#rationality

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#fanatic #irrationality #secularism #love

A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa. ↗

— Ricky Gervais

#christianity #comedy #humor #humour #rationality

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious. ↗

— Iain Pears

#doctrine #education #freedom #freedom-of-religion #freedom-of-thought

We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin. ↗

— Robin Hanson

#inspirational #rationality #ruin #inspirational

Elinor agreed with it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition. ↗

— Jane Austen

#compliments #discussion #disdain #intelligence #opposition

The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#advantage #assumes #because #claimed #equivalent

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something. ↗

— Krzysztof Kieslowski

#contemporaries #lost #much #our #rationality

One obvious palliative of the evils of democracy in its present form would be to encourage much more publicity and initiative on the part of civil servants. They ought to have the right, and, on occasion, the duty, to frame Bills in their own names, and set forth publicly the arguments in their favor. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#expression #freedom-of-expression #rationality #thought #freedom

Violence and irrationality were so long and thoroughly cultivated among the Irish, and so perfectly ingrained into their nature, that modern civilization has as yet been unable to extract the virus. ↗

— Thomas Mellon

#been #civilization #cultivated #extract #ingrained

It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. (“The Disinheritors”) ↗

— Richard Matheson

#imagination #rationality #reality #unreality #imagination