Quote of the Moment Archives

Jan-Mar 2003

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March 30, 2003:

"The three most powerful ideological groups in today's world, however, do know what they think: the Church, the Communist Party and the Liberal Establishment are united in their fanatic opposition to Ayn Rand; they recognize that her philosophy is the gravest threat to their power." - Leonard Peikoff, "Ayn Rand," The Objectivist Forum, June, 1982, p. 3.

March 27, 2003:

"There was no age limit for those condemned to the stake: women in their eighties and boys in their teens were treated in the same way as other heretics." - Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, (New Haven, CT: Yale Univeristy Press, 1998), p. 212.

March 24, 2003:

"If some people put up with dictatorship—as some do in Soviet Russia and as they did in Germany—they deserve whatever their government deserves." - Ayn Rand, Q & A with Ayn Rand on the Death of Innocents in War.

March 21, 2003:

"I have spoken in a respectful manner of the book of Job in the former part of the Age of Reason, but without knowing at that time what I have learned since, which is, that from all the evidence that can be collected the book of Job does not belong to the Bible." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1995), p. 133.

March 18, 2003:

"The argument for positive atheism in the sense of disbelief in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, completely free, disembodied being based on Epicurus's problem can be stated very simply: God is by definition all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. If God is all-powerful, He can prevent evil. If God is all-knowing and can prevent evil, He knows how to prevent evil. If God is all-good, He wants to prevent evil. But since there is evil, God cannot exist." - Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 335.

March 15, 2003:

"In the Hebrew Bible, as in mainstream Judaism to this day, Satan never appears as Western Christendom has come to know him, as the leader of an "evil empire," an army of hostile spirits who make war on God and humankind alike. As he first appears in the Hebrew Bible, Satan is not necessarily evil, much less opposed to God. On the contrary, he appears in the book of Numbers and in Job as one of God's obedient servants - a messenger, or angel, a word that translates the Hebrew term for messenger (mal'āk) into Greek (angelos). In Hebrew, the angels were often called "sons of God" (benē'elōhīm), and were envisioned as the hierarchical ranks of a great army, or the staff of a royal court." - Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan, (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 39.

March 12, 2003:

"Altruism is incompatible with capitalism - and with businessmen. Businessmen are a cheerful, benevolent, optimistic, predominantly American phenomenon. The essence of their job is the constant struggle to improve human life, to satisfy human needs and desires - not to practice resignation, surrender and worship of suffering. And here is the profound gulf between businessmen and altruism: businessmen do not sacrifice themselves to others - if they did, they would be out of business in a few months or days - they profit, they grow rich, they are rewarded, as they should be. This is what the altruists, the collectivists and other sundry "humanitarians" hate the businessman for: that they pursue a personal goal and succeed at it." - Ayn Rand, "The Sanction of the Victims," The Objectivist Forum, April, 1982, p. 4.

March 9, 2003:

"Like all religions, Christianity is incompatible ultimately with every virtue. It seems to take special pride, however, in its principled exhortation to injustice, particularly in the spiritual realm. If men are to have any chance for a future, it is this aspect of the Christian ethics above all others - this demand, at once brazen and mawkish, for unearned love, unearned approval, unearned forgiveness - that the West must reject, in favor of a solemn commitment to its moral antithesis: the trader principle." - Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, (New York: Mentor, 1993), p. 290.

March 6, 2003:

"...Paul also expresses ambivalence concerning the practical implications of human equality. Discussing the public activity of women in the churches, he argues from his own - traditionally Jewish - conception of a monistic, masculine God for a divinely ordained hierarchy of social subordination: as God has authority over Christ, he declares, citing Genesis 2-3, so man has authority over women." - Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 73.

March 3, 2003:

"Omnipotence contradicts omniscience. To be omniscient means that all future facts are known. This means that the set of knowable facts is fixed and unchangeable. If facts cannot be changed, then this limits the power of God. If God knows what will happen tomorrow, then he is impotent to change it. If he changes it anyway, then he was not omniscient." - Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist, (Madison, Wisconsin: The Freedom from Religion Foundation, 1992), p. 151.

February 28, 2003:

"A precondition of freedom is the recognition of the individual's capacity to make decisions for himself. If man were viewed as congenitally incapable of making rational choices, there would be no basis for the very concept of rights. Yet that is increasingly how our government views us. It is adopting the role of a paternalistic nanny, zealously protecting the citizen against his own actions. In the process, our freedom is disappearing." - Andrew Bernstein, The Threat of the Paternalistic State.

February 25, 2003:

"At root, Judeo-Christianity commands the believer to have faith in and sacrifice himself to God. Proponents of the political-right who want to politicize their religious beliefs generally seek to control the individual's mind by having government force him to obey (or to at least consider) God's alleged moral truths, as by censoring certain entertainment materials and by instituting prayer in public schools. Their counterparts on the political-left generally seek to control the individual's physical being by having government force him to accept the Crucifix's moral symbolism (i.e., the sacrifice of the ideal man to less virtuous men), as by welfare-statism." - Joseph Kellard, The Judeo-Christian Left.

February 22, 2003:

"The disillusionment of the modern intellectuals is usually described as a reaction to this century's numbing progression of wars, economic disasters, and the like. But this is not a full explanation; such events are not primaries; they are the products of certain ideas." - Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, (New York: Meridian, 1982), p. 278.

February 19, 2003:

"Observe the indecency of what passes for moral judgments today. An industrialist who produces a fortune, and a gangster who robs a bank are regarded as equally immoral, since they both sought wealth for their own 'selfish' benefit. A young man who gives up his career in order to support his parents and never rises beyond the rank of grocery clerk is regarded as morally superior to the young man who endures an excruciating struggle and achieves his personal ambition. A dictator is regarded as moral, since the unspeakable atrocities he committed were intended to benefit 'the people', not himself." - Ayn Rand, "Introduction," The Virtue of Selfishness, (New York: Signet: 1964), p. viii.

February 16, 2003:

"Perception is our normal mode of experience. It is the normal result of using our senses, and the basis for our ordinary judgments about the objects around us. Sensations are experienced only in unusual circumstances, and pure sensations are probably not possible for an adult with normal faculties. Both sensation and perception are products of our sensory systems, in response to stimulation, and exactly the same stimulus might give rise to a sensation in one subject, a percept in another." - David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses: A Realist Theory of Perception, (Baton Rouge, LA: Lousiana State University Press, 1986), p. 49.

February 13, 2003:

"Integrity is the virtue of remaining loyal to one's convictions and values. A man who is able to hold to a principled course of action, to pursue his values relentlessly, without compromise, and to do so under duress and the scorn of others, deserves our deepest respect." - John Ridpath, America Needs a Leader Like George Washington.

February 10, 2003:

"The most striking feature of the early documents is that they do not set Jesus' life in a specific historical situation. There is no Galilean ministry, no teaching, no parables, no miracles, no Passion in Jerusalem, no indication of time, place or attendant circumstances at all. Instead, Jesus figures as a basically supernatural personage obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, "emptied" then, as Paul puts it, of all his supernatural powers (Phil. 2:6-11). He was indeed crucified for our redemption, yet the Passion is not as in the gospels. In Paul, for instance, there is no cleansing of the Temple (which according to Mark and Luke was responsible for the decision of the chief priests and the scribes to kill Jesus), no conflict with the authorities, no agony in Gethsemene, no trial, no thieves crucified with Jesus, no weeping women, no word about the place or the time of the crucifixion, and no mention of Judas or Pilate. Paul's colourless references to the crucifixion might be accepted as unproblematic if it were unimportant for him compared with, say, the resurrection. But he himself declares it to be the substance of his preaching (1 Cor. 1:23 and 2:2)." - G. A. Wells, A Reply to J. P. Holding's "Shattering" of My Views and an Examination of the Early Pagan and Jewish References to Jesus.

February 7, 2003:

"Virtually all of the Arab regimes in the Middle East are at or close to a point of collapse. The Arabs have not shared in the massive wave of economic prosperity that has swept the world over the last two decades. Arab governments remain wedded to discredited ideas of command economies and political oppression like those which devastated the Communist world. Political unrest is growing in the Arab world and Islamic radicalism is spreading." - Daniel G. Jennings, Why I Support the War.

February 4, 2003:

"The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes it ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, (New York: Carol Publishing, 1974), p. 119.

February 1, 2003:

"If the existence of one atheist Nazi shows some relationship between atheism and Nazism, imagine how much more of a relationship is demonstrated by the tens of thousands, if not millions, of xian Nazis. Xians typically deny that such people, Nazis, are really xians, but there is plenty of biblical support for such conduct. Hitler claimed to believe in the xian god and acted accordingly. He committed genocide in the grand tradition of Moses, Joshua, Saul, David and so on. Since the god of the bible ordered genocide, I challenge xian apologists, including [Paul] Copan and [Ravi] Zacharias, to show conclusively that Hitler was not fulfilling god's will. It is unlikely that they will attempt to do so." - Doug Krueger, Copin' with Copan: The Defense of Zacharias that Fails.

January 29, 2003:

"Unlike the accounts of Jesus raising Lazarus or the synagogue ruler's daughter or Jesus himself being raised, [Matthew 27:52-53] depicts saints dead for way over "three days" being raised. And, from the phrase, "they entered the holy city and appeared to many," it is possible to infer that these many raised saints showed themselves to many who were not believers! Yet Josephus, who wrote a history of Jerusalem both prior to and after her fall, i.e., forty years after the death of Jesus, knew of Jesus but nothing of this raising of many and appearing to many. Of this greatest of all miracles, not a rumor appears in the works of Josephus or of any other ancient author." - Ed Babinski, What Happened to the Resurrected Saints?.

January 26, 2003:

"Unlike the philosopher, the theologian adopts a position of dogma, and then commits himself to a defense of that position come what may. While he may display a willingness to defend this dogma, closer examination reveals this to be a farce. His defense consists of distorting and rationalizing all contrary evidence to meet his desired specifications. In the case of divine benevolence, the theologian will grasp onto any explanation, no matter how implausible, before he will abandon his dogma. And when finally pushed into a corner, he will argue that man cannot understand the true meaning of this dogma." - George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1979), pp. 86-87.

January 23, 2003:

"Just as there is nothing concrete which makes the belief in God unwarranted, there is nothing concrete which makes the belief in vampires or leprechauns unwarranted. Both are types of entities such that if they didn't exist, it would be impossible to show that they don't. If lack of evidence of absence is sufficient grounds for forming a belief, one's worldview will quickly lose connection to reality. Of course, your belief in God is a special instance. That there is nothing which makes belief in time travellers unwarranted isn't enough to make you believe in time travellers." - Vladimir Kornea, Re: Ultimate Irrationalism (from the Apologia List).

January 20, 2003:

"In ancient times, the premise of some sort of supernatural dimension was universally assumed. In Paul's encounter with the intelligentsia of Athens on Mars Hill [Acts 17:16-29], we see the permeation of the philosophers' thought with the polytheism that would ultimately prove so inferior in depth and poignancy to the Jewish monotheism and its progeny. Rationalized denial of the operativity of one or more gods would not come until modern times, and precious little in the Bible lends itself to application for defense against rationalized or scientific challenge to itself." - Edmund D. Cohen, The Mind of the Bible-Believer, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 176.

January 17, 2003:

"There's a third, unexpected reason that transitions seem so little known. It's that even when they are found, they're not popularized. The only times a transitional fossil is noticed much is if it connects two noticably different groups (such as the 'walking whale' fossil reported in 1993), or if [it] illustrates something about the tempo and mode of evolution..." - Kathleen Hunt, Part 1a of Transitional Vertebrate Fossil FAQ.

January 14, 2003:

"Religion cannot be the basis of freedom and capitalism because of its inherently authoritarian nature. Religion demands acceptance on faith. It demands obedient followers. It demands the subordination of the individual’s mind and the individual’s interests to the dictates of some higher authority. Under capitalism, by contrast, the individual is supreme. Capitalism recognizes the autonomy of the individual citizen and the inalienability of his individual rights. This is the most fundamental reason why, where faith is culturally dominant — in the Dark Ages dominated by the medieval church or in the theocracy run by the ayatollahs of contemporary Iran — political/economic freedom is stifled." - Andrew Bernstein, Religion and Capitalism Are Antithetical.

January 11, 2003:

"The disadvantage of following reality is that you also need to follow its complexity. Fictional positions are not bound to this restriction." - François Tremblay , How to Debate a Christian.

January 8, 2003:

"Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence. As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists. In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil which makes the forest possible. " - Ayn Rand, "Philosopher: Who Needs It," Philosophy: Who Needs It, (New York: Signet, 1984), p. 2.

January 5, 2003:

"Perception by its nature is the awareness of external objects. This awareness is the function of a certain type of cognitive system, operating by means of the sense organs. Other systems produce other modes of experience - such as dreams and imagination - that are in certain respects similar to perceiving. But these are other systems, other modes of experience. " - David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses: A Realist Theory of Perception, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), p. 143.

January 2, 2003:

"'You must realize that to talk of deception, whether in the form of a mirage, illusion or hallucination, makes sense only in contrast to a wider context of nondeception. In order to say that one's interpretation of sensory evidence is incorrect, one must be able to distinguish incorrect from correct interpretations. Otherwise, what would it mean to speak of mistaken identification? Mistaken as opposed to what? What would it mean, for example, to speak of counterfeit coins, unless in contradistinction to genuine coins?'" - George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), p. 156.

 

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