All Quotes By Tag: Indoctrination
“Religion and politics together is the most dangerous of all combinations, when that religion, is not the true religion of kindness and love, but the religion of books, doctrines and priests.”
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“Many of the boys and men who are regarded as immature by some females are so deemed merely because they do not want to get married someday … or soon.”
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“Some beliefs are so strongly held that some believers are ready to lose their heads rather than the belief they carry therein”
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“Most human beings would have never been pained by the death of a human being if they had never seen a human being or pretending to be pained by that.”
“Millions of sane people would each be sexually attracted to their own parent or child if they were not related to them.”
“Pain, unless it is physical, was sold to you (by your culture).”
“We acquire both the language and religious concepts from our immediate culture – at the same time. A child cannot discriminate between useful survival information and the emotional and psychological manipulations of religion. Once infected, these ideas are deeply embedded and almost impossible to change.”
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“Muslims are the first victims of Islam. […] To liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him.”
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“When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.”
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“A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a ‘child of Muslim parents’ will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.”
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“Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?…Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.”
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“We all know that any emotional bias — irrespective of truth or falsity — can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value…. If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”
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“I wouldn’t give 2 cents for all the fancy principles, doctrines, philosophies, sciences and institutions in the world, if behind them they didn’t have plain ordinary everyday conscience guiding them in the right direction.”
“We may not yet know the right way to go, but we should at least stop going in the wrong direction.”
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“If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom.”