Quote of the Moment Archives
Apr-Jun 2002
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June 29, 2002:
"Many biblical books have the earmarks of fiction. For example, private
conversations are often related when no reporter was present. Conversations
between God and various individuals are recorded. Prehistoric events are given
in great detail. When a story is told by more than one author, there are usually
significant differences. Many stories--stories which in their original context
are considered even by Christians to be fictional--were borrowed by the biblical
authors, adapted for their own purposes, given a historical setting, and then
declared to be fact."
- Donald Morgan,
Introduction to the Bible and Biblical Problems.
June 26, 2002:
"The abdication of German political Catholicism in 1933, negotiated and imposed from the Vatican by
[future Pope Pius XII Eugenio] Pacelli with the agreement of Pope Pius XI, ensured that Nazism could
rise unopposed by the most powerful Catholic community in the world - a reverse of the situation
sixty years earlier, when German Catholics combated and defeated Bismarck's Kulturkampf persecutions
from the grass roots. As Hitler himself boasted in a cabinet meeting on July 14, 1933, Pacelli's
guarantee of nonintervention left the regime free to resolve the Jewish question."
- John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII,
(New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 7.
June 23, 2002:
"The vital germs of virtually every modern science had thus their origin and some notable development
in the fertile minds of the Greek thinkers and in their great schools of thought, in the centuries
which preceded the Advent of he 'Perfect Teacher' and his divinely instituted successors in schoolcraft.
If these profound researches into Nature had been included in the Curriculum of the Church, rather than
fire and sword employed to extirpate them and all who ventured to pursue them, the Holy Church would
not have had the 'Dark Ages of Faith' to record and apologize for. To what perfection of Civilization
and Knowledge might Humanity have arrived in these 2000 years wasted on the Supernatural, and the 'Sacred
Science of Christianity'!"
- Joseph Wheless, Forgery in Christianity:
A Documented Record of the Foundations of the Christian Religion,
(Kessinger Publishing), p. 333.
June 20, 2002:
"Reason involves three factors: the senses, logic, and concepts. The metaphysical basis of logic
(and the rules of deduction) was identified by Aristotle. The validity of the senses was established
by Aristotle, elaborated by Thomas Aquinas, and fully clarified by Ayn Rand. But in the absence
of an objective theory of concepts, the relation of reason to reality remained problematic. Until
the 'problem of universals' could be solved, reason lay vulnerable to the tricks and sophistries
that centuries of mind-hating philosophers used against it. To defend reason and to understand it
properly, this was the problem that had to be solved."
- Harry Binswanger, "Ayn Rand's Philosophic
Achievement," The Objectivist Forum, June, 1982, p. 10.
June 17, 2002:
"When Gospel writing finally did enter the Christian enterprise some four to seven decades after
the conclusion of Jesus' earthly life, and some two decades after Paul first began to write,
the struggle to articulate the meaning of Christ continued. We can watch it flowing beneath the
words chosen by the evangelists, if we know how to read the symbols. The experience of Jesus
clearly needed to be narrated. In these Gospel stories the Jesus experience would be explained,
interpreted, and rationalized in terms of a first-century Jewish worldview. Inevitably, this
meant that the Jesus experience would be distorted."
- John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must
Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile, (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 107.
June 14, 2002:
"The hallmark of a human conceptual mind is the organization of its content into a
unified, non-contradictory whole. It's a mind in which knowledge does not stand as isolated bits of data to be stored away in
mental compartments sealed off from one another. It is a mind that integrates each piece of
knowledge with everything else, from abstractions to concretes. It is a mind that actively seeks
to relate what it knows about [for example] earning a living with what it knows about
about philosophy, with what it knows about science, with what it knows about an upcoming vacation,
with what it knows about economics, with what it knows about love, etc., etc... [T]his is a
proper consciousness, a consciousness geared to deal successfully with reality."
- Peter Schwarz,
Integration by Essentials,"
taped lecture, Side A.
June 11, 2002:
"Mark never explains Gentile matters, such as who Pilate was. However, he assumes
that his intended readers know even less about Judaism than he does and he has
to explain the most elementary features. By contrast, Matthew makes more use of
Judaism and assumes his readers are up to speed. Was Mark really a Jewish
companion of Peter, or someone who was very close to the earliest, Jewish ,
followers of Jesus?"
- Steven Carr, Are the Gospels Eyewitness
Accounts? (Part 1).
June 8, 2002:
"The ostensible purpose of prayer is to get godly things done. Collectively, prayers are somehow
to give the omnipotent God needed help in accomplishing his purposes. Actually, prayer is an
endless exercize in internalizing the group ethos and forcing the conscious mind to conform to it.
Prayer comes down to self-brainwashing. the obsessive, insomniac quality of prayer, if it is truly
biblical, is rather plainly expressed in some passages."
- Edmund D. Cohen, The Mind of the Bible-Believer,
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 297.
June 5, 2002:
"Absolutely nothing! The word "abortion" does not appear in any translation of
the bible! ...Out of more than 600 laws of Moses, none comments on abortion. One Mosaic law
about miscarriage specifically contradicts the claim that the bible is
antiabortion, clearly stating that miscarriage does not involve the death of a
human being. If a woman has a miscarriage as the result of a fight, the man who
caused it should be fined."
- Annie Laurie Gaylor, What Does the Bible
Say about Abortion?.
June 2, 2002:
"In sum, Paul has a different view of Jesus from that of the evangelists. In the gospels, Jesus'
lifetime is not consigned to a vague past, but is firmly set in the first half of the first
century in Palestine by linkage with such historical figures as John the Baptist and Pontius
Pilate. He does not live obscurely, but works prodigious miracles and impresses great crowds.
And he delivers extensive teachings on ethics and on the circumstances which will attend his
supernatural return to earth and the end of the world associated with it. How is it that these
gospels, written only a generation later than Paul's letters, give such a different picture?
And if Paul did not regard Jesus as a contemporary (or near contemporary) preacher and miracle-
worker, on what was his view of Jesus based?"
- G. A. Wells,
The Historical Evidence for Jesus,
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 37.
May 30, 2002:
"In a benevolent universe, where the achievement of values is possible to man, success would be the
natural, the normal, the to-be-expected - and the sky would be the limit. In a malevolent universe,
however, success would of necessity be an exception to the rule - and the first ant hill in one's
path would be the limit."
- Leonard Peikoff, "An Exercise in Philosophical
Detection," The Objectivist Forum, December, 1981, p. 8.
May 27, 2002:
"One will search in vain for a single instance of an attack on reason, on the
senses, on the ontological status of the laws of logic, on the cognitive
efficacy of man's mind, that does not rest on the fallacy of the stolen concept.
The fallacy consists of the act of using a concept while ignoring, contradicting
or denying the validity of the concepts on which it logically and genetically
depends."
- Nathaniel Branden, The Stolen
Concept.
May 24, 2002:
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and
his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that
the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I
contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which
declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of
separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme
will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with
sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to
man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to
his social duties."
- Thomas Jefferson,
Letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802).
May 21, 2002:
"One of the first issues to be debated by Christians was whether they were a new religion. The first
followers of Jesus were centered in and around Jerusalem under the leadership of Jesus' brother, James,
and two of his disciples, Peter and John. These early Jewish-Christians understood Christianity in terms
of its Jewish past and they continued their observance of Jewish ritual practices exemplified by
dietary requirements and circumcision... Paul, in contrast, was concerned with interpreting
Christianity to the wider non-Jewish world and argued that Christianity required only an affirmation
of faith in Christ. Consequently, in Paul's understanding the requirements of Jewish law were not a
necessary prerequisite of the faith. Paul's Chrsitianity had its historical roots in Judaism, but
theologically it was an autonomous and thus new religion... A compromise between Jewish and Pauline
gentile Christianity was reached at the Apostolic Council of 48 c.e. The Jerusalem church would
minister to the circumcised, and Paul would minister to 'the uncircumcised,' that is, to the gentile
world (Gal. 2:7-9)."
- Luther H. Martin,
Hellenistic Religions: An Introduction,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 118-119.
May 18, 2002:
"The most telling moment in the gospels... is when Mark has Jesus quote from the Old Testament in
his arguments against the Pharisees. Nothing surprising about this - except that Jesus quotes from the
mistranslated Greek version of the Old Testament, which suits his purpose precisely, not from the
original Hebrew, which says something quite different and unhelpful to his argument. That Jesus the
Jew should quote a Greek mistranslation of Jewish Holy Scripture to impress orthodox Jewish Pharisees
is simply unthinkable. It does make sense, however, if the whole incident were made up by one of the
hundreds of thousands of Greek-speaking Jews who no longer spoke their native tongue and could not
read their scriptures untranslated, hence attributing to Jesus their own misunderstandings."
- Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy,
The Jesus Mysteries: Was the 'Original Jesus' a Pagan God?,
(London: Thorsons, 1999), p. 144.
May 15, 2002:
"The law of identity does not attempt to freeze reality. Change exists; it is a fact of reality.
When a thing is changing, that is what it is doing, that is its identity for that period. What is
still is still. What is in process is in process. A is A."
- Harry Binswanger, "Q & A Department," The
Objectivist Forum, December, 1981, p. 14.
May 12, 2002:
"The oldest and crudest form of a rule sanction is the use or threat of physical force. This is
manifested in Christianity by the doctrine of hell... The belief in eternal torment, still subscribed to by fundamentalist Christian denominations,
undoubtedly ranks as the most vicious and reprehensible doctrine of classical Christianity. It has
resulted in an incalculable amount of psychological torture, especially among children where it
is employed as a terror tactic to prompt obedience."
- George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God,
(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), p. 299.
May 9, 2002:
"Every proper value-judgment is the identification of a fact: a given object or
action advances man’s life (it is good): or it threatens man’s life (it is bad
or an evil). The good, therefore, is a species of the true; it is a form of
recognizing reality. The evil is a species of the false; it is a form of
contradicting reality. Or: values are a type of facts; they are facts considered
in relation to the choice to live."
- Leonard Peikoff, Fact and Value.
May 6, 2002:
"Strictly speaking, nothing in this prophecy [Jeremiah 23:5-6] came true, and certainly not as
reflected in Jesus’ own career. But the point is, such ‘prophecies’ were
concerned with the idea of a renewed monarchy, the hoped-for restoration of the
kingship in the hereditary line of David. They were the fanciful future
mythology of a people conquered by one empire after another, desperate to be
freed from their yoke."
- Earl Doherty, Jesus
as Fulfillment of Prophecy, excerpted from his book Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-
Examination of Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ.
May 3, 2002:
"It is folly to claim, as Christians do, that this priestly invented scheme of the Atonement
manifests a spirit of divine forgiveness. Instead of being a forgiving
plan, it is one of exaction and vengeance. According to the story, God demands
and receives payment before he grants pardon; Christ exacts belief in himself as
the condition of salvation; and he who sins against the Holy Ghost is never to
be forgiven."
- Charles Watts, The Death of Christ.
April 30, 2002:
"Ever the quick study, I decided to take those Christians up on their advice and
once again found myself back in the Bible trying to figure out how one is
'saved'. Logic would dictate that obtaining this salvation would be fairly
straightforward and laid out in one easy-to-understand book—especially if said
creator of this book wanted to make sure His followers were indeed 'saved'. Of
course, upon investigation I found that this is not the case. One Christian
denomination tells us the "saved" were predestined. One tells us that baptism is
required. Another says baptism is a ritual and that salvation comes through
belief in Christ’s sacrifice. Others say Christ’s sacrifice alone is enough. Yet
another stresses good works or the grace of God."
- Thomas Doubting, Christian Salvation?.
April 27, 2002:
"There are a few instances of unrelieved factual contradictions in the Bible, mostly in the Old
Testament. These have little bearing on hte hortatory content of the Bible, and emphasis in the
past, on the part of organized atheists, on them and on apparent contradictions that can be
explained away, has protected believers from hearing unbiblical criticism well-targeted to their
vulnerabilities and latent doubts. The uncamouflaged contradictions are all strategically placed,
safely away from the consequential issues. For the believer, such contradictions can always be
explained away as scribal errors not material to the spiritual teaching, as testing devices put
there to help cull out the unfaithful from the faithful, or lofty teachings whose meanings the
Holy Spirit is not yet ready to reveal."
- Edmund D. Cohen, The Mind of the Bible-Believer,
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 213.
April 24, 2002:
"Any theory that propounds an opposition between the logical and the empirical, represents a
failure to grasp the nature of logic and its role in human cognition. Man's knowledge is not
acquired by logic apart from experience or by experience apart from logic, but by the application
of logic to experience. All truths are the product of a logical identification of the facts
of experience."
- Leonard Peikoff, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,"
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Second Revised Edition, (New York: Meridian,
1990), p. 112.
April 21, 2002:
"All consciousness is reason. All reason is logic. Everything that comes between consciousness and
logic is a disease. Religion - the greatest disease of mankind."
- Ayn Rand, "From Ayn Rand's Unpublished Writings:
Philosophic Journal," Harry Binswanger, editor, The Objectivist Forum, August, 1983, p. 7.
April 18, 2002:
"In the genesis of ideas, the first mode in which reflection on religion, or theology, makes the
divine being a distinct being, and places him outside of man, is by making the existence of God the
object of a formal proof."
- Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity,
George Eliot, trans., (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), p. 198.
April 15, 2002:
"Liberty is the protector of man's values. It does not per se advance man's life; rather, it is
the absence of that which threatens his life (i.e., force). In that sense, it is similar to the
locks on doors: they do not create any wealth, they simply allow people to keep what they have
already produced. The value of a lock depends first upon the value of that which it is protecting.
Nobody could agitate for the universal installation of dead-bolt locks and burglar alarms in order
to secure homeowners' goods against theft, and at the same time declare that it does not matter to
him whether the homes actually contain any goods or not; or whether material possessions should be
valued or morally condemned; or even whether people's property really exists or is merely a figment
of their subjective consciousnesses."
- Peter Schwarz, Libertarianism: The Perversion
of Liberty, (New York: The Intellectual Activist, 1986), p. 45.
April 12, 2002:
"The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist
in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity) is the equivalent of the basic
principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value,
but may be given any value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic,
but conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition."
- Ayn Rand, "Concept-Formation,"Introduction to
Objectivist Epistemology, Second Revised Edition, (New York: Meridian, 1990), p. 18.
April 9, 2002:
"Even if the cosmological argument did show, in one of its versions, that a necessary being had to
exist, or that there had to be a first cause or mover, that first thing or necessary being could have
simply been the universe itself. This explanation is simpler than the explanation that god and
the universe exist. The simpler view is more likely to be true than its rival, since the 'universe
only' model assumes less than the other model. For any two rival theories, all other things being
equal, the theory with fewer assumptions has the greater probability of being true. This is a
principle accepted in science and philosophy, and with good reason."
- Douglas E. Krueger, What is Atheism? A Short
Introduction, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 151.
April 6, 2002:
"Since religion is a primitive form of philosophy - an attempt to offer a comprehensive view of
reality - many of its myths are distorted, dramatized allegories based on some element of truth,
some actual, if profoundly elusive, aspect of man's existence."
- Ayn Rand, "Philosophy and Sense of Life,"The
Romantic Manifesto, Second Revised Edition, (New York: Signet, 1975), p. 25.
April 3, 2002:
"It has often been noted that a proof of God would be fatal to religion: a God susceptible of proof
would have to be finite and limited; He would be one entity among others within the universe, not
a mystic omnipotence transcending science and reality. What nourishes the spirit of religion is not
proof, but faith, i.e., the undercutting of man's mind."
- Leonard Peikoff, "'Maybe You're Wrong',"The
Objectivist Forum, April 1981, p. 12.
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