 Home |
| Biography |
| Vitae |
| Academic
Geneology |
| Research |
| Quotes |
| Links
|
| my
Geneology |
| Hollywood's
Future |
| Poems~Prose |
| Book
Report Books |
| Intellectual
Heroes |
|
$100 million represents
roughly ten years' worth of spending on the biology of aging for the NIA budget.
This weekend, [July 19, 2004] Spiderman II brought in $180 million in ticket receipts
in its first six days of performance. So any one day's receipts for Spiderman
represents five years of basic aging research. It's now clear in the last ten years that there are at least eight different
genes, which, when changed, can slow aging down proportionately and extend the
life span by 40 percent. If this sort of change also applied to people, and that's
a big if, but if it applied to people, then the average person at the age of about
130 would be as healthy as the average 80-year-old today. We should be agnostic
about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs
merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell,
etc. I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of. ~ Clarence Darrow Top [T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe, if the people tolerate the growth
of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state
itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism… The
natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. The
kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always
the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. – James Madison Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human liberty;
it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. . . ~ Henry Kissinger (from Chapter 5 in Final Days by Carl Bernstein) …I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Phillippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. . . ~ Mark Twain (from the New York Herald, October 15, 1900, "An Anti-Imperialist") Nations! What are nations?
. . . Like insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. You really haven't been a virgin for so long In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and
videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with
critical thinking skills in decline, restructuring societal memories even without
much attention from the secret police seems possible. In the
American republic the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all,
and our news keeps that knowledge from us. By their subjugation of the press,
the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political
blessing--Gyges' ring of invisibility. If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization,
it expects what never was and never will be. When covering
the Capitol, the first thing to remember is that every government is run by liars. Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the
range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050,
at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand
such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be
different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy
means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. I promise to question everything my
leaders tell me. I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop
my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgments. Populus vult decipi. (The people want to be deceived.) What experience and history teach is this--that nations and governments
have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might
have drawn from it. Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics
won't take an interest in you. "The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Federal Constitutional - Convention of 1787, not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was, not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy." -Louis Brandeis A professional
politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near
high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations
that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker. The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles.... Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies,
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are
cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending
the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children....This
is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening
war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross. It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into
error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into
error. Those who seek power
at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful
and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. The mode of production of material life determines the general
character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their
social being determines their consciousness. The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these
shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for
centuries. We can have a democratic society or we can
have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both. The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." ~ Thomas Jefferson It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office. ~ H. L. Mencken ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS The AstonishingHypothesis is that "You," your joys
and your sorrows, your memoires and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity
and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve
cells and their associated molecules. ... This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas
of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing. I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will
understand why I dismiss yours. ... Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively,
fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature. It could
be said that Atheism has a doctrine to question and a dogma to doubt. It is the
human mind in its natural environment, nothing is too holy to be investigated,
nor too sacred to be questioned. The Atheist Bible, it could be said, has but
one word: “THINK.” Atheism is the complete emancipation of the human mind from
the chains and fears of superstition. I don't believe
in God, because I don't believe in Mother Goose. All thinking men are atheists. ‘God’, ‘immortality of the soul’, ‘redemption’, ‘beyond’. Without exception,
concepts to which I have never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child.
Perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them? I do not by any means know
atheism as a result; even less as an event: It is a matter of course with me,
from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand
for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at
bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think! Theists have good reasons for not believing in every god but their
own. Atheists make no exception for the last one. Something
akin to laws of Nature was once glimpsed in a determinedly polytheistic society,
in which some scholars toyed with a form of atheism. This approach of the pre-Socratics
was, beginning in about the fourth century B.C., quenced by Plato, Aristotle,
and the Christian theologians. if the skein of historical causality had been different--if
the brilliant guesses of the atomists on the nature of matter, the plurality of
worlds, the vastness of space and time had been treasured and built upon, if the
innovative technology of Archimedes had been taught and emulated, if the notion
of invariable laws of Nature that humans must seek out and understand had been
widely propagated--I wonder what kind of world we would live in now. Men will cease to commit
atrocities only when they ceae to believe absurdities. BELIEF Doubt
is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and
pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state
which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief, in anything else. On
the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing
just what we do believe. As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use. Intellectual honesty consists in stating the precise conditions under which
one will give up one's belief. We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. ~ George Orwell Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person
toward the creation of certitude of systems of meaning, which are supported by
tradition and authority. Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude
which can be defended with the utmost certainty. A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. Man
prefers to believe what he prefers to be true." It’s
not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable.
To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people
continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown. We do everything
by custom, even believe by it our very axioms, let us boast of freethinking as
we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Every man is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions,
which move with him like flies on a summer day. Nothing
is so firmly believed as what we least know. The moment we
want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become
blind to the arguments against it. The general root
of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and
commit to memory the one, and pass over the other. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty
about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things
I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're
here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but
if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to
know an answer. I don't have to...I don't feel frightened by not knowing things,
by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is
the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
Bible Quotes (Scary) - Translation: New International Version. On Punishing 'Immorality' Leviticus 20:9 If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. 20:10 If a man commits adultery with another man's wife-with the wife of his neighbor-both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death. 20:13 If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death. Deuteronomy 22:20-1 If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl's virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father's house. Exodus 35:2 For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it must be put to death. On Destroying Other People Deuteronomy 7:1-2 When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations . . . then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 20:10-17 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. . . . This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them-the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites-as the Lord your God has commanded you. On the Evil of Biblical Law Ezekiel 20:25-26 I also gave them over to statutes that were not good and laws they could not live by; I let them become defiled through their gifts-the sacrifice of every firstborn-that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the LORD. On Slavery & Subjugation of Women Ephesians 5:22-24 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Exodus 21:20-21 If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property. 1 Peter 2:13 Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among men. 2:18 Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh. Leviticus 25:44-45 Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. Jesus, on His Second Coming Matthew 24:29-34 [T]he sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. . . . They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. . . . I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. [Emphasis added.] 16:27-28 For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. Scientific Errors (1) Rabbits don't chew cud. Deuteronomy 14:6-7 You may eat any animal that has a split hoof divided in two and that chews the cud. However, of those that chew the cud or that have a split hoof completely divided you may not eat the camel, the rabbit, or the coney. (2) No insects (including grasshoppers) are 4-legged. Leviticus 11:20-22 All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you. There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper. (3)This is only possible on a flat earth. Matthew 4:8 Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. (4) pi does not = 3. 1 Kings 7:23 He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim . . . It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. (5) The earth moves. It does not have a foundation. Psalms 104:5 He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved. Selected Contradictions (1) 2 Kings 2:11 As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. John 3:13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven-the Son of Man. (2) Numbers 23:19 God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Exodus 32:14 Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened. (3) Ephesians 2:8-9 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith . . . not by works. James 2:14-17 What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? . . . Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. Revelation 22:12 Behold, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he has done. (4) (Jesus speaking) Matthew 5:16 Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your father in heaven. Matthew 6:1 Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. (5) (Jesus speaking) John 14:27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Matthew 10:34 Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. (6) Genesis 32:30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "It is because I saw God face to face, and my life was preserved." Exodus 33:11 The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. John 1:18 No one has ever seen God. (7) (Jesus speaking) John 5:31 If I testify about myself, my testimony is not valid. John 8:14 Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid. The peculiar evil of silencing
the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity
as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still
more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the
opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost
as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced
by its collision with error. Censorship reflects society's
lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely
because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves. ...the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives
death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and nations
to sell. This is not an issue of which we might anticipate widespread skepticism.
People will want to believe it, even if the evidence is meager to nil... compelling
testimony ... provides that our personality, character, memory ... resides in
the matter of the brain, it is easy not to focus on it, to find ways to evade
the weight of the evidence. I should prefer to an ordinary
death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time,
then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But in all
probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy
of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection. I don't want
to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through
not dying. I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking,
feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe
that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an
afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
Will Durant to his wife Ariel Grow strong my comrade … Bertrand Russell to his wife Edith Through the long yearsI sought peace I found ecstasy, I found anguish I found madness, I found loneliness I found the solitary pain That gnaws the heart, But peace I did not find. Now, old and near my end, DOGMA No country or people who are slaves to
dogma and dogmatic mentality can progress. ... none of his [a priest's] certainties were worth a single strand of a woman's
hair. What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined
with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted
by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer. Ubi dubium ibi libertas. (Where
there is doubt, there is freedom.) It you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least
once in your life, you doubt, as far as possible, all things. Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt particularly to doubt one's
cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms. Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Believe nothing because a wise man said it. Believe nothing because it is generally
held. Believe nothing because it is written. Believe nothing because it is said
to be divine. Believe nothing because someone else believes it. But believe only
what you yourself judge to be true. I think we ought always to
entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically
to believe any philosophy, not even mine. I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend
to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a
certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or
the clay beneath. Men become civilized, not in proportion
to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty
about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things
I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're
here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but
if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to
know an answer. I don't have to...I don't feel frightened by not knowing things,
by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is
the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. Do not fear to
be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. If
we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day,
abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation
of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but
divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring
drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head
and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not
merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly
solved and earth would become paradise. ECONOMICS The money our society spends goes to appease those with
power. As such, it goes mainly to those who don't need it. A nation that redistributes
income to its poor buys a civilized and humane society, and it buys this with
a miniscule share of the national income and a modest reduction in the supply
of cleaning women. A country that subsidizes workers in the
prime working years sacrifices, not a dust-free living room, but the very muscle
of the national economy. Every person, if possible, ought
to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessaries,
and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt, but such an equality is
most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of
the rich than it adds to that of the poor. Why do we go through the struggle to be educated? Is it merely in order to
pass some examinations and get a job? Or is it the function of education to prepare
us while we are young to understand the whole process of life? I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the
peace. We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated,
but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are
free. The principle goal of education is to create [persons] who are capable of doing
new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-[persons]
who are creative, inventive, and discoverers. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is
this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than-learning.
His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing
form him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of
useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that
he has still far more to learn than they-he has to learn to let them learn. The
teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices. The teacher
is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs. If the relation
between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place
in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official.
It is an exalted matter, then, to become a teacher-which is something else entirely
than becoming a famous professor. Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities
will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure. ~ Kingman Brewster A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding
people to be exactly like one another; and the mould in which it casts them is
that which pleases the predominant power in the government - in proportion as
it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading
by natural tendency to one over the body. Have patience, and endure. None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm. - Henry David Thoreau Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm. - Benjamin Disraeli The best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell. ~ Bertrand Russell The scientific doctrine of progress is destined
to replace not only the myth of progress, but all other myths of human earthly
destiny. It will inevitably become one of the cornerstones of man's theology,
or whatever be the future substitute for theology, and the most important external
support for human ethic I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics
to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it. What
can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. Today the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone
but a fundamentalist minrity, whose objections are based not on reasoning, but
on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles. Evolution,
as such, is no longer a theory for the modern author. It is as much of a fact
as that the earth revolves around the sun. Every modern discussion
of man's future, the population explosion, the struggle for existence, the purpose
of man and the universe, and man's place in nature rests on Darwin. Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman -- a rope
over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back,
a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge
and not a goal. Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation
on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the
molecular level. ... humans can now impose moral principles
upon ever-widening areas of cosmic process, in whose further slow unfolding they
are now the protagonist. They can inject their ethics into the heart of evolution.
...Evolutionary biology ... has given us a new view ... impossible of attainment
in an earlier age, of our human destiny. That destiny is to be the agent of the
evolutionary process on this planet, as the instrument for realizing new possibilities
for its future. There is grandeur in this [evolutionary] view of life ... whilst this planet
has gone cycling on according to the laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved. The
living thing is not the clay molded by the potter, nor the harp played upon by
the musician. It is the clay modeling itself. What disconcerts the modern world at its very roots is not being sure,
and not seeing how it ever could be sure, that there is an outcome--a suitable
outcome to evolution. Half our present uneasiness would be turned to happiness
if we could once make up our minds to accept the facts and place the essence and
the measure of our modern cosmogonies within a noogenesis. The ancient
covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling
immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled
out. Nor is his duty. The kingdom above, or the darkness below: it is for him
to choose. In the evolutionary long run, humanity will survive only as integral parts
of a wild nexus of widely divergent life forms whose reproduction becomes possible
only in concert. [the] general condition to which all other theories, all hypotheses, all systems
must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable
and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines
must follow. The evolutionary epic is ... the best myth we will ever have. Mankind is
still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something more complicated and
more centered than man himself should emerge. We are a fluke of nature,
a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency. Man in
his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of deity. More
humble and I think truer to consider himself created from animals. We want
to be special. We want our place in the cosmos to be central. We want evolution--even
godless evolution--to have been directed toward us so that we stand at the pinnacle
of nature's ladder of progress. Rewind the tape of life and we want to believe
that we (Homo Sapiens) would appear again and again. Would we? Probably not. ... Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp
of his lowly origin. Man is that part of reality in which
and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend
itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply
it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role
is to discover his destiny as agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill
it more adequately I asserted – and I repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man – a man of restless and versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice. ~ T.H. Huxley (in reply to Bishop Wiberforce)
Faith is believing things for which there is no evidence. The way to see by faith
is to shut the eye of reason. Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without
knowledge, of things without parallel. Faith is deciding to allow yourself to believe something your intellect would
otherwise cause you to reject—otherwise there’s no need for faith. Truth
does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing “Yes,
gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that
what goes up, up, up must come down, down. down. Amen!” If they did, we would
think they were pretty insecure about it. Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits. ~ Dan Barker He is a person of faith, and faith has that effect. It is, as James’
schoolboy said, “believing what you know ain’t true”. This means lying to yourself,
to tell yourself you are justified in believing it. And of course, you have to
keep adding to the lies to bolster the story you believe. The result of this continual
lying is the loss of your intellectual integrity. Once intellectual integrity
is lost, so is moral integrity. The believer will then lie in God’s name, cheat
in God’s name, exploit in God’s name, and persecute in God’s name.
They, believe me, who await Fear is the main source
of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the
beginning of wisdom. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to
think sanely under the influence of a great fear. Nothing is so firmly
believed as what is least known. The whole problem with the
world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser
people so full of doubts. You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. Ultimately, we are not
subject to the conditions that confront us; rather, these conditions are subject
to our decision ... we must decide whether we will face up or give in, whether
or not we will let ourselves be determined by the conditions. ... freedom is a
conquest, always partial, always precarious, always challenged. ... the freest
person is the one with the most hope. If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were
gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was
traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once
and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence,
watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according
to his own free will. The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good
in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede
their efforts to obtain it. It would be very strange
that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should
be very little animal, five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act
as he pleased. My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I
oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm-as in abortion, sodomy,
prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly
defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy. FREETHOUGHT Freethought is scientific inquiry unrestricted by
tradition, authority, established belief, preconception, prejudice or any agenda
that might compromise the free exercise of thought and the reliability and validity
of one's conclusions. Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool
of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict
limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into
faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender. To
all freethinkers, past and present, whose independence of mind isolates them from
the sympathy and understanding of their community, but whose courageous and unwavering
devotion to the scientific method has liberated their community from the dark
ages. Scientists who have dedicated their lives to building machines that think,
feel that it's only a matter of time before some form of consciousness is captured
in the laboratory Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share
our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds. The development
of artificial intelligence may well imply that man will relinquish his intellectual
supremacy in favor of thinking machines. With oceans of time available for future
innovation, there seems to be no reason why machines cannot achieve and surpass
anything of which the human brain is capable. By 2050 we expect AI systems to have a modest range of emotions.
Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of
their own. Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never
were and ask why not. Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.
The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope. We know what we are, but we know not what we may become. All the past is but
the beginning of a beginning; all that the human mind has accomplished is but
the dream before the awakening. But at the same time, in reality, what a difference there is between the
world today, and what it used to be! And with the passage of more time, some two
or three hundred years, say, people will look back at our own times with horror,
or with sneering laughter, because all of our present day life will appear so
clumsy, and burdensome, extraordinarily inept and strange. Yes, certainly, what
a life it will be then, what a life! No theory changes what it is a theory about. Nothing is changed because
we look at it, talk about it, or analyze it in a new way. Keats drank confusion
to Newton for analyzing the rainbow, but the rainbow remained as beautiful as
ever and became for many even more beautiful. Man has not changed because we look
at him, talk about him, and analyze him scientifically. ... What does change is
our chance of doing something about the subject of a theory. Newton's analysis
of the light in a rainbow was a step in the direction of the laser. ... not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness
to a distant futurity. Be a lamp unto yourself. HAPPINESS Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. This
creed is somewhat short, but is long enough for this life; long enough for this
world. If there is another world, when we get there, we can make another creed.
But this creed certainly will do for this life. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they
do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly found, given and tranmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Not to know what has happened before one was born is always to be a child. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. The nations wax, the nations wane away; in a brief space
the generations pass. And like runners hand the lamp of life one unto the other. HUMAN NATURE Man will become better when you show him what he is like. ~ Anton Chekhov "Every man as long as he remains alive is in himself a multitude of conflicting men."- D.H. Lawrence Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Mankind is blessed with a creative talent
for inventing and applying ideas, and cursed with an inability to shed them when
their time is passed. ... ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is
those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that
this or that problem will never be solved by knowledge. Ignorance of reality provides no protection from it. INSECURITY Flight from insecurity is catastrophic to any kind of human growth. To flee
from insecurity is to miss the whole point of being human. It is to miss, at any
rate, the whole point of religion. Irreverence is
the champion of liberty. People who are on the journey
are a lot more interesting than people who, having found answers, are in dry dock.
It is impossible for a man to learn
what he thinks he already knows. And none will
hear the postman’s knock Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls. "Life
is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets,
and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps
the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all
the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood
sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny
the fact of death, which is the only fact we have." A dangerous path
is this, like the edge of a razor. Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your
elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours. All the
world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players. Life
is warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame, oblivion. When I consider
the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the
little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity
of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and
am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here
rather than there, now rather than then. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burdens
again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises
rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without
a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each
mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle
itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus
happy. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, How can life ever be a good teacher if there is only one of them to be lived?
How can one perform life when the dress rehearsal for life is life? This is
the true joy of life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a
mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap;
the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments
and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you
happy. Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure
it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself;
and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality
of life. "The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new
courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth..." I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more
I live. Life is no 'brief candle" to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which
I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible
before handing it on to future generations." Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live
along some distant day into your answers. The unexamined
life is not worth living. The person who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned
in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of their
age or their nation, and from the convictions which have grown up in their mind
Put away the book, the description,
the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and
don't be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you
love, everything will come right. Love has its own action. Love, and you will
know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority who tells you what love
is and what it is not. No authority knows and he who knows cannot tell. Love,
and there is understanding. Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete
and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in
themselves. This is a fact of daily experience. At what moment do lovers come
into the most complete possession of themselves if not when they say they are
lost in each other? In truth, does not love every instant achieve all around us,
in the couple or the team, the magic feat, the feat repudiated to be contradictory,
of personalizing by totalizing? And if that is what it can achieve daily on a
small scale, why should it not repeat this one day on world-wide dimensions? Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman
really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a
century. LYING The way to get a lie believed is to continue to REPEAT it.
We
could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own
world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished
from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years. I like mathematics
because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with
the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us
in return. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man,
which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics
as surely as poetry. Man's concern about a
meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human. An individual
piece only has meaning when it is seen as part of the whole. Man's search for meaning
is the primary motivation of his life. This meaning is unique and specific in
that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance
which will satisfy his own will to meaning. MEMES Consider
the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated
many times by independent ‘mutation.’ In any case, it is very old indeed. How
does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music
and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that ‘survival
value’ here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme
in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god
that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival
value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal.
It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about
existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next.
The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which,
like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. There
are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive
generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with
high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human
culture. There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that
can take it at par. No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless . . . its falsehood
would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish. The Christian
religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot
be believed by any reasonable person without one. The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between
a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better. Music is the effort we
make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed
because this is listening to a human mind. How little is required for pleasure! The sound of a bagpipe — without music,
life would be an error. NATURE In my opinion, the
greatest scandal of philosophy is that, while all around us the world of nature
perishes ... philosophers continue to talk, ...about the question of whether this
world exists.
We are all born originals. Why is it so many of us die copies? Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never
of killing for their country. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when
it deserves it. My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some
desperate glory. The old lie: It is sweet and fitting that you should die for
your country. Morally, a philosopher
who uses his professional competence for anything except a disinterested search
for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery. Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings? Philosophy is
a stubborn attempt to think clearly. Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that
may never be qustions. ... philosophy is to science as pornography
is to sex: it's cheaper, easier and some people prefer it. The
first step toward philosophy is doubt. Philosophy means
the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political,
or religious prejudice. The beginning and end of
all philosphy is--freedom. Philosophy asks the
simple question, what is it all about? It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what
one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation
... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and
build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking
precarious. Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to
its questions ... but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because
these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual
imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion
our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be
a happy and a virtuous people. The great virtue of philosphy is that it teaches not what to think, but how
to think. "Can you tell me, boss," he said,
and his voice sounded deep and earnest in the warm night, "what all these
things mean? Who made them all? And why? And, above all" - here Zorba's voice
trembled with anger and fear - "why do people die?" PROGRESS Progress is a
noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that
must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history. Progress,
then, as I see it, is to be measured by the accuracy of man's knowledge of nature's
forces. If you examine this sentence carefully you will observe that I conceive
progress as a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets ahead, in other words,
by discarding the theory of today for the fact of tomorrow. Moses believed that
the earth was flat, Caesar believed that his family doctor could cure pneumonia,
and Columbus believed that devils entered into harmless old women and turned them
into witches... You and I, knowing that all three of these distinguished men were
wrong in their beliefs, are their superiors to that extent. One
is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes the wicked have committed, but by the
punishments the good have inflicted; a community is infinitely more brutalized
by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurance
of the crime. The
haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask
a question remains a fool forever. There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask
whatever questions they wanted to. Our whole dignity consists in thought. Let us endeavor, then,
to think well: this is the principle of ethics. It is
wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone to believe upon insufficient evidence. You
cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the
first place. To save the world requires faith and courage:
faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true. It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion
without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental
truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him. Its
name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think
it is the voice of God. Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or
freed a human soul. Man is an emotional animal, occasionally
rational; and through his feelings he can be decieved to his heart's content. How noble is reason! How infinite in faculty! ... in apprehension
how like a god! Intelligence is the only moral guide. Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters:
united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders. So, little by little, time brings out each several thing
into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light. And generally
let every student of nature take this as a rule: that whatever his mind seizes
and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion, and that
so much the more care is to be taken dealing with such questions to keep the understanding
even and clear. The Church says the earth is flat, but
I know that it is round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more
faith in a shadow than in the Church. He who will
not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave. Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing
us the consequences and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell
us what the future will be? Does the human being
reason? No; he thinks, muses, reflects, but does not reason...that is, in the
two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind, politics
and religion. He doesn't want to know the other side. It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from
the exercise of its own reason. It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. ~ Bertrand Russell Top For every complex question there's a simple answer--and it is clever, neat,
and wrong. Our thinking tends to be hazy, hasty, narrow,
or sprawling--causal terms for impulsive. Just like anything else, thinking skills
require upkeep. If they aren't nourished, they'll fade away. It is much easier to do and die than it is to reason why. The weapon that most readily conquers reason is terror and violence. Most people would rather die than think--in fact, they do! Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage.
Tutelage s man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction
from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of
reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from
another. Sapere aude! "Have courage to use your own reason!"- that is the motto
of enlightenment. I wish to propose for the reader's' favorable
consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive.
The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesireable to believe a proposition
when there is no good ground for supposing it to be true. Religion is fundamentally opposed
to everything I hold in veneration--courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness,
and, above all, love of the truth. If you want to make a little money, write a book. If you want to make a lot
of money, create a religion. I
am myself a dissenter from all know religions, and I hope that every kind of religious
belief will die out. Religion is based ... mainly on fear ... fear of the mysterious,
fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it
is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand .. My own view of
religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a
source of untold misery to the human race. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and
by rulers as useful. I count religion but a childish toy and hold there is no sin but ignorance. The Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is
the principle enemy of moral progress in the world. With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and
evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes
religion. Finding that no religion is based on facts
and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of
]mankind trained from infancy to believe in error. The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably
not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point
than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. Religion
... the universal ... neurosis of humanity. Religion is the opiate of the masses. Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will
fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines. Fear of things
invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.
Religion is all bunk. It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain. There is
no point beating around the bush. Supernatural concepts have no philosophical
warrant. Furthermore, it is not that such concepts are displaced only if we accept,
from the start, a naturalistic or scientific vision of things. There simply are
no good arguments--theological, philosophical, humanistic, or scientific--for
beliefs in divine beings, miracles, or heavenly afterlives. These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of
experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the
oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. I knew that man's womanish heart has constant need of consolation, a need
to which that super-shrewd sophist the mind is constantly ready to minister. I
began to feel that every religion which promises to fulfull human desires is If I have said anything about religions and religion that seems harsh, I have
said those things because of a firm belief that the claim on the part of religions
to possess a monopoly of ideals and of the supernatural means by which I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if
so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe,
and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will
be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. I cannot imagine
a God who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we
experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual
that survives his physical death; let feeble souls from fear or absurd egotism,
cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life
and a glimpse of the marvelous sturcture of the existing world, together with
the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of tthe Reason
that manifests itself in nature. One does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity
of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this. The memory of
my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the
superstitions of the Christian religion. There is no greater social evil than religion. It is the cancer in the body
of humanity. Human credulity and superstition, and the need for comforting fables,
will never be extirpated, so relgion will always exist, at least among the uneducated.
The only way to manage the dangers it presents is to confine it entirely to the
private sphere, and for the public domain to be blind to it in all but one respect:
that by law no one's private beliefs should be allowed to cause a nuisance or
an injury to anyone else. The time appears to me to have
come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known. With or without [religion] you'd have good people doing good things and evil
people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they
do it from religious conviction. The man who is thoroughly
convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment
entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events--that is,
if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the
religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards
and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions
are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot
be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions
it goes through. Hence science has been charged with undermining morality, but
the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on
sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would
indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope
of reward after death. Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.
Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that
has ever infected the world. If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
Superstition, born of paganism and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian
Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception,
believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always
believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken,
but as men who were really in communication with the devil. Nothing can be more
contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense. No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter ... than you and
I; and all religion ... is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination
and poetry. I found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated
in the Pentateuch. Surely the writers had a very low idea of the nature of their
god. They made him not only anthropomorphic, but of the very lowest type, jealous
and revengeful, loving violence rather than mercy. I know of no other books that
so fully teach the subjection and degradation of women. The Bible and the Church
have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation." There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child,
religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its
youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to
the athlete: 'Let us be friends.' It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished
to make with the horse: 'Let us agree not to step on each other's feet.' For ages,
a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought
and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other.
This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to
honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world.
The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown,
and to misery hereafter. The few have said, "Think!" The many have said, "Believe!"
Faith is believing what you know ain't so. "In God We Trust." I
don't believe it would sound any better if it were true. It ain't the parts of
the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness...
It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes
Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast. [The Bible is] a mass of fables
and traditions, mere mythology. Man is a marvelous curiosity . . . he thinks he
is the Creator's pet . . . he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion
for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out
of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea. If
there is a God, he is a malign thug. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone
with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority
of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. I am myself a
dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief
will die out. Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious,
fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it
is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view
on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as
a source of untold misery to the human race. It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a
lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God
and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in
me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure
of the world so far as our science can reveal it. You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries
of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading
heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless
skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline
spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the
price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell. History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational
basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown
without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time
and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proven innocent. To
abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief
by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous
and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal
enmities.... It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the
truth of a religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious
observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it - and the
only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate
nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay
for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has
been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief. I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of
rational decision, to drain people of their free will--and a hell of a lot of
money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them
all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning
brain. We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful
God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and
to the same extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his
children smart. Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility. He
who begins by loving Christianty better than truth, will proceed by loving his
own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better
than all. Since the early days, [the church]
has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind
of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible
defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions.
It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the
divine right of kings. Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the
improbable. . . . A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had)
the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually
ill. The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in
Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on it divine inspiration. During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded
that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its
duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews,
and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it
night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned
whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with
their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches,
and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. God
is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They
find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing
to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters. For centuries,
theologians have attempted to explain the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing. You
dispute, you quarrel, you fight for that which is uncertain, that of which you
doubt. O men! Is this not folly? ... We must trace a line of distinction between
those that are capable of verification, and those that are not, and separate by
an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities,
that is to say, all civil effect must be taken away from theological and religious
opinions. The most savage controversies are those about
matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used
in theology, not in arithmetic. ... I cannot see as plainly as others do, evidence of design and beneficence
on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade
myself that a beneficent and omnipotent god would have designedly created the
Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies
of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. The
human psyche has two greate sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations,
and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.
Abrahamic religion gives strong sanction to both--and mixes explosively with both.
Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion
in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Fear of power invisible, feingned by the mind, or imagined from tales
publicly allowed is religion; not allowed is superstion. Those
to whom his word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses.
There wasn't anyone else around when Mohammed got the word, either. Mormon Joseph
Smith and Christian Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy, had exclusive audiences with God.
We have to trust them as reporters--and you know how reporters are. They'll do
anything for a story. For anyone with eyes to see, there
can be no doubt that religious faith remains a perpetual source of human conflict.
Religion persaudes otherwise intelligent men and women to not think, or to think
badly, about questions of civilizational importance. And yet it remains taboo
to criticize religious faith in our society ... What is worst in us (outright
delusion) has been elevated beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best
(reason and intellectual honesty) must remain hidden, for fear of giving offense. The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don’t
understand it. The aim of a religious movement is to
inflict a malady on society, then offer the religion as a cure. Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity? ~ Arthur C. Clarke History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unkonwn without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it. ~ Robert A. Heinlen You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. ~ Aldous Huxley There is so much in the bible against which every insinct of my being rebels, so much so that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end. I do not think that the knowledge I have gained of its history and sources compensates me for the unpleasant details it has forced upon my attention. ~ Helen Keller We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. ~ Gene Roddenberry Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. ~ Kurt Vonnegut RELIGION (ACCORDING TO SOME OF AMERICAN'S FOUNDERS) It does me no injury for my
neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks
my leg. Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the
I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies. ~ Benjamin Franklin Whenever we read the obscene
stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the
unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible [by which Paine
means the Old Testament] is filled, it would be more consistent that we called
it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that
has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely
detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. Persecution is not an original
feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions
established by law. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian
or Turkish appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and
enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity
been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and
indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition,
bigotry, and persecution. In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians
of the liberties of the people. Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the
mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise. I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the
abuses of grief which the history of [hu]mankind has preserved - the Cross. Consider
what calamaties that engine of grief has produced! The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never
give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma. Religion is
based upon blind faith supported by no evidence. Science is based upon confidence
that results from evidence. ... Science approaches truth, closer and closer ...
Religion already has it all decided, and it's 'in the book.' It's dogma, unchangeable,
and unaffected by .. whatever facts we come upon in the real world. Science makes godlike - it is all over with priests and gods when man
becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such - it alone is forbidden.
Science is the first sin, the original sin. This alone is morality. “Thou shall
not know” - the rest follows. You will find men like
him in all of the world’s religions. They know that we represent reason and science,
and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow
their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion.
Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets.
No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor,
but they have few followers now.
All our science,
measured against reality, is primitive and childlike--and yet it the most precious
thing we have. It appears to me (whether rightly
or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly
any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual
illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science. Artists
may pour out their angst; philosophers and theologians may fume, lament, and obfuscate;
but only science can know. There is nothing which
can better serve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge
is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. At
the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory
attitudes- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive
they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.
This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.... If we were
to back off from science and technology, we would in fact be condemning most of
the human population of the Earth to death. The end
of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and
the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
For my part, I have no doubt, although progressive changes are to be expected
in physics, the present doctrines are likely to be nearer to the truth, than any
rival doctrines now before the world. Science is at no moment quite right, but
it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than
the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.
Thus have I made as it were a small globe of the
intellectual world, as truly and faithfully as I could discover. Those to whom
intellectual freedom is personally important may be a minority in the community,
but among them are the [humans] of most importance to the future. We have seen
the importance of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin in this history of mankind,
and it is not to be supposed that the future will produce no more such men. If
they are prevented from doing their work and having their due effect, the human
race will stagnate, and a new Dark Ages will succeed, as the earlier Dark Ages
succeeded the brilliant period of antiquity. New truth is often uncomfortable,
especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruely
and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward
species. We shall not seek from exploration But to me the search
for unity is much more substantial than the affirmation of unity; the need and
the search, and the idea that one is working at it ... We declare at the outset that we do not make any positive assertion that anything
we shall say is wholly as we affirm it to be. We merely report accurately on each
thing as our impressions of it are at the moment. Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions,
his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they
are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact propoertion to the contravention
of probability by the thing testified. Those who
have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power,
a skeptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging skepticism. I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. Skeptics are the watchmen of reasoning errors, aiming to
expose bad ideas. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're
unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in
power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, hten those
in power work for us. In every country we should be teaching our children the
scientific method and the Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility
and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of
being human, this may be all that stands between us and hte enveloping darkness. ... continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life
of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. If you are distressed
by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate
of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. SUNDAY Sunday:
A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in
Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell. TECHNOLOGY Technology does not drive change at all. Technology merely enables change.
It's our collective cultural response to the options and opportunities presented
by technology that drives change. If scientists don't play
God, who will? Beginning to think
is beginning to be undermined. There is no expedient
to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking. No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. You can lead me to college, but you can't make me think.
As soon as man does not take his existence for
granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins. What
good fortune for those in power that people don't know how to think. We are such things as dreams are made on. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.~ Betrqnd Russell I don't know what
I may seem to the world. But to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing
on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then to find a smoother pebble
or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
before me. Wa are but thinking reeeds; but because we know,
we are superior to the universe. Thought constitutes our greatness. When people learn no tool of judgment and merely follow their hopes,
the seeds of political manipulations are sown. A person
who does not think about life is a stranger mapless in a foreign land, for one
such, lost and without directions, any turning in the road is as good as any other,
and if it takes him somewhere worthwhile it will have done so by the merest chance. So long
as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies
in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation
of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best
example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional
order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, lead nowhere in particular and can
be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world. Dost thou love life,
then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. All the
tragedies which we can imagine, return in the end to the one and only tragedy:
the passage of time. Intolerance
is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses
certainty; certainty is murderous. "I believe in transhumanism": once there are enough people who can truly say
that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as
different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously
fulfilling its real destiny. It is morally as bad not
to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as
it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. ...in
matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it can carry you without
other considerations... do not pretend the conclusions are certain that are not
demonstrated or demonstrable. It is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the
objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically
justifies that certainty. Truth is the greatest secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral
authority; it is the highest summit of art and life. It you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once
in your life, you doubt, as far as possible, all things. A credulous mind
... finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are
the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible,
for every man can believe such. It is a capital mistake
to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit
theories, instead of theories to suit facts. The
foundation of morality is to ... give up pretending to believe that for which
there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond
the possibilities of knowledge. Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth Nothing is too wonderful to be true. One unerring
mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance
than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. In war, truth
is the first casualty. Truth emerges from the clash of adverse ideas. I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn
human actions, but to understand them. It is difficult
to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding
it. Out yonder
there was this huge world... which stands before us like a great eternal riddle
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only stranger
than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose. Unless we can so
enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison
in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate
surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife
between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or
another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this
strife. The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation
…(their) vision does not penetrate the surface of things. Of course
the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who
determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along
whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist
dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding
of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,
and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to
greater danger. To carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows? ~ Noam Chomsky Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elde |