EMPIRIA Magazin - Hanna Kuliffay's collection of quotes, quips, excerptions
"Nothing in the world
is so difficult as
to free the mind of prejudice
and preconception."
(Llewelyn Powys,1930)
CÉDULÁK - NOTE CARDS I.
“We brazenly call our God the source of mercy,
while we are aware all the time that there is not an authentic instance in
history of His ever having exercised that virtue. We call Him the source or
morals, while we know by His history and by His daily conduct as perceived with
our senses that He is totally destitute of anything resembling morals. We call
him Father, and not in derision, although we would detest and denounce any
earthly father who should inflict upon his child a thousand part of the pains
and miseries and cruelties which our God deals out to His children every day,
and has dealt out to them daily during all the centuries since the crime of
creating Adam was committed.”
“In His destitution of one and all of
the qualities which could grace a God and invite respect for Him and reverence
and worship, the real God, the genuine God, the Maker of the mighty universe is
just like all the other gods in the list. He proves every day that He takes no
interest in man, nor in the other animals, further than to torture them, slay
them and get out of this pastime such entertainment as it may afford - and do what He can not to get weary of the
eternal and changeless monotony of it.”
“They (humanity) have always believed in
the millions of gods and religions that have been stuffed down their midriffs.
There isn’t anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being
can’t believe it.“
Mark Twain: Reflections on Religion
"The truth trick is liberally used. In many religions, God and Truth are virtually synonymous. Rejecting the faith means turning away from Truth; converting others means giving them the gift of the true faith. This may seem odd when many religious claims are clearly false, but there are many reasons why it works."
"The idea of 'genes for religious behaviour' is not at all implausible - all it means is genes that make people more inclined towards religious beliefs and behaviour. Brain development is under genetic control and it is known that some brains are more prone to religious belief and experience than others. For example, people with unstable temporal lobes are more likely to report mystical, psychic and religious experience, and to believe in supernatural powers, than those with stable temporal lobes." (Persinger 1983).
"Religions build theories about the world and then prevent them from being tested. Religions provide nice, appealing and comforting ideas, and cloak them in a mask of 'truth, beauty, and goodness'. The theories can thrive in spite of being untrue, ugly, or cruel."
Susan Blackmore: The Meme Machine
The fact is that the mind of Jesus was full of misconceptions. Life is not ordered by a loving father. A sucking child can see that it is not. We would all like it to be so, but that is another matter. . . . The more we study mind and matter scientifically the more we see that all things follow a natural sequence, a sequence is liable to work for our disadvantage as for our advantage. It flows like the water of a river, it falls like rain, it is as impartial as the sea. It is as innocent of malice as it is of compassion. It is deaf to our prayers.
Llewelin Powys: An Hour on Christianity
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless"
Steven Weinberg: The First Three Minutes
“Wisdom comes by
disillusionment, but again that is only the beginning of wisdom. As doubt is
the beginning of philosophy; it is not also the end and fulfillment. The end is
happiness, and philosophy is only a means; if we take it as an end we become
like the Hindu mystic whose life-purpose is to concentrate upon his navel.”
“There is nothing immortal. (. . .) No doubt the spirit and energy of the world
is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it
passes through us; and, cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to
have perceived it as it moved.”
“Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made
by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes. “
“There are two stages in the criticism of myths. (. . .) The first treats them angrily as superstitions; the second treats them smilingly as poetry. . . . Religion is human experience interpreted by human imagination. (. . . ) The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic representation of the truth and life, is simply an impossible idea.”
George Santayana: Reason in Science
"The critical habit of thought, if usual in society, will pervade all its mores, because it is a way of taking up the problems of life. People educated in it cannot be stampeded by stump orators. They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty of thought is the only education of which it can truly be said that it makes good citizens."
William Graham Sumner. 1906
“Critical thinking is a desire to seek, the patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order, and hatred for every kind of imposture.”
Francis Bacon. 1605
How about this? Most Americans are uninformed, brainwashed AND stupid.
orcan October 5th, 2008 1:48 am
Yes but we have over 100 channels of tv.
ctrl-z October 5th, 2008 2:42 am
“There is plenty of evidence that
human happiness is almost wholly based upon illusions of one kind or another.
But the scientific spirit, or the spirit of truth, is the enemy of illusions and
therefore the enemy of human happiness. That is why it is going to be so
difficult to live with the truth. . . . But without the Great Illusion, the
illusion of a good, kindly, and purposeful universe, we shall have to learn to live.”
“Of course we know that it is
perfectly possible for individual men, very highly educated men, philosophers,
scientists, intellectuals in general, to live moral lives without any religious
convictions. But the question is whether a whole civilization, a whole family
of peoples, composed almost entirely uneducated men and women, can do this.”
“It has been said that man lives by
truth, and that the truth will make us free.
Nearly the opposite seems to me to be the case. Mankind has managed to
live only by means of lies, and the truth may very well destroy us. If one were
a Bergsonian one might believe that nature deliberately puts illusions into our
souls in order to induce us to go on living.”
W. T. Stace: Man against Darkness (1948)
We always forget that a hero is a man, only a man, and that resisting a tyranny, undergoing tortures, languishing for years in a cell without air or light is at times easier than fighting amid the ambiguity and the snares of normalcy.
(Oriana Fallaci: A man)
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize (hu)mankind."
Thomas Pain
„The concept of ’the Chosen people’, the belief that members of their tribe of believers along will be saved, is a myth that is totally without any empirical foundation, as is the superiority attitude of devout Muslims or fundamentalist Baptists. It is divisive.”
Paul Kurtz
"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."
Charles Darwin
„God, Christ, and religion in general are absurd; Christianity is
surely a genuine scandal to the intellect, but we need it all the same, for, as
Camus and Sartre recognize, man’s very condition in this world is absurd and if
there is no God, man’s life must be meaningless – a stupid game of charades,
without any rational at all.”
„We have a natural capacity to distinguish good from evil. All
persons, have within themselves, some natural knowledge of good and evil. In some it is undeveloped; some hardly
exercise it at all, but quite apart from any Divine revelation thay may or may
not have had, they have some rudimentary knowledge of how thay ought to behave.
Contrary to Emile Brunner,
we do not need a
positive revelation from God to discern the difference between good and evil.”
„ To attribute the ills of Russian society to the claim that it
is a secularized society is at best naive.
. . . The Scandinavian countries (all of them) are the strongest
disconfirming evidence to the we-need-Christianity-to-keep-the-wolf-at-bay
hypothesis. They are among the most
highly educated, affluent, and the most secularized societies we have today,
yet they are all without exception, flourishing, open societies with firm,
valid democratic traditions. Moreover,
they are stable societies that are prospering economically with high standards
of living that extensively trickle down to most of their members. They are the most egalitarian societies in
the world and some of the freest. Yet
these, let me repeat, are deeply secularized
societies where religion is steadily, but untraumatically, losing its
grip.”
„In the Scandinavian countries secularization has dug deeper
than anywhere else in the world but the moral fabric of these societies has
remained intact or at least they are as intact as is the morality of any of the
more religiously oriented industrial societies. „
Kai Nielsen: Ethics without God
„Everything is driven by necessity.”
Leucippus
(445 B.C.)
„Having rejected the dogma of the Trinity as a logical absurdity that could not be reconciled with human reason, Jefferson than subjected the rest of Christianity to the test of rational analysis and concluded that its basic doctrines were simply unacceptable to an enlightened man living in the eighteenth century.”
„Much
of Jefferson’s interest in religion was
of a generic, broadly philosophical sort. He could be described as a Deist, which is to say, he believed in
natural law, in natural reason, in a God accessible without the medium of an
inspired scripture. He could be quite
contentious about traditional, dogmatic, or sectarian religions, and, in the
mood of many Enlightment figures, was
critical of ’priestcraft’ and institutional religion.”
„The
rationalistic critique of Christianity was far less prominent in the American
Enlightment than in its European counterpart owing to the high degree of religious
toleration that existed in the British colonies.”
Eugene
R. Sheridan: Jefferson and Religion
"The church and civilization are antipodal; one means authority, the other freedom; one means conservatism, the other progress; one means the rights of God as interpreted by the priesthood, the other the rights of humanity as interpreted by humanity. Civilization advances by free-thought, free speech, free men."
Matilda Joslyn Gage: Women, Church and State (1893)
„The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego. I am not thinking of Freud’s barbarous Id or Unconscious as the actual reality behind the facade of personality. Freud, as we shall see, was under the influence of a nineteenth-century fashion called ’reductionism’, a curious need to put down human culture and intelligence by calling it a fluky by-product of blind and irrational forces. They worked very hard, then, to prove that grapes can grow on thorn-bushes.”
"As systems of doctrine, symbolism,
and behaviour, religions harden into institutions that must command loyalty, be
defended and kept ’pure’, and – because all belief is very fervent hope,
and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty
- religions must make converts.
The more people who agree with us, the less nagging insecurity about our
position.”
Alan Watts: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)
„The vital aid to clear thought is the habit of approaching everything we hear and everything we are taught to believe with a certain skepticism. The method of using doubt as an examiner is a familiar one among scholars and scientists, but it is also the best protection which a citizen has against the cant and humbug that surround us.”
„An
educated man can be judged by the quality of his prejudices.”
Alan Simpson: The Marks of an Educated Man
"Right or wrong are not to be defined in terms of God's will; morality is a matter of reason and conscience, not religious faith; and in any case, religious considerations do not provide definitive solutions to the specific moral problems that confront us. Morality and religion are, in a word, different."
"Morality is a set of rules that rational people would agree to accept for their mutual benefit."
James Rachels: The Elements of Moral Philosophy
"We all know many people who do not believe in God and yet are decent and admirable. Western societies, as highly secularized as they are, retain many humane features. Not even tacitly has our sole governing maxim become the one Dostoevsky thought was bound to follow the denial of the God-man: "Everything is permitted."
Glenn Tinder: Can We Be Good Without God?
„Real sexual freedom implies that each sex cares equally about the
physical and emotional needs of the other.”
„Just as blacks live in a world defined by whites, women live in a
world defined by males. . . . Racial and sexual stereotypes also resemble each
other: women, like blacks, are said to be childish, incapable of abstract
reasoning, innately submissive, biologically suited for menial tasks, emotional,
close to nature. Most important, both women and blacks have a history of slavery
– only female slavery goes back much further. From the beginnings of
civilization until very recently, women in most societies were literally the
property of their husbands and fathers.”
„Other antifeminists insist, ’Women are free. They can vote, work,
and can have orgasms – what more do they want?’ ”
Ellen Willis: The New Racism: Sexism (1969)
"Normal human behavior is not natural, but rather habitual behavior that over a period of time has become typical in a particular society. The person who seeks to adjust more fully to a normal behavior of his society in the belief that he moving toward fulfillment is only wriggling inside a strait jacket of conventional assumptions. He is only becoming more typical. . . . When normal behaviors leave him deprived, the adjusted individual is relatively helpless. In the first place, he doesn't have a clear idea of what he is seeking; he has learned a set of customs, not an understanding of human needs. In the second place, he has learned to take for granted deprivation in certain areas of life."
Snell Putney-Gail Putney: The Adjusted American (1964)
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things."
Steven Weinberg (Nobel Prize-winning physicist)
"I believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are divinely inspired documents, written by men especially raised up by their Creator for that purpose. I believe that God has made and presented to us a nation for a purpose -- to bring freedom to all the people of the world."
George Romney's Lincoln Day speech. Boston. 1966
"Where there are a thousand faith we are apt to become skeptical of them all."
"Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom."
Will Durant: The story of Philosophy
"Socrates is the saint and martyr of philosophy. No other great philosopher has been so obsessed with righteous living. Like many martyrs, Socrates chose not to try to save his life when he probably could have done so by changing his ways. According to Plato, Socrates said at his trial:
"You are
mistaken if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time
weighing up the prospect of life and death. He has only one thing to consider
in performing any action - that is, weather he is acting rightly or
wrongly"
Anthony Gottlieb: The Dream of Reason
"One thing that ancient history proves is that virtue predates religion by a long way and that Socrates was a godly man and he didn't need a god to be that. The ancient gods were free from all inhabitation and free from guilt and free from all feeling of Original Sin, which came in with monotheism."
Interview
with Sir Peter Ustinov from the
collection of Imagine there's no
Heaven (Voices
of Humanism)
"They gave him "a safe conduct" to the Council
at Constance and there they called upon him to recant; but this 'pale, thin man
in mean attire' had the stomach of truth in him. Christ, not Peter, he asserted
was the head of the church. The priests in the crowd held up their hands in
horror; solemnly they condemned him to be burnt, consigning his soul to the
devil. In silent prayer John Huss committed it to the care of the gentle
imaginary God of his allegiance. He was burnt at the stake."
Llewelin Powys: Christianity
"Chavalier de la Barre, put to death on charges of sacrilege, was found to have in his pocket Voltaire's Dictionnaire portatif."
"Personal morality, like tolerance, did not well up from within the Church, but was forced upon it from without."
Morman L. Torrey: Voltaire and the English Deists (1967)
"One of the last of many great scholars who worked at the Alexandrian Library was a woman named Hypathya. She appears to have lectured on philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and other Greek thinkers, and was therefore regarded by the Christians of the day a major protagonist of pagan Neo-Platonism. . . . Hypathia's teachings and her friendship with Orestes (the pagan prefect of Alexandria) provoked the enmity of Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, a bigot dedicated to the suppression of in all its forms. In 415 there was a riot - one of many in Alexandria - and a Christian mob led by monks who were possibly carrying out wishes of Cyril, dragged Hypatia from her chariot as she rode through the streets, stripped her, and flayed her alive with clam shells."
Quest
for the Past
"A young Austrian, born Georg Joachim (1514-1574), had taken the
name Rheticus to avoid bearing the stigma of his father, a town physician
who had been beheaded for sorcery.
Rheticus arrived in Frauenburg in the summer of 1539 to meet Copernicus and
learn more about his new cosmology, still not available in print. He had just received his M.A. from
the University of Wittenberg for a thesis which proved that the Roman law did
not forbid astrological predictions, because like medical predictions they were based on observable physical
causes. . . . Rheticus had written his
First Report (Narratio Prima) of Copernicus' system, which was printed in
Danzing early 1540."
Danoel J. Boorstin: The Discoverers
"If to die as a human sacrifice for human beings deserves the highest
reverence, the true Christs of the world are to be numbered by millions. Almost every land of the globe has drunk
their annually shed blood. Thus has the human race paid in death for its faith
in immortality. Nameless men and women have done many millions of times what is
credited to the fabulous Jesus of the Christian gospels."
"Like Christ, and like Adonis and Attis, Osiris and
Dionysus also suffer and die to rise again. To become one with them is the mystical
passion of their worshippers. They are all alike in that their mysteries give
immortality. From Mithraism Christ takes the symbolic keys of heaven and hell
and assumes the function of the virgin-born Saoshyant, the destroyer of
the Evil One. Like Mithra, Merodach and the Egyptian Khousu, he is the
Mediator; like Khousu, Horus and Merodach, he is one of a trinity; like Horus
he is grouped with a divine Mother; like Khousu he is joined with the Logos;
and like Merodach he is associated with the holy spirit, one of whose symbols
is fire. In fundamentals, therefore, Christism is but paganism reshaped."
J. M. Robertson: Pagan Christs (Anno 1903)
"Roger Bacon (c.1220-1292), the most celebrated European scientist of the Middle Ages, sought 'to work out the natures and properties of things' - which included studying light and the rainbow and describing a process of making gunpowder -- he was accused of black magic. He failed to persuade Pope Clement IV to admit experimental sciences to the university curriculum, he had to write his scientific treaties in secrecy, and was imprisoned for 'suspected novelties.' . . . Early experimentalists were assumed to be in league with the Devil."
Daniel J. Boorstin: The Discoverers
"We are used to such ideas, (experimentation in colleges and workshops) so we forget the courage and the vision needed to propound them in (Francis) Bacon's day. We forget that to challenge the accepted epistemology - let alone to challenge God's cosmology and the mysteries of His universe - was to query also the established social and religious order. For this impudence, Bacon's Italian contemporaries - Galileo, Campanella, Giordano Bruno - were imprisoned as heretics, and one of them was burned at the stake."
"He (Bacon) was the prophet who urged men out of sterile scholasticism into adventurous, experimental future. . . . But it is the questions Bacon asks which are valuable, not the answers -- and this applies to his legal writings as to his philosophical ones. Certain of Bacon's scientific queries suggest in startling fashion the findings of the twentieth century."
"So eager is Bacon to have us, as he says, 'think things, not words'."
Catherine D. Bowen: Francis Bacon, the Temper of a Man (1963)
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