Quote of the Moment Archives

Jul-Sep 2002

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September 30, 2002:

"It is impossible that this passage is entirely genuine. It is highly unlikely that Josephus, a believing Jew working under Romans, would have written [of Jesus], 'He was the Messiah'. This would make him suspect of treason, but nowhere else is there an indication that he was a Christian. Indeed, in Wars of the Jews, Josephus declares that Vespasian fulfilled the messianic oracles. Furthermore, Origen, writing about a century before Eusebius, says twice that Josephus 'did not believe in Jesus as the Christ'." - Peter Kirby, Testimonium Flavianum.

September 27, 2002:

"The government has no source of revenue, except the taxes paid by the producers. To free itself - for a while - from the limits set by reality, the government initiates a credit con game on a scale which the private manipulator could not dream of. It borrows money from you today, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you tomorrow, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you day after tomorrow, and so on. This is known as 'deficit financing'. It is made possible by the fact that the government cuts the connection between goods and money. It issues paper money, which is used as a claim check on actually existing goods - but that money is not backed by any goods, it is not backed by gold, it is backed by nothing. It is a promissory note issued to you in exchange for your goods, to be paid by you (in the form of taxes) out of your future production." - Ayn Rand, "Egalitarianism and Inflation," Philosophy: Who Needs It, (New York: Signet, 1984), p. 133.  

September 24, 2002:

"Since Copernicus and Galileo, it has become clear that Plato's upthrust finger points only at the cold emptiness of outer space. Now that men have walked on the moon and laid bare the structure of the atom, mysticism has lost all credibility in the physical realm. But mysticism still haunts the realm of values. That realm has been fenced off as a special epistemological preserve which reason may not enter. Mysticism has distorted the very concepts used to make value-judgments. Many people who reject the metaphysics of the supernatural are yet victimized by the residual mysticism that infects their evaluative concepts." - Harry Binswanger, "The Possible Dream," The Objectivist Forum, February, 1981, p. 1.

September 21, 2002:

"From a post hoc perspective, anything can be made to seem 'miraculous'. Because these miracle claims are devised after the fact, and based on a need to believe that Jesus is real and that he performs miracles, Christians will latch onto any improbable event that fits a preformed expectation they have in their minds, but they ignore the thousands of other "improbable events" they see every day but never notice because they carry no religious weight for them." - Bruce Monson, Post Hoc Miracles.

September 18, 2002:

"Objectivity lies in the means of proving or grounding some claim, not in the range of its applicability. Such a proof, if we can obtain it, will connect the claims (or judgments) we make with the world itself that judgments aim to identify correctly. That is the point of stressing objectivity, to note the connection between what we judge, claim, think, etc., with what is the case, with reality." - Tibor R. Machan, Why Objective Seems Subjective in Ethics.

September 15, 2002:

"To review biblical stories and analyze their unsound, primitive ideas could waste years. It is far easier to undermine all religions, simultaneously, without discrimination, by exposing their root irrational root cause. Traditional philosophic arguments bearing on god belief foolishly first assume a mythical god exists and then show that god's attributes are insupportable. To realize that the idea of a Space Spook represents a simple error of logic, requires only a short essay if properly done." - Charles Schisler, Liberty and Atheism: An Exercise in Logic, (North Palm Beach, FL: Charles Schisler, 1998), p. 1.

September 12, 2002:

"Tennessee, of course, was the state where in 1925, still within the memory of many people living today, a teacher was put on trial for insisting on teaching the theory of evolution. Fundamentalist Christianity had forced its way into the classroom and required teachers to toe the line on the Bible. The fundamentalists at that time had the support of the state, whose legislature forbade the teaching of evolution." - Richard Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Virtue: How the Battle Over Multiculturalism is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, Our Lives, (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 140.

September 9, 2002:

"What is the psychological difference between the 'rhythm method' and other means of contraception? The difference lies in the fact that, using the 'rhythm method', a couple cannot regard sexual enjoyment as a right and as an end in itself. With the help of some hypocrisy, they merely sneak and snatch some personal pleasure, while keeping the marriage act 'open to the transmission of life', thus acknowledging that childbirth is the only moral justification of sex and that only by the grace of the calendar are they unable to comply." - Ayn Rand, "Of Living Death," The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, (New York: Meridian, 1990), p. 53.

September 6, 2002:

"Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements - and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual acheivements of individual men." - Ayn Rand, "Racism," The Virtue of Selfishness, (New York: Signet, 1964), p.127.

September 3, 2002:

"Clement argues that God, the God of Israel, alone rules all things: he is the lord and master whom all must obey; he is the judge who lays down the law, punishing rebels and rewarding the obedient. But how is God's rule actually administered? Here Clement's theology becomes practical: God, he says, delegates his 'authority of reign' to 'rulers and leaders on earth'. Who are these designated rulers? Clement answers that they are bishops, priests, and deacons. Whoever refuses to 'bow the neck' and obey the church leaders is guilty of insubordination against the divine master himself. Carried away with his argument, Clement warns that whoever disobeys the divinely ordained authorities 'receives the death penalty'." - Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), pp. 40-41.

August 31, 2002:

"Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, 'Considered by daylight... and without prejudice, this famous Ontological Proof is really a charming joke'. One is tempted to agree. Yet, as we have seen, some well-known philosophers who have reputations as profound thinkers have taken it quite seriously. Given the problems with the argument outlined here, it is difficult to understand why they do." - Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 95.

August 28, 2002:

"Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy. Aristotle lived up to it and, in part, so did Plato, Aquinas, Spinoza - but how many others? It is earlier than we think." - Ayn Rand, "The Chicken's Homecoming," The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, (New York: Signet, 1971), p. 108.  

August 25, 2002:

"The oft-made claim that only religion can provide an objective standard for ethics is actually an assertion that there is no rational basis for ethics, but by proposing an arbitrary belief system somehow the ethics you derive from it are objective! For if there was a rational basis, 'faith' would not be needed. Unfortunately, a system derived from arbitrary claims is itself arbitrary, because it has no connection to the facts of reality: as the branches of a rootless tree have no link to the earth. So the essential moral claim of faith is this: 'there are no rational ethics, but if you just believe, then you will have a guide for living'. And that is just another way of saying 'ethics are arbitrary': a fine idea, if your aim is to disarm men's minds and pave the way for the first demagogic thug who comes along." - Robin Craig, The Ethics of Faith.

August 22, 2002:

"Jewish monotheism did not stop the Jewish authors of the Wisdom literature from speculating about semi-divine figures, any more than Christian monotheism has prevented Christians from seeing Jesus as God. In this connection it is relevant to keep in mind what may be called the degradation of ideas, something very often significant in religious history. Statements which may perhaps have originated as merely what [Christian apologist Professor J.] Dunn calls ‘some form of poetic hyperbole’ can readily be taken more literally in the course of their transmission." - G. A. Wells, Earliest Christianity.

August 19, 2002:

"...it can be seen that fundamentalists are not really defending a minor book of the Old Testament when they insist that Jonah was a real person and that his story, including the whale, is history. Rather, they are defending the words of Jesus [in Matt. 12:40]. [Christian apologist Gleason] Archer [says] that, as Jesus' resurrection was factual and served as an antitype of Jonah, the story of Jonah had to be factual as well, since a fictional past episode cannot serve as a prophetic source for a future literal fulfillment. What Archer does not consider is that if the story of Jonah were accepted as an important allegory by the people to whom Jesus spoke, then it would be logical for Jesus to use it as an allegory for death and resurrection. Jesus' allusion to the story does not require us to believe that he took it literally." - Tim Callahan, Bible Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment? (Altadena, CA: Millennium Press, 1997), p. 147.

August 16, 2002:

"There is as far as I have seen nothing significant about Christianity that was novel: everything of importance had precedents in other religions, pagan or Jewish, and can easily be explained as a syncretic combining of numerous different ideas into one. The combination was certainly novel and unique, as every religion is, but not inexplicable." - Richard Carrier, Osiris and Pagan Resurrection Myths: Assessing the Till-McFall Exchange.

August 13, 2002:

"[Jean] Calvin... had never asserted that consciences should be free. How could the perfected society of the elect tolerate among it those who challenged its rules? The obvious answer to critics was to expel them from the city, following excommunication. If they attempted to remonstrate, they were executed. But execution, Calvin found, was also useful to inspire terror and thus bring about compliance. One of his favourite ways of triumphing over an opponent was to make him burn his books publicly with his own hands... He was particularly severe with anyone who rebelled against his own rule, or who used the New Learning to challenge the doctrine of the Trinity." - Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, (New York: Touchstone, 1995), p. 289.  

August 10, 2002:

"Predestination seems to make out that all of us, all the time, whether we know it or not, both when by ordinary standards we are acting freely and could help doing what we choose to do and when we are acting under compulsion or when we are not acting at all but are asleep or paralyzed - all of us are, really and ultimately, as it were, acting out the irresistible suggestions of the Great Hypnotist. This idea is incompatible with that of our being free agents, properly accountable for what we do." - Antony Flew, "Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom," in Critiques of God: Making the Case Against Belief in God, ed. Peter A. Angeles, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), p. 234.  

August 7, 2002:

"Religionists rarely, if ever, object to bible verses being 'taken out of context' by clergypersons. Only when someone begins to take too close a look at bible law and lore, to judge it like any other book, to dare to criticize its teachings does 'context' become a consideration." - Annie Laurie Gaylor, Woe to the Women: The Bible Tells Me So, (Madison, WI: Freedom From Religion Foundation, 1988), p. iii.

August 4, 2002:

"The principle here is clear: there can be no philosophic breach between thought and action. The consequences of the epistemology of religion is the politics of tyranny. If you cannot reach the truth by your own mental powers, but must offer obedient faith to a cognitive authority, then you are not your own intellectual master; in such a case, you cannot guide your behavior by your judgment, either, but must be submissive in action as well. This is the reason why, historically - as Ayn Rand has pointed out - faith and force are always corollaries; each requires the other." - Leonard Peikoff, "Religion Versus America," The Objectivist Forum, June, 1986, p. 7.  

August 1, 2002:

"Because of the fall of Adam in the garden, and unlike the leaders of the Eastern Orthodox Church, both Ambrose and Augustine believed in original sin and that the responsibility for it lay with the genitals. Men should be ashamed of the lusts they felt stirring there; and it was wrong for married coupls to make love whenever they felt like it instead of waiting until bedtime." - Sir Ludovic Kennedy, All in the Mind: A Farewell to God, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), p. 103.

July 29, 2002:

"The introduction of 'group rights' also results in unresolvable conflicts with 'individual rights'. 'Group rights' are rights that are possessed by a group of people (such as by women, blacks, or gays) simply by virtue of belonging to that group, whereas 'individual rights' are rights possessed by all individuals by virtue of their status as autonomous beings." - Diana Mertz Hsieh, The Roots of Dictatorship and Freedom.

July 26, 2002:

"In Rand's Russia, religion offered the only organized opposition to the Bolsheviks. Religion was viewed as communism's natural enemy. Whereas communism was atheistic and materialistic, religion celebrated God's existence and human spiritual redemption... Rand examined this opposition between two dominant Russian cultural forces and refused to accept their apparent hostility as evidence for their mutual exclusivity. She recognized that something fundamental united the communists and the believers. Tracing their essential similarities became one of Rand's earliest philosophical preoccupations... For Rand, communism was a secular substitute for religion. Like the Church before it, communism subjugated the individual to an allegedly higher power. In this respect, religion and communism were identical. The main difference between them was their respective agencies of domination. For believers, it was God; for the communists, it was the state." - Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 98.

July 23, 2002:

"Incredibly, Strobel's discussion of this 'rebuttal evidence' does not even include a summary of that evidence. Not only did Strobel fail to interview a single member of the Jesus Seminar, Strobel neglected to quote or even summarize the Jesus Seminar's arguments for their position. Again, this is odd for someone who is promoted as a journalist. Instead, Strobel chose to interview an avowed enemy of the Jesus Seminar--Greg Boyd--and wrote a chapter that is full of a conclusionary statements but short on arguments which support these conclusions." - Jeffrey Jay Lowder, The Rest of the Story, a review of Lee Strobel's The Case For Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus.

July 20, 2002:

"A proof requires the use of premises known independently of the conclusion. A proof of the primacy of existence could not begin by premising facts external to consciousness, since that would beg the question. But it could not begin by premising facts about consciousness itself, since the very thesis implies that such facts cannot be known before we have knowldge of the external world. To attempt the latter sort of proof, as some realists have, is simply to endorse a Cartesian view that undercuts their case. The primacy of existence is therefore not a conclusion at all. It must serve as an axiomatic foundation for any inquiry into the nature and functioning of our cognitive capacities." - David Kelley, The Evidence of thee Senses, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), p. 30.

July 17, 2002:

"Unlike the doctrine of the Incarnation there has never been anything like an official theory of the Atonement that has been accepted by most Christians and whose nonacceptance would put them beyond the fold. It is significant that none of the official creeds of Christendom state explicitly why there was an incarnation, why Jesus as the incarnation of the Son of God died on the cross, why he was resurrected from the dead, and why in order to be saved one must have faith in him. This lack of creedal acknowledgment and sanction of a theory of the Atonement suggests an unwillingness among Christians to be committed to the same theory." - Michael Martin, The Case Against Christianity, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), p. 157.

July 14, 2002:

"Intrinsicism is associated with mysticism, since some non-sensory, non-rational means of cognition is required to grasp the supposed universals. Subjectivism is associated with skepticism: realizing that no universal archetype or essence is to be found in metaphysical reality, the subjectivist, still regarding this as the only possible means of conceptual knowledge, concludes that concepts, absolutes, principles are fantasy creations, and that 'anything goes' is the motto of enlightenment. The essence of the subjectivist attitude is that expressed by one of Dostoevsky's characters: 'Since God does not exist, everything is permitted'." - Harry Binswanger, "Ayn Rand's Philosophic Achievement: Part IV," The Objectivist Forum, Dec., 1982, p. 5. 

July 11, 2002:

"Who 'decides'? In politics, in ethics, in art, in science, in philosophy - in the entire realm of human knowledge - it is reality that sets the terms, through the work of those men who are able to identify its terms and to translate them into objective principles." - Ayn Rand, "Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?" The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, (New York: Meridian, 1990), p. 22.

July 8, 2002:

"With their strong emotional appeal, such articles of faith [as the birth of Jesus] can long survive, even when, for many people, they have ceased to carry complete conviction. As the charming stories of events surrounding the birth of the god-man some 2,000 years ago are recited and enacted every Christmas, few celebrants will be troubled by thoughts as to whether such a birth ever occurred, or whether the accompanying miracles ever took place. Hundreds of years before Christianity, the birth, life, and exploits of Herakles were celebrated by the Greeks, and few worshippers will have questioned the belief that their hero, still in his cradle, actually strangled the serpents sent by the goddess Hera to destroy him. Philosophers who asked: 'But are these stories true?' would have been dismissed as spoilsports." - G. A. Wells, The Jesus Myth, (Chicago: Carus Publishing, 1999), p. 122. 

July 5, 2002:

"The standard Inquisition procedure of isolating and grilling suspects was followed - plus an added step: the victims were usually stripped naked, shaved of all body hair, and 'pricked'. The Malleus Maleficarum specified that every witch bore a numb 'devil's mark', which could be detected by jabbing with a sharp object. Inquisitors also looked for 'witches' tits', blemishes that might be secret nipples whereby the women suckled their demons." - James A. Haught, Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990), p. 76. 

July 2, 2002:

"The universe has not 'run down'; on this, theists and atheists can agree. Thus, the question arises, 'Why?' The theist, true to the style of primitive man who explained lightning by inventing a lightning god, posits an anti-entropic god. Rather than examine his application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the theist prefers to argue that it applies without exception - and he then posits an exception to it as an explanation. But positing a god, for this or any other problem, is not an explanation. It is an evasion, and a poor one besides. If the theists cannot solve the entropy problem, a simple 'I don't know' would be much more honest." - George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), p. 255.

 

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