The faith of a rationalist

In the past days I have been going through some of the texts of Bertrand Russel. Among them, I would like to suggest you his paper entitled "Why I am not a Christian and the faith of a rationalist". It outlines in a well-written way the main arguments for why religion and, in particular, Christianity are flawed and should not be taken as seriously as one does. Besides the well-known arguments against religion, such as the lack of evidence supporting god, he makes the following two points which are most interesting:

1) If you think that there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are faced with the following problem: if you think that this distinction was designed by god, then it is meaningless to say that god is good because he himself designed the rules for saying that something is good. Now, if you think that god is good, then you must admit that the rules defining right and wrong come from somewhere else. So, why do you need god?

2) Was Christ as described in the Gospels a wise man? In some aspects yes, but in many others no. There were much wiser men than Christ, for instance, Bertrand Russel himself is much wiser than Christ. Chirst for instance believed on hell. To believe on the idea that someone will be punished with the worst tortures for the rest of time just because he/she disagrees with some values does not seem to be very wise.

From my personal background, I could pose a similar question w.r.t. Krishna: was Krishna a wise man? It does not seem wise to believe that a person's duty (dharma) comes from the fact that he/she was born within a social class. In particular, Krishna tells Arjuna, the warrior prince that was in doubt to fight against his kin, that he should fight because he is a warrior, that is his duty. In that sense, Buddha seems a bit better since at least he acknowledges the problems of the caste system. Moreover, to my knowledge, Krishna did not say anything about the fact that the war would involve millions of "innocent" soldiers that served both armies.