reason

The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

The real difference is this: the Christian says that he has knowledge; the Agnostic admits that he has none; and yet the Christian accuses the Agnostic of arrogance, and asks him how he has the impudence to admit the limitations of his mind. To the Agnostic every fact is a torch, and by this light, and this light only, he walks.The Agnostic knows that the testimony of man is not sufficient to establish what is known as the miraculous. We would not believe to-day the testimony of millions to the effect that the dead had been raised. The church itself would be the first to attack such testimony. If we cannot believe those whom we know, why should we believe witnesses who have been dead thousands of years, and about whom we know nothing?The Agnostic takes the ground that human experience is the basis of morality. Consequently, it is of no importance who wrote the gospels, or who vouched or vouches for the genuineness of the miracles. In his scheme of life these things are utterly unimportant. He is satisfied that __he miraculous_ is the impossible. He knows that the witnesses were wholly incapable of examining the questions involved, that credulity had possession of their minds, that 'the miraculous' was expected, that it was their daily food.

I always have my reasons, even when I don't know what they are.

People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.

If the Pentateuch be true, religious persecution is a duty. The dungeons of the Inquisition were temples, and the clank of every chain upon the limbs of heresy was music in the ear of God. If the Pentateuch was inspired, every heretic should be destroyed; and every man who advocates a fact inconsistent with the sacred book, should be consumed by sword and flame.In the Old Testament no one is told to reason with a heretic, and not one word is said about relying upon argument, upon education, nor upon intellectual development__othing except simple brute force. Is there to-day a christian who will say that four thousand years ago, it was the duty of a husband to kill his wife if she differed with him upon the subject of religion? Is there one who will now say that, under such circumstances, the wife ought to have been killed? Why should God be so jealous of the wooden idols of the heathen? Could he not compete with Baal? Was he envious of the success of the Egyptian magicians? Was it not possible for him to make such a convincing display of his power as to silence forever the voice of unbelief? Did this God have to resort to force to make converts? Was he so ignorant of the structure of the human mind as to believe all honest doubt a crime? If he wished to do away with the idolatry of the Canaanites, why did he not appear to them? Why did he not give them the tables of the law? Why did he only make known his will to a few wandering savages in the desert of Sinai? Will some theologian have the kindness to answer these questions? Will some minister, who now believes in religious liberty, and eloquently denounces the intolerance of Catholicism, explain these things; will he tell us why he worships an intolerant God? Is a god who will burn a soul forever in another world, better than a christian who burns the body for a few hours in this? Is there no intellectual liberty in heaven? Do the angels all discuss questions on the same side? Are all the investigators in perdition? Will the penitent thief, winged and crowned, laugh at the honest folks in hell? Will the agony of the damned increase or decrease the happiness of God? Will there be, in the universe, an eternal auto da fe?

Purpose drives the process by which we become what we are capable of being.

The difference between impossible and possible is a willing heart.

You got to be careful of what comes and leave your mind and how often they do both. Whatever enters your mind has brought a new brand of you and whatever exits is going to manifest that brand.

You do not realize what can happen when you liberate a mind from what society calls reason.

Reason is your means of survival _ so that for you, who are a human being, the question __o be or not to be_ is the question 'to think or not to think..'.

Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires...Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform.

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call __uman nature,_ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man__very man__s an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

Man__ life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man__or the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of __ife_ that makes the concept of 'Value_ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice _ and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man _ by choice; he has to hold his life as a value _ by choice; he has to learn to sustain it _ by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues _ by choice.A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man__ Life is its standard of value.All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

Man__ life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being__ot life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement__ot survival at any price, since there__ only one price that pays for man__ survival: reason.