Reason, according to my dictionary is "the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by the process of logic; that which is practical, or possible; common sense."
If we all have the ability to reason, then why do so many people believe what is illogical or makes no common sense at all? Why do they believe in things without evidence?
In my opinion, it is just wishful thinking. One wishes that crystals and pyramids have healing powers. One hopes there is an afterlife. One would like it if one's personality conforms to an astrological sign. One hopes prayer will make a difference. But wishing doesn't make it so. People who believe such superstitions are apparently BEYOND ALL REASON.
There is no scientific evidence that any of these things are true. Not one problem, be it medical, scientific, political, or social, has been resolved by mere hope or faith. We need to reason out problems, develop solutions, experiment to see what works, then work long and hard to resolve problems.
* * * * *
ABBEY, EDWARD, American writer, controversial environmentalist (1927-1989):
• "Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried."
ALLEN, ETHAN, American Revolutionary (1738-1789):
* * * * *
ABBEY, EDWARD, American writer, controversial environmentalist (1927-1989):
• "Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried."
ALLEN, ETHAN, American Revolutionary (1738-1789):
• "Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistant with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument. (Reason the Only Oracle of Man, 1784)
BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL
• "The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and in practice." (God and State, 1871)
BLOOM, LENNY
• "Phony pretexts repeated often enough become real reasons. Things that...are not true become true in the public mind simply through endless repetition."
BUDDHA, spiritual leader(c. 563 BC - 483 BC):
• "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
BURROUGHS, JOHN, American naturalist, author (1837-1921):
• “Our civilization is founded upon reason and science.”
DARROW, CLARENCE SEWARD, American criminal lawyer (1857-1938):
• “Anybody who can believe those old myths and fables isn’t governed by reason.”
DAWKINS, RICHARD
• "The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous."
DUPUIS, CHARLES FRANÇOIS
• "A great error is more easily propagated, than a great truth, because it is easier to believe, than to reason, and because people prefer the marvels of romances to the simplicity of history." (1794)
DRUMMOND, WILLIAM
• "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not, is a slave."
EDISON, THOMAS, American inventor (1847-1931):
• “To those searching for truth -- not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction -- faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.”
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN, American statesman, scientist, author (1706-1790):
• “I hope....that mankind will at length, as they call themselves responsible creatures, have the reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats...”
• "The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason." (Poor Richard, 1758)
GALILEO
• "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
HARRIS, SAM, American non-fiction writer (1967- ):
• "Religion gives people bad reasons to be good, where good reasons are actually available."
• "There is no society in history that has ever suffered because its population became too reasonable — too reluctant to embrace dogma, too demanding of evidence."
HECHT, JENNIFER MICHAEL, American poet, philosopher, author (1965- ):
• "A reasonable scale of probability--what is likely--forbids believing a whole range of imaginative possibilities, even though we do not know anything for sure."
HITCHENS, CHRISTOPHER, British-American author, (1949- )
• "Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something. That is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated."
• "Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life — except religion.... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our “godly gift” of reason when we cross their mental thresholds?" (“The Lord and the Intellectuals,” Harper’s July 1982)
• "Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith."
INGERSOLL, ROBERT G.
• "Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars." ("Humbolt" speech)
• "Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the unreasonable the impossible, the unknowable, and the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains... Religion has not civilized man — man has civilized religion." ("The Ghosts" speech)
• "The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called 'faith.'"
JEFFERSON, THOMAS, 3rd U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia (1743-1826):
• “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion." (to Peter Carr, 8/10/1787)
• “Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.” (to James Smith, 1822)
• "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."
• [The spirit of truth] is “that frame of mind by which men who acknowledge their own fallibility, and who desire above all things to discover what is true, should adjudicate between conflicting arguments.... Reason, reason alone, should determine their opinions.”(A History of Rationalism, 1900)
KANT, EMMANUEL
• "Have courage to use your own reason! - that is the motto of enlightenment."
LOCKE, JOHN, English philosopher (1632-1704):
• "Every religion, as far as reason will help them, makes use of it gladly - and where it fails them, they cry out: "It is a matter of faith, and above reason!"
LUTHER, MARTIN
• "Reason is the greatest enemy of faith...."
• "Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight...."
• "Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."
O'HAIR, MADALYN MURRAY
• "Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason and anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is time now for reason, education and science to take over." (Speech, 1990)
PAINE, THOMAS, English-born American patriot (1737-1809):
• “The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and trust I never shall.” (The Age of Reason)
• "Reasoning with one who has abandoned reason is like giving medicine to a dead man."
• "When men, from custom or fashion or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing,... being no longer honest to their own minds they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others."
• "I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science." (The Dreams of Reason)
RABAN, JONATHAN, Britsh writer (b. 1942):
• “Arguing with people’s supernatural delusions is a losing game. But ideas are different. Ideas are negotiable: one can expose their false premises, concede their partial truth, disentangle their conclusions, rob them of their magic by force of sweet reason.” (“Our Secret Sharers”, My Holy War, 2006)
RUSSELL, BERTRAND, English mathematician, author, Nobel Prize winner (1872-1970):
• “If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless and will therefore result to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called education.”
• “Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.” (Is There a God?)
• "My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity." (Is There a God?)
• "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." (attributed)
SMITH, GEORGE H., American author and educator (1949- )
• "I am arguing that faith as such, faith as an alleged method of acquiring knowledge, is totally invalid and as a consequence, all propositions of faith, because they lack rational demonstration, must conflict with reason." (Atheism: The Case Against God)
• "Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation." (Atheism: The Case Against God)
• "Reason is not one tool of thought among many, it is the entire toolbox. To advocate that reason be discarded in some circumstances is to advocate that thinking be discarded — which leaves one in the position of attempting to do a job after throwing away the required instrument." (Atheism: The Case Against God)
SPINOZA, BARUCH
• "I call him free who is led solely by reason."
STEPHEN, SIR LESLIE, British author (1932-1904):
• "The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact." (Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking)
SWIFT, JONATHAN, British author/theologian (1667-1745):
• "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into."
TAYLOR, RICHARD
• "What I conclude is that religion has nothing to do with experience or reason but with deep and irrational needs." ("WIll Secularism Survive?" Free Inquiry)
TWAIN, MARK, American author, journalist, humorist (1835-1910):
• “Many...people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.”
VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET de, French author, philosopher (1694-1778):
• “The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost their power of reasoning.”
• "You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of the Church, Rome has always favored the doctrine which most completely subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason."
WASHINGTON, GEORGE, 1st U.S. President, commander-in-chief Continental Forces (1732-1799):
• “We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition..."
BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL
• "The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and in practice." (God and State, 1871)
BLOOM, LENNY
• "Phony pretexts repeated often enough become real reasons. Things that...are not true become true in the public mind simply through endless repetition."
BUDDHA, spiritual leader(c. 563 BC - 483 BC):
• "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
BURROUGHS, JOHN, American naturalist, author (1837-1921):
• “Our civilization is founded upon reason and science.”
DARROW, CLARENCE SEWARD, American criminal lawyer (1857-1938):
• “Anybody who can believe those old myths and fables isn’t governed by reason.”
DAWKINS, RICHARD
• "The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous."
DUPUIS, CHARLES FRANÇOIS
• "A great error is more easily propagated, than a great truth, because it is easier to believe, than to reason, and because people prefer the marvels of romances to the simplicity of history." (1794)
DRUMMOND, WILLIAM
• "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not, is a slave."
EDISON, THOMAS, American inventor (1847-1931):
• “To those searching for truth -- not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction -- faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.”
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN, American statesman, scientist, author (1706-1790):
• “I hope....that mankind will at length, as they call themselves responsible creatures, have the reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats...”
• "The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason." (Poor Richard, 1758)
GALILEO
• "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
HARRIS, SAM, American non-fiction writer (1967- ):
• "Religion gives people bad reasons to be good, where good reasons are actually available."
• "There is no society in history that has ever suffered because its population became too reasonable — too reluctant to embrace dogma, too demanding of evidence."
HECHT, JENNIFER MICHAEL, American poet, philosopher, author (1965- ):
• "A reasonable scale of probability--what is likely--forbids believing a whole range of imaginative possibilities, even though we do not know anything for sure."
HITCHENS, CHRISTOPHER, British-American author, (1949- )
• "Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something. That is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated."
• "Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life — except religion.... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our “godly gift” of reason when we cross their mental thresholds?" (“The Lord and the Intellectuals,” Harper’s July 1982)
• "Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith."
INGERSOLL, ROBERT G.
• "Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars." ("Humbolt" speech)
• "Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the unreasonable the impossible, the unknowable, and the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains... Religion has not civilized man — man has civilized religion." ("The Ghosts" speech)
• "The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called 'faith.'"
JEFFERSON, THOMAS, 3rd U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia (1743-1826):
• “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion." (to Peter Carr, 8/10/1787)
• “Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.” (to James Smith, 1822)
• "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."
• [The spirit of truth] is “that frame of mind by which men who acknowledge their own fallibility, and who desire above all things to discover what is true, should adjudicate between conflicting arguments.... Reason, reason alone, should determine their opinions.”(A History of Rationalism, 1900)
KANT, EMMANUEL
• "Have courage to use your own reason! - that is the motto of enlightenment."
LOCKE, JOHN, English philosopher (1632-1704):
• "Every religion, as far as reason will help them, makes use of it gladly - and where it fails them, they cry out: "It is a matter of faith, and above reason!"
LUTHER, MARTIN
• "Reason is the greatest enemy of faith...."
• "Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight...."
• "Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."
O'HAIR, MADALYN MURRAY
• "Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason and anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is time now for reason, education and science to take over." (Speech, 1990)
PAINE, THOMAS, English-born American patriot (1737-1809):
• “The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and trust I never shall.” (The Age of Reason)
• "Reasoning with one who has abandoned reason is like giving medicine to a dead man."
• "When men, from custom or fashion or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing,... being no longer honest to their own minds they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others."
"The Age of Reason [by Thomas Paine] wasPAGELS, HEINZ, American physicist (1939-1988):
responsible for making more people into infidels
than any other book except the Bible."
—Gordon Stein
• "I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science." (The Dreams of Reason)
RABAN, JONATHAN, Britsh writer (b. 1942):
• “Arguing with people’s supernatural delusions is a losing game. But ideas are different. Ideas are negotiable: one can expose their false premises, concede their partial truth, disentangle their conclusions, rob them of their magic by force of sweet reason.” (“Our Secret Sharers”, My Holy War, 2006)
RUSSELL, BERTRAND, English mathematician, author, Nobel Prize winner (1872-1970):
• “If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless and will therefore result to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called education.”
• “Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.” (Is There a God?)
• "My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity." (Is There a God?)
• "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." (attributed)
SMITH, GEORGE H., American author and educator (1949- )
• "I am arguing that faith as such, faith as an alleged method of acquiring knowledge, is totally invalid and as a consequence, all propositions of faith, because they lack rational demonstration, must conflict with reason." (Atheism: The Case Against God)
• "Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation." (Atheism: The Case Against God)
• "Reason is not one tool of thought among many, it is the entire toolbox. To advocate that reason be discarded in some circumstances is to advocate that thinking be discarded — which leaves one in the position of attempting to do a job after throwing away the required instrument." (Atheism: The Case Against God)
SPINOZA, BARUCH
• "I call him free who is led solely by reason."
STEPHEN, SIR LESLIE, British author (1932-1904):
• "The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact." (Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking)
SWIFT, JONATHAN, British author/theologian (1667-1745):
• "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into."
TAYLOR, RICHARD
• "What I conclude is that religion has nothing to do with experience or reason but with deep and irrational needs." ("WIll Secularism Survive?" Free Inquiry)
TWAIN, MARK, American author, journalist, humorist (1835-1910):
• “Many...people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.”
VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET de, French author, philosopher (1694-1778):
• “The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost their power of reasoning.”
• "You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of the Church, Rome has always favored the doctrine which most completely subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason."
WASHINGTON, GEORGE, 1st U.S. President, commander-in-chief Continental Forces (1732-1799):
• “We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition..."
This post is not complete. I future-dated it to give myself time to complete it, but life interfered. By the time I got back to it, it had already posted, so everyone might as well enjoy it in its unfinished state. I will be adding more quotations and additional biographical info in the future, so check back again.
6 comments:
But then the question becomes one of why so many people NEED to believe in fantasies. All I can think is that they must offer some degree of survival value. Thoughts?
I just responded to your post, but maybe it didn't go through. Sometimes, I don't pay enough attention. Anyway, I was wondering aloud why so many people feel such a great need to believe in fantasies, and all I could think to offer was that such beliefs must offer some survival advantage, or at least they did at one time.
I agree with you, Snowbrush. I think religions were invented to explain what was unknown, and they continue because of the same reason. I have heard many say something like, I couldn't have survived ---insert horrible ordeal --- without my faith in God, or without Jesus.
I've had some fairly horrible ordeals in my life, none of which resulted in my turning to religion.
I think religion is a crutch, but then, some people need crutches. Apparently, I don't.
"I think religion is a crutch, but then, some people need crutches. Apparently, I don't."
I think there's truth is what you say, but I also think there's room for honest disagreement about the supernatural, although I will admit that I am at a loss to understand how it is possible. Also, I don't think of the situation (or of human nature) as being so simple that we can resolve it by (in our minds) putting strong atheists on one side and weak theists on the other and then feeling that our understanding is complete.
P.S. As for not having survived a situation without Jesus, I found that my efforts to believe only got in the way of survival since they amounted to nothing more than a desperate attempt to lie to myself and therefore represented a lack of integrity.
I was re-reading this post and Snowbrush's comments. I thought I might add that religions and the act of going to a place of worship also fulfill other needs. For example the need to belong. Religion gives some people comfort, alleviates fears of death, makes them feel like they are doing good. Belonging to a church might also have practical value. For example a business owner might think that as a church-goer, clients will have more trust in his/her business. I know a couple of people who are closet atheists that go to church to "network" or to make a good impression, especially as owners of small-town businesses. I have friends who are basically non-believers who still think that church will give their children basic good morals.
I think people can acquire all of those things and more through other means. But the idea of going to church has been so ingrained in most of us, I can understand why it is hard for some to give up, even if they are closet doubters.
In my experience the stronger the religious upbringing the more likely one is to continue adhering to a religion ----or drop religion completely. In my case, the latter was true.
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