy, religion, and Russian literature, would have absolutely known Tolstoy’s work — especially since Tolstoy was one of the most influential moral thinkers of the late 19th century.

☦️ Tolstoy in his essay posits that “Faith in divine love is the only truth.

🧠 Russell argues, “Faith in reason and human kindness is enough.”

Reading both is like watching the 19th and 20th centuries argue over what makes a good life.

Tolstoy’s ideas would not prove very popular with the today’s modern western reader. Russell’s musings on the other hand are relevant even today.

The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a different aspect of Russell's beliefs.

Part 1: God and the Cosmic Mystery 🌌

Russell basically says, “Look, if there is a God up there, and He’s doing a terrible job at customer service.”

He talks about why bad things happen to good people, why religion often makes people fight instead of hug, and why using science and reason to understand the universe is way cooler than believing scary stories written a few thousand years ago.

He’s not mean about it—just kind of cheeky, like: “Don’t believe everything your grandma told you about thunder being angels bowling.” ⚡🎳

Part 2: Morality Without a Magic Book 💫

Then he asks: “If we don’t get our rules from heaven, how do we decide what’s right and wrong?”

His answer: Be kind, be curious, don’t be a jerk.

He builds an entire moral system out of empathy and happiness instead of commandments and guilt.

Basically, he’s the first philosopher to say, “Do good things because it makes life awesome—not because you’re scared of eternal detention.” 😇

Part 3: Humans, Wars, and How Not to Be Dumb About Power 🕊️

Here he turns into the world’s grumpiest peace activist.

He’s like: “Why do humans keep blowing each other up when we could just… not?”

He believes in democracy, freedom, education, and people actually thinking before yelling.

He wants a world where logic and kindness win over greed and war—and honestly, he’d probably have banned Twitter if he were alive today.

The book is a bit predictable but occasionally quite funny.

Take the bit where Russell basically roasts Jesus. 😅

He says, “Everyone keeps calling Christ the best human who ever lived — but, um, have you read what he actually said?”

Russell doesn’t hate Jesus, exactly — he just thinks the guy had anger issues. He’s like:

“Calling people ‘ye serpents’ because they didn’t agree with your sermon? Not exactly chill, my dude.” 🐍

Then he gets to the fig tree story — where Jesus curses a poor tree because it didn’t have fruit (even though it wasn’t fig season).

Russell reads that and goes, basically, “Wait. You smite a tree… for doing tree things?!” 🌳😳

He’s also weirded out that Jesus keeps saying he’ll come back soon — like, any minute now — and that he talks about hell.

Russell thinks a truly great person wouldn’t threaten eternal fire to make people behave. 🔥

But here’s the rub — Russell trashes religion with full confidence… and doesn’t really replace it with anything.

He doesn’t ask why people crave faith, or what hole it fills.

He just waves it off, like: “You don’t need all that. Think for yourself.”

So he’s essentially this brilliant, fearless thinker — but also kind of that snarky classmate who points out every flaw in your argument without saying what should happen instead.

And that’s what makes reading him fun: he’s a genius and a bit of a troublemaker at the same time.

What makes him still relevant is that his faith is in clear thinking itself.

He’s not trying to sell a system — he’s trying to keep you free from one.

That’s rare today, when everyone’s rushing to belong to some ideological team.

Russell’s world had trenches and telegrams; ours has algorithms and doomscrolling.

But the question’s the same: can reason, kindness, and a little humor keep us sane?

His answer was yes — and I think we still need to hear it.

💼 Three Career Lessons from Bertrand Russell (Who’d Probably Be Terrible on LinkedIn)

1. Question every teapot. ☕

In today’s corporate world, new belief systems drop faster than software updates.

One quarter it’s design thinking, next it’s AI-first culture, emotional intelligence training, or the squashed work from home revolution.

Each comes wrapped in a keynote, a glossy deck, and a promise to “transform how we work.”

Russell’s teapot is a perfect antidote: before you swallow an idea whole, ask for the evidence.

You don’t have to be cynical — just precise.

Does this principle actually improve decisions here, or is it another round of motivational theater?

Critical thinking isn’t rebellion; it’s responsibility.

Because progress isn’t built on blind agreement — it’s built on people brave enough to say, wait, does this make sense?

2. Think for yourself — especially inside systems. 🧠

Russell refused to belong to any camp, and that independence is what made him dangerous — and free.

In the workplace, the same rule applies: companies, industries, and even “movements” will try to tell you who you are and what matters.

You can play along — wear the lanyard, post the slogans — but don’t hand over your mind.

Independent thought doesn’t mean rebellion for its own sake; it means remembering that your judgment, not the algorithm’s, is your compass.

The people who rise the fastest are often the ones who quietly ask the questions no one else dares to ask.

3. Stay kind, stay rational, stay funny.

😄

Russell’s secret weapon wasn’t just logic — it was humor.

He believed reason without warmth turns you into a machine, and compassion without reason turns you into a mess.

In today’s world of performative outrage and 24/7 “hot takes,” calm intelligence is revolutionary.

Be the one who can defuse tension with a sentence, who can disagree without venom, who can think clearly while everyone else is yelling.

Kindness, clarity, and humor are not soft skills — they’re survival skills.

And if you’ve stayed with me this far, you probably don’t need pep talks or motivational wallpaper quotes.

You need conversations that make you think.

Because smart advice only works on people smart enough to recognize it —

and if you understood this blog entry, congratulations: you’re already in that club.

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