De La Fumisterie Intellectuelle by Bertrand Russell.

 What a wonderful, sunny and funny book is De La Fumisterie Intellectuelle

by Bertrand Russell. One of my favorite thinkers, I started to read him during my teeenage age. With great humor, passion and let me add, simplicity, Russell tell to people the state of thinking, in general on superstitions, religion and much more. 

Man needs to be supported by religions, creeds, susperstitions: the man is an animal searching for these things, adds.

Russell takes at first in consideration the Eden, and what the Catholic church thinks of it: if Adam would have continued to eat just ananas and other delicious fruits, leaving alone the apple, we wouldn't have known winter, or summer, but only, religion says, a state of beatitude. 

Our religions thinks also that the body of a person once dead shouldn't be cremated. Why this? To permit a real resurrection to everyone: once burned a body is not anymore... recognizable. But there are a lot of other factors that could decide the end of the world: the story of the Planet: once it will become old enough: the sun, who simply will die bringing in the unknown the Solar System. There are also other things that the Church at the end authorized: the dissection of bodies for medical purposes and the Church still proclaims sex as a big sin: it should be strickly done only for procreation. Tolstoi vice versa thought that more than sex, tobaccos was the cause of a lot of sins; a man, reports the beloved Russian writer, in fact smoked some cigarettes before to commit a murder. 

The story of purity of race is a thematic largely treated: the nazists "read" Jewish people as the ones who had to be exterminated: but also in the USA there is this sort of "supremacy" of white people: if we go in China the skin color more appreciated is the yellow one: and no one, although Americans tried their best with the Q.I. can says that a white man has a best and more functional brain than the one of a black man.

Just few people of wild tribes can be recognized as members of a pure race, because for all the rest, every country is a mixture of people assembled together because of historical facts, and so...Where is it this purity so sacred to racists? 

The number 13 is known in the USA for being, in particular if associated to the friday, an unlucky number bringing dead most of the time or horrible incidents: in hotels the number 13 is avoided. In most cases, affirms Russell, these ones are superstitions: superstitions in grade to keep the man alive, presenting him more certainty regarding his present and maybe future.

There are words revisisted of famous thinkers, plenty of wrong, uncorrect ideas to Russell. 

Women and their conditions is a dear thematic  to the writer who will explain in this trip through history to reconstruct who we were starting with the Greek and where we are at the moment. 

Wonderful book for sure. Little, you'll read it quickly and it will let you smile, because Russell doesn't want to be heavy but wants to let you understand, simply, here, his point of view.

I just adore his way of thinking, because original and free.

Highly recommended.

I thank L'Editions de L'Herne for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori