Quote of the Moment Archives
Oct-Dec 2002
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December 30, 2002:
"I thought that I could force the doubts and questions out of my head by tossing out some tapes." - Christopher Robinson, Why I Became an Atheist.
December 27, 2002:
"In a speech to the American Legion convention, [President Ronald] Reagan declared, 'What some would do is to twist the concept of freedom of religion to mean freedom against religion.' Here is an explicit statement that we have no right to be free from religion. Reagan interprets the separation of church and state to mean: your government gives you the absolute choice over which religion will be rammed down your throat."- Harry Binswanger, "The Presidential Election," The Objectivist Forum, October 1984, p. 15.
December 24, 2002:
"All of the historically important theories of the Atonement have serious problems. In particular, they either fail to explain why God sacrificed his son for the salvation of sinners or else they make the sacrifice seem arbitrary and pointless. Thus, they do not provide an adequate explanation of the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of Jesus." - Michael Martin, Is Christianity Absurd?.
December 21, 2002:
"We are often told that the pursuit of truth is selfless since a personal interest acts as an agent of distortion. The premise underlying this claim is that man's goals are necessarily irrational and, therefore, that he faces an agonizing dilemma: to uphold either truth or his interests, reason and reality or his values. If a man's goals are not rational, however, they demand of him a recognition of facts. In such case, the discovery of truth is an eminently selfish policy, because it is an indispensable means to attaining one's ends. It is not selfless to know what one is doing and why." - Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, (New York: Meridian, 1993), p. 233.
December 18, 2002:
"The stunt of letting a book fall open for purposes of divination is well established in religion. The Greeks did it with Homer; the Moslems do it with the Koran. It is known as 'stichomancy,' and it is an established magic ritual." - James Randi, The Faith-Healers, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1987), p. 172.
December 15, 2002:
"That in every fundamental respect atheistic communism is virtually identical to Christianity and the opposite of atheistic Objectivism clearly demonstrates how it is wrong to claim atheism is a philosophic system and atheists are all fundamentally alike." - Joseph Kellard, Question & Answer on Atheism.
December 12, 2002:
"Natural selection is really the law of causality applied to life. It says one: the survival of an organism depends on its actions... That's the conditional nature of life on which the Objectivist ethics is built... And two: the actions of an organism depend on its nature - that's the law of causality. Therefore its survival depends on its nature. Thus every variation in the nature of an organism has a survival significance... It promotes survival, or it hurts survival... Nothing is neutral to life; everything is pro-life or anti-life. The pro-life variations survive better on average than the anti-life variations - that's natural selection." - Harry Binswanger, Selected Topics in the Philosophy of Science, (Second Renaissance Books, 1993), Tape 2, Side B.
December 9, 2002:
"The direct influence of the Reformation was at first unfavourable to scientific progress, for nothing could be more at variance with any scientific theory of the development of the universe than the ideas of the Protestant leaders. That strict adherence to the text of Scripture which made Luther and Melanchthon denounce the idea that the planets revolve about the sun, was naturally extended to every other scientific statement at variance with the sacred text. There is much reason to believe that the fetters upon scientific thought were closer under the strict interpretation of Scripture by the early Protestants than they had been under the older Church." - Andrew Dickson White, " From Genesis to Geology," The Warfare of Science with Theology.
December 6, 2002:
"The acceptance of full responsibility for one's own choices and actions (and their consequences) is such a demanding moral discipline that many men seek to escape it by surrending to what they believe is the easy, automatic, unthinking safety of a morality of 'duty'. They learn better, often when it is too late." - Ayn Rand, "Causality Versus Duty," Philosophy: Who Needs It, (New York: Signet, 1984), p. 101.
December 3, 2002:
"The fate of Luke [Skywalker's] life, and consequently of the entire galaxy, hinges on a series of accidents. By the time he is allowed to choose, his only choice is completely superficial: Either stay in a burned-out hovel, with the graves of his aunt and uncle next to him, or learn to become a Jedi Knight and liberate a princess from the evil Empire. Here, Luke the character is purposeful, but the plot-structure pushes him around from accident to accident, leaving him only superficial choices to make." - Lee Sandstead, "Mysticism vs. Heroism: The 'Star Wars' Saga," The Intellectual Activist, Vol. 13, No. 7, July 1999, p. 4.
November 29, 2002:
"[John] Calvin was immensely intelligent, determined and self-confident; he had, he said, 'received from God more ample enlightenment than others'. But the controlling factor in his system was excommunication, on which all the male members of his family were brought up to be experts. Thus he pounced on Luther's rediscovery of Augustinian predestination, and drove it to its ultimate conclusion. He began by doubling it: men were not only predestined to be saved, but to be damned." - Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, (New York: Touchstone, 1995), p. 287.
November 26, 2002:
"The alternative to subjectivism is the advocacy of objectivity - an attitude which rests on the view that reality exists independent of human consciousness; that the role of the subject is not to create the object, but to perceive it; and that knowledge of reality can be acquired only by directing on's attention outward to the facts." - Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, (New York: Meridian, 1993), p. 62.
November 23, 2002:
"...if you consistently practice a philosophy built on the primacy of consciousness, it will lead you to the same end as Jesus: willingly embracing a premature death." - Dawson Bethrick, The Trappings of Mental Disfigurement.
November 20, 2002:
"The Jews loved God because He made the world; the gnostics loved God because they believed He didn't. The Great Church sought a compromise, and is still searching." - John M. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 220.
November 17, 2002:
"Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superceding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: 'It is, therefore I want it.' They say: 'I want it, therefore it is.'" - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 953.
November 14, 2002:
"The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian tales, without the merit of being entertaining; and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the Mythology." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1995), p. 114.
November 11, 2002:
"Through all the ages of superstition, each nation has insisted that it was the peculiar care of the true God, and that it alone had the true religion -- that the gods of other nations were false and fraudulent, and that other religions were wicked, ignorant and absurd. In this way the seeds of hatred had been sown, and in this way have been kindled the flames of war." - Robert Ingersoll, God in the Constitution.
November 8, 2002:
"By demonstrating the objectivity of value, [Ayn] Rand has illuminated the relationship between facts and values. She has shown how values are inextricably grounded in facts. Factual judgments and value judgments are not radically different in kind, as if pertaining to different universes; the notorious gap between facts and values is artificial." - Tara Smith, Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefied Publishers, Inc., 2000), p. 101.
November 5, 2002:
"Another striking feature of Paul's letters is that one could never gather from them that Jesus was an ethical teacher. Paul is not indifferent to ethical problems; on the contrary, his epistles abound in ethical admonition. But on only one occasion [I Cor. 7:10; cf. Mark 10:11-12] does he appeal to the authority of Jesus to support an ethical teaching which the gospels also represent Jesus as having delivered; and in this instance it is not necessary to suppose that Paul believed that the doctrine in question had been taught by the historical (as opposed to the risen) Jesus." - G. A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 23.
November 2, 2002:
"Christian faith is not merely believing that there is a god. It is believing that there is a god no matter what the evidence on the question may be. Have faith, in the Christian sense, means 'make yourself believe that there is a god without regard to evidence.' Christian faith is a habit of flouting reason in forming and maintaining one's answer to the question whether there is a god. Its essence is the determination to believe that there is a god no matter what the evidence may be." - Richard Robinson, " Faith," An Atheist's Values.
October 30, 2002:
"It
is fear that drives them to seek the warmth, the protection, the 'safety' of a
herd. When they speak of merging their selves into a 'greater whole', it is
their fear that they hope to drown in the understanding waves of unfastidious
human bodies. And what they hope to fish out of that pool is the momentary
illusion of an unearned personal significance."
- Ayn Rand, "The Left: Old and New,"
The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, (New York: Signet, 1971), p. 80.
October 27, 2002: "Again, Paul when writing to
Timothy expressed, 'That thou keep this commandment without spot, unrebukeable until the appearing
of our Lord Jesus Christ' (I Tim 6:14). Paul must have expected Jesus' return during Timothy's lifetime.
The promise of Jesus' coming was to be soon, very quickly, in certain people's lifetime, yet they are
long since dead. Almost two thousand years have passed since the promise of a soon return, and
fundamentalists of today still echo this age-old promise."
- Shmuel Golding, "Probing the Mystery of Jesus' Second Coming," printed in Tim C. Leedom, ed.,
The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You to Read, (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co.,
1993), p. 190. October 24, 2002: "Since knowledge is rooted in
the evidence of the senses, all of the principles of philosophy and science must ultimately depend
on observation and inference. Even though Rand's metaphysical axioms can be grasped implicitly by
the mind of the infant and the adult alike, they are conceptually identified as primary facts of
reality, embracing the entire field of human awareness. As such, the axiomatic concepts serve as the
foundation of ontology, epistemology, logic, objectivity, and science itself."
- Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1995), p. 133. October 21, 2002: "Toward other persons who bring
anything but the biblical teaching, the believer is to remember privately teachings ridiculing them,
while outwardly evincing endless patience and self-restraint. To be sure, the believer rationalizes
that contempt, reminding himself that he is not to judge the unbeliever, whose heart only God can
know and whose destiny, to salvation or eternal punishment, is God's business alone. Toward the
natural environment, the biblical teaching amounts to an all-encompassing, nondisprovable hypothesis.
Whatever happens, that it does proves it is God's will."
- Edmund D. Cohen, The Mind of the Bible-Believer (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 183.
October 18, 2002: "Paul does indeed give teachings
that in the gospels are attributed to Jesus, but he does so without any suggestion that they derive
from him. Far from 'echoing' what Jesus has already said, they surely represent ethical doctrines only
later put into his mouth."
- G. A. Wells, The Jesus Myth, (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1999), p. 64.
October 15, 2002:
"Imagine the following scenario: if on the eve of American independence, the founders had asked
the world's permission before they revolted against the English crown. Imagine if the question of
American independence rested not in the minds of the patriots, but with the kings in the palaces of
Europe. And then imagine not living in America, because had the founders not possessed the moral
courage to act independently and instead adapted a policy of begging the world's favor, America would
simply not exist as it does today."
- Nicholas Provenzo, A Declaration
of Independence. October 12, 2002: "Many people who believe in God
view him as a father figure. Like a father, he
provides, he sets boundaries, and (like some fathers) he defines what one should
do in life. Some, like the Existentialists, claim that without a God life has no
meaning and it is 'absurd'. They view life without God like the life of a
toddler without a parent: arbitrary, wandering around in the muck, not knowing
what to do or why, with no purpose, no end, and alone and unhappy. But, like all
children, believers in God need to grow up. Life as an adult is much more
rewarding than life as an infant. "
- Jeff Landauer and Joseph Rowlands,
God.
October 9, 2002: "It
is important to stress that the term 'concrete' is not limited to phyical,
tangible things, nor does the term 'abstract' mean 'intangible'. The feelings we
have at a given moment, for example, are not tangible, but they are concrete:
each is an individual, particular occurrence. And the concepts we use to
classify feelings are measured in the same way as other concepts. The concept
LOVE is more abstract than its species, such as ROMANTIC LOVE, but less abstract
than its genus, EMOTION."
-
David Kelley, The Art of Reasoning, 3rd Edition, (New York: W. W. Norton &
Co. Ltd., 1998), p. 15.
October 6, 2002: "
October 3, 2002:
"The old-line Marxists used to claim that a single modern factory could produce enough shoes to provide for the whole population of the world and that nothing but capitalism prevented it. When they discovered the facts of reality involved, they declared that going barefoot is superior to wearing shoes." - Ayn Rand, "The Left: Old and New," The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, (New York: Signet, 1971), p. 91.
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