As a Christian who has studied math and philosophy, I am quite familiar with Bertrand Russell's contributions to logic and philosophy, I am quite impressed with his brilliance. When I first got this book, I was afraid of what kind of powerful arguments he might present against my beliefs, instead I was shocked to find his arguments poorly constructed, his premises, shoddy, his logic full of holes. I expect much better from a man of his genius. It is quite obvious that his atheism wasn't based on a reasoned analysis of philosophy, a rigorous deduction from the evidence, rather, it was the result of a strong emotional bias against Christian ethics, particularly sexual ethics, period. A disappointment through and through. Whether you are atheist or theist, if you are looking for a good, through, reasoned arguments against God, you should look elsewhere than the writing of Bertrand Russell.

It appears in these selections that Russell was a very complex person who thought a great deal about religion. His views are not always consistent and they are pervaded by emotion. His general tendency is against religion. He especially hates Christianity as it has been practiced throughout history and the idea of Christian faith. He takes faith to be a set of related beliefs, on substantial issues, for which one has no good reasons. This selection is light reading, but it is too unfair to be used as an introduction to the philosophy of religion. Of course, this is one of the features of Russell's thought on religion that makes him psychologically interesting.

After reading 'Why I am not a christian', I was excited to find that there existed an even larger collection of Mr. Russells essays. Some of the essays in this book are already in 'Why I am not a christian', including that particular essay. The others I had not read before were informative, well-structured, and balanced. He was truly a man ahead of his time.

It's actually two books by two different authors. The last 100 pages consists of extracts from various articles, letters, and journal entries by Leibniz that Bertrand Russell put together to form a coherent statement (since Leibniz never actually wrote a whole book himself). The first 200 pages consists of Russell's analysis of the 100 pages of Leibniz's philosophy.

The Leibniz section is pretty straightforward and interesting. I read the book because I was curious about "monads", which are the metaphysical analog of mathematical points (well, sort of). Before Leibniz gets around to monads, he goes into his theory of predicates (every element of the universe is a predicate that goes toward describing ME), which I found pretty interesting. There's also some discussion of space and time that I liked. The last part of the Leibniz section contains some arguments for the existence of God, which is probably the weakest and least interesting part of his philosophy -- as Russell gleefully and exhaustively points out.

I didn't like the Russell section (2/3 of the book) much partly because he brings other philosophers like Hegel and Kant into the discussion (I'm not very familiar with either); and partly because he goes into such depth critiquing fine points in the Leibniz writings, that I completely lost interest in anything Russell has to say.

I think "Bert" is a brilliant man and a terrific author, but most (if not all) of the essays in this book are really dry and uninteresting. The best part of the book was Bertrand's discussion of what the word "should" means. He concludes that "should" in most instances mearly means that if you do x, someone specific would approve. For example, "you should be kind to others" means nothing more than "if you are kind to others, those people will experience a feeling of approval regarding your actions." Other than that, the book was pretty painful to read. I recommend Why I Am Not A Christian or Unpopular Essays instead. I give this book 2 stars because nobody should ever give Bertrand Russell one star (if you did, he would disapprove!)