False Attribution Quotes

Buy a gift for a dog, and you'll be amazed at the way it will dance and swerve its tail, but if don't have anything to offer to it, it won't even recognize your arrival; such are the attributes of fake friends.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it's not satire, it's bullying.

You should punish in the same manner those who commit crimes with those who accuse falsely.

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco

Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. [Incorrectly attributed to Tolkien. It is a line from the Hobbit movie that did not appear in the books.]

It is Satan's constant effort to misrepresent the character of God, the nature of sin, and the real issues at stake in the great controversy. His sophistry lessens the obligation of the divine law and gives men license to sin. At the same time he causes them to cherish false conceptions of God so that they regard Him with fear and hate rather than with love. The cruelty inherent in his own character is attributed to the Creator; it is embodied in systems of religion and expressed in modes of worship.

Learning After some time, you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and imprisoning a soul; You learn that love does not equal sex, and that company does not equal security, and you start to learn…. That kisses are not contracts and gifts are not promises, and you start to accept defeat with the head up high and open eyes, and you learn to build all roads on today, because the terrain of tomorrow is too insecure for plans… and the future has its own way of falling apart in half. And you learn that if it’s too much even the warmth of the sun can burn. So you plant your own garden and embellish your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring flowers to you. And you learn that you can actually bear hardship, that you are actually strong, and you are actually worthy, and you learn and learn…and so every day. Over time you learn that being with someone because they offer you a good future, means that sooner or later you’ll want to return to your past. Over time you comprehend that only who is capable of loving you with your flaws, with no intention of changing you can bring you all happiness. Over time you learn that if you are with a person only to accompany your own solitude, irremediably you’ll end up wishing not to see them again. Over time you learn that real friends are few and whoever doesn’t fight for them, sooner or later, will find himself surrounded only with false friendships. Over time you learn that words spoken in moments of anger continue hurting throughout a lifetime. Over time you learn that everyone can apologize, but forgiveness is an attribute solely of great souls. Over time you comprehend that if you have hurt a friend harshly it is very likely that your friendship will never be the same. Over time you realize that despite being happy with your friends, you cry for those you let go. Over time you realize that every experience lived, with each person, is unrepeatable. Over time you realize that whoever humiliates or scorns another human being, sooner or later will suffer the same humiliations or scorn in tenfold. Over time you learn to build your roads on today, because the path of tomorrow doesn’t exist. Over time you comprehend that rushing things or forcing them to happen causes the finale to be different form expected. Over time you realize that in fact the best was not the future, but the moment you were living just that instant. Over time you will see that even when you are happy with those around you, you’ll yearn for those who walked away. Over time you will learn to forgive or ask for forgiveness, say you love, say you miss, say you need, say you want to be friends, since before a grave, it will no longer make sense. But unfortunately, only over time…

...Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers... for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality... But I had gradually come by this time, i.e., 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. ...By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, (and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become), that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost uncomprehensible by us, that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses; by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief... Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

True’ and ‘false’ are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither ‘truth’ nor ‘falsehood.

The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)

Mr. Langdon all questions were once spiritual. Since the beginning of time spirituality and religion have been called on to fill in the gaps that science did not understand. The rising and setting of the sun was once attributed to Helios and a flaming chariot. Earthquakes and tidal waves were the wrath of Poseidon. Science has now proven those gods to be false idols. Soon all gods will be proven to be false idols. Science has now provided answers to almost every question man can ask. There are only a few questions left and they are the esoteric ones. Where do we come from What are we doing here? What is the meaning of life and the universe?

Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn." Benjamin Franklin never said those words, he was falsely attributed on a respected quotation website and it spread from there. The quote comes from the Xunzi. Xun Kuang was a Chinese Confucian philosopher that lived from 312-230 BC. His works were collected into a set of 32 books called the Xunzi, by Liu Xiang in about 818 AD. There are woodblock copies of these books that are almost 1100 years old. Book 8 is titled Ruxiao ("The Teachings of the Ru"). The quotation in question comes from Chapter 11 of that book. In Chinese the quote is: 不闻不若闻之, 闻之不若见之, 见之不若知之, 知之不若行之 It is derived from this paragraph: Not having heard something is not as good as having heard it; having heard it is not as good as having seen it; having seen it is not as good as knowing it; knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. (From the John Knoblock translation, which is viewable in Google Books) The first English translation of the Xunzi was done by H.H. Dubs, in 1928, one-hundred and thirty-eight years after Benjamin Franklin died.

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.... Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason. Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.

four-fifths of the words attributed to me are things I never said, and would not agree with. If your words cannot stand on their own, adding my name won't make them less flimsy

The mark of Cain is stamped upon our foreheads. Across the centuries, our brother Abel was lain in blood which we drew, and shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us, Lord, for the curse we falsely attributed to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did.

Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'.

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy. When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

Don’t assume sabotage when obliviousness is the more likely answer. Human beings are inclined to attribute things to malice that are best explained by apathy, and when we falsely identify other people’s motivations, we create a situation in our minds that not only doesn’t exist but colors all of our future interactions.

for everybody must now 'move in a circle', - to the prevalence of which rotatory motion, is perhaps to be attributed the giddiness and false steps of many.

At a banquet given in his honour Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock once modestly attributed his success in life to the habit of "getting up earlier than the other fellow." But this was partly metaphorical, partly false and in case wholly relative for journalists are as a rule late risers.

If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.

If Mohammed had been a false prophet. there is no reason why Christ should not have spoken of him as he spoke of Antichrist but if Mohammed is a true Prophet the passages referring to the Paraclete must inevitably concern him - not exclusively but eminently - for it is inconceivable that Christ, when speaking of the future, should have passed over in silence a manifestation of such magnitude. The same reasoning excludes a priori the possibility that Christ. when making his predictions, intended to include Mohammed under the general denomination of'' false prophets", for in the history of our era Mohammed is in no sense a typical example among others of the same kind, but on the contrary, a unique and incomparable apparition(1). If he had been one of the false prophets announced by Christ he would have been followed by others and there would exist in our day a multitude of false religions subsequent to Christ and comparable in importance and extension to Islam. The spirituality to be found within Islam from its origins up to our days is an incontestable fact. and "by their fruits ye shall know them." Moreover, it will be recalled that the Prophet in his doctrine has testified to the second coming of Christ without attributing to himself any glory. unless it be that of being the last Prophet of the cycle and history proves that he spoke the truth, no comparable manifestation having followed after him.

Every successful conspiracy remains secret after completion. There is only the desired effect which will always be attributed to reasonable, plausible but false causes.

When I'm long dead and gone, people will be falsely attributing made-up quotes to me on internet pages and memes.

Hundreds of false rumors of alleged attacks by the man-eater were brought to us, entailing endless miles of walking, but this was only to be expected, for in an area in which an established man-eater is operating everyone suspects their own shadows, and every sound heard at night is attributed to the man-eater.

Interpretation that aims at, or thrives on, uniqueness can usually be attributed to pride (an attempt to “outclever” the rest of the world), a false understanding of spirituality (wherein the Bible is full of deeply buried truths waiting to be mined by the spiritually sensitive person with special insight), or vested interests (the need to support a theological bias, especially in dealing with texts that seem to go against that bias).

her mind in that freshness which is sometimes falsely supposed to be an invariable attribute of rusticity. Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings; and this breath of poetry had surrounded Eppie from the time when she had followed the bright gleam that beckoned her to Silas’s hearth;

Was Charles I too stubborn to listen to reason? Could Civil War have been averted if the king had been more willing to negotiate? His great enemy Cromwell always maintained that the king had been swayed at the last moment by his queen, the beautiful Henrietta Maria. We can believe Cromwell's claim that the queen told her husband to be firm. But the wicked, spiteful, altogether irresistable quote often attributed to her by Puritan writers of the time is almost certainly false. "Oh my love, if you cannot remain firm in the bedchamber, at least try to remain firm with your subjects!

Alien Parasites are what the Gnostics call 'Archons.' They cause delusions in people's thinking because they convince their victims to believe things that are not true. A delusional person has false or unrealistic beliefs or opinions. A delusional person is someone who has a belief that is held with an extremely strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. Now, this trait may be a brave attributes, but the delusional person refuses to listen and consider the opposite opinion. The mature and wise individual always is willing to listen to an opposing opinion, and actually is eager to hear the opposing point of view, in order to make sure his or her theories and beliefs can withstand all opposing ideas and to revise his or her ideas if necessary.

Yo one day people on twitter are gonna falsely attribute quotes to my name.

What is a 'false prophet'? Those who lie by attributing personal biases to divine source.

This quote is often falsely attributed to Mark Twain.

False theology makes God’s foreknowledge of our believing the cause of His election to salvation; whereas, God’s election is the cause, and our believing in Christ is the effect .

Never for even one second be concerned about the attribution of false motive.

Much history as well as popular imagination not only erases their contingency but implicitly attributes to historical actors intentions and consciousness they could not have possibly had...Once a significant historical event is codified, it travels a sort of condensation symbol and, unless we are very careful, takes on a false logic and order that does a grave injustice to how it was experienced at the time.

The law itself was originally created in order to protect property. However, the law has been falsely attributed to being the reason property exists in the first place. At least, this is what the state would have us believe. The law does not create property rights because these already existed before the law was created. It is this false attribution that allows the state apparatus to conduct its mission of expropriation.

By the late 20th century, the general consensus among most historians attributed the origins of fascism to one of the numerous branches of heretical Marxism that had developed into dictatorship, nationalization, welfarism, and militarism. Later, Sternhell, in The Birth of Fascist Ideology, he took the position that the ‘origins’ of Franco-Italian fascism ideology was ‘Marxism,’ or to be more precise, from ‘a very specific revision of Marxism.

The human mind has a tendency to observe unsystematic events and assign a pattern to the results. A habitual risk-taker reorganizes the stream of random events and retrospectively attributes the outcome of indiscriminate trials to their own gambling “strategies.” We often hear people say that they are lucky or unlucky, when in actuality they can claim no ownership in the occurrence of chaotic outcomes. A false sense of the existence of luck can cause people to discount the value of their actual effort, skill, and training.

The fundamental attribution error is simply this: human beings tend to falsely attribute the negative behaviors of others to their character (an internal attribution), while they attribute their own negative behaviors to their environment (an external attribution).

Very few Zionist Left intellectuals see Israel as a colonial settler state. They do not attribute its “internal” regime, laws, and political culture to this central characteristic of state and society (not to mention Israel’s Apartheid nature). The majority refuses to see the Zionist movement as an ongoing colonial project.

This denial is bizarre. Last time Chomsky denied something I attributed to him, it was Chomsky's word against mine and there was no way to resolve this argument. This time, however, there's some fairly conclusive evidence. Look at http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/. It describes itself as 'the official weblog of Professor Noam Chomsky', and it is attached to Z Magazine, for which Chomsky has regularly written for over a decade. It claims Chomsky makes direct blog entries. Yet Chomsky claims he has 'nothing to with with it'. Are we really meant to believe this? If it is true, why does he carry on writing for a magazine that publishes a false blog in his name?

The tender and peculiar love with which Silas had reared her in almost inseparable companionship with himself, aided by the seclusion of their dwelling, had preserved her from the lowering influences of the village talk and habits, and had kept in her mind that freshness which is sometimes falsely supposed to be an invariable attribute of rusticity.

during a night journey taken early in the Second War in a compartment full of young soldiers. Their conversation made it clear that they totally disbelieved all that they had read in the papers about the wholesale cruelties of the Nazi régime. They took it for granted, without argument, that this was all lies, all propaganda put out by our own government to “pep up” our troops. And the shattering thing was, that, believing this, they expressed not the slightest anger. That our rulers should falsely attribute the worst of crimes to some of their fellow-men in order to induce others of their fellow-men to shed their blood seemed to them a matter of course. They weren’t even particularly interested.

We have created a false dichotomy between behaviors attributable to companion animals and those of other species that blinds us to the inherent worth and needs of all animals. The problem is that we have constructed a society in which we are rarely forced to think about where what we consume comes from, and this extends to the animals reared for our consumption.While we pamper one set of animals, another set of animals becomes our food. The main difference is that we come to know one set of these animals, while the other set is raised and killed for us, delivered in plastic wrap and Styrofoam, and served up as dinner. If nothing else, this belies the deep moral confusion that we have about animals as a culture.

Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have been called on to fill in the gaps that science did not understand. The rising and setting of the sun was once attributed to Helios and a flaming chariot. Earthquakes and tidal waves were the wrath of Poseidon. Science has now proven those gods to be false idols. Soon all Gods will be proven to be false idols.

Debbie Nathan blames the early symptoms on pernicious anemia yet explains their supposed remission by Shirley’s being out of contact with Dr. Wilbur for those 9 years. But Dr. Wilbur never diagnosed a dissociative disorder in 1945. Nathan does not seem to recognize the implausibility of Dr. Wilbur creating via suggestion a complex dissociative disorder in five sessions, particularly when the doctor herself did not diagnose it. Nathan attributes Shirley’s postintegration improvement in functioning to being out of contact with Dr. Wilbur rather than to the therapy. But the pernicious anemia continued to be undiagnosed and untreated during that time period, so any symptoms due to it should have continued rather than showing an improvement that coincided with psychotherapy with Dr. Wilbur. Debbie Nathan’s thesis is self-contradictory.

In another way, which Washington could not foresee, his image was much more grievously damaged. A painful physical disability was being grafted onto his legend so that in the minds of future Americans his attribute—like Saint Catherine’s wheel or Saint Sebastian’s arrows—became ill-fitting false teeth. Washington did wear clumsy dentures. Only one of his own teeth was in his mouth in 1789 when he presided over the capital in New York. That tooth soon vanished. Washington wore terrifying-looking contraptions, made of substances like hippopotamus ivory. The upper and lower jaws, that were hinged together at the back of the mouth, opened and closed with the assistance of springs. He himself complained that they distorted his lips. However, as he could command the best dentists, he was probably no more disfigured than was then common among the elderly

In opposition to the absolutely and directly false Heideggerian theses attributing to Aquinas an onto-theo-logical metaphysics of Being, Aquinas's actual and genuine conception of God is articulated in the famous formulation according to which God is ipsum esse per se subsistens, Being itself subsisting through itself. God is not a being (ens,) among other beings, thus not anything like the highest, first, or maximal being. (p. 43)

For many purposes, we need to understand the world as having things in it that are related to each other, not just variables with values. For example, we might notice that a large truck ahead of us is reversing into the driveway of a dairy farm but a cow has got loose and is blocking the truck’s path. A factored representation is unlikely to be pre-equipped with the attribute TruckAheadBackingIntoDairyFarmDrivewayBlockedByLooseCow with value true or false

In the meantime, the Bear had attained the Avenue, where blinding, brilliant traffic travelled like a line of light from north to south, as if between worlds. But it was Jacob who saw the ladder, wrestled with the angel, and obtained a birthright under false pretenses. The Bear had done none of these things. He pulled the hat brim farther down on his face and walked south beneath the vault of darkness, above him like guardians or heralds the electric signs of bars and stores- white, orange, yellow, gold, red, brilliant blue and green, occasional imperial purple - as if they were angels that had descended to earth only to hire themselves out as lures for business, possibly for reasons of pity. The Bear walked beneath them like a resolute and powerful man, the saxophone case at his side swinging like a cache of fate, love, gold or vengeance. When he realised that he could have his pick of them - that all options, attributions and possibilities actually were open to him, that he was, at the moment, exalted, liberated, free - he stopped walking for a moment, put down the saxophone case, looked gradually around him at the Avenue, raised his snout and smiled broadly, and there on the pavement stretched out his great and inevitable arms. Aah. The night entered him like honey, and he began so heartily and with such depth of pleasure that it might have been for the first time in his life, to laugh out loud.

Obviously no two creation stories can both be true. All of those invented by the many known thousands of religions and sects in fact have certainly been false. A great many educated citizens have realized that their own faiths are indeed false, or at least questionable in details. But they understand the rule attributed to the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger that religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

God GOD, noun [Saxon god; German gott; Dutch god; Swedish and Danish gud; Gothic goth or guth; Pers. goda or choda; Hindoo, khoda, codam. As this word and good are written exactly alike in Saxon, it has been inferred that God was named from his goodness. But the corresponding words in most of the other languages, are not the same, and I believe no instance can be found of a name given to the Supreme Being from the attribute of goodness. It is probably an idea too remote from the rude conceptions of men in early ages. Except the word Jehovah, I have found the name of the Supreme Being to be usually taken from his supremacy or power, and to be equivalent to lord or ruler, from some root signifying to press or exert force. Now in the present case, we have evidence that this is the sense of this word, for in Persic goda is rendered dominus, possessor, princeps, as is a derivative of the same word. See Cast. Lex. Col. 231.] 1. The Supreme Being; Jehovah; the eternal and infinite spirit, the creator, and the sovereign of the universe. God is a spirit; and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth. John 4. 2. A false god; a heathen deity; an idol. Fear not the gods of the Amorites. Judges 6. 3. A prince; a ruler; a magistrate or judge; an angel. Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people. Exodus 22. Psalm 97. [Gods here is a bad translation.] 4. Any person or thing exalted too much in estimation, or deified and honored as the chief good. Whose god is their belly. Philippians 3.

The Four Errors. Man has been reared by his errors: firstly, he saw himself always imperfect; secondly, he attributed to himself imaginary qualities; thirdly, he felt himself in a false position in relation to the animals and nature; fourthly, he always devised new tables of values, and accepted them for a time as eternal and unconditioned, so that at one time this, and at another time that human impulse or state stood first, and was ennobled in consequence. When one has deducted the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted humanity, humaneness, and "human dignity".

False was all this - false all but the affections of our nature, and the links of sympathy with pleasure or pain. There was but one good and one evil in the world - life and death. The pomp of rank, the assumption of power, the possessions of wealth vanished like morning mist. One living beggar had become of more worth than a national peerage of dead lords - alas the day! than of dead heroes, patriots, or men of genius. There was much of degradation in this: for even vice and virtue had lost their attributes - life - life - the continuation of our animal mechanism - was the Alpha and Omega of the desires, the prayers, the prostrate ambition of human race.

Feminist “theory,” as it is grandiloquently called, is simply whatever the women in the movement come up with in post facto justification of their attitudes and emotions. A heavy focus on feminist doctrine seems to me symptomatic of the rationalist fallacy: the assumption that people are motivated primarily by beliefs. If they were, the best way to combat an armed doctrine would indeed be to demonstrate that its beliefs are false. (…) A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role. By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than nurturing and assisting. This in turn envolves relative independence, action, and competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional impulse). Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of“primacy” rather than superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent — even, so far as I know, among homosexuals. Normal women are attracted to male traits and wish to partner with a man who possesses them. (…) The feminists’ response to the primacy of male traits, on the other hand, is a feeling of inadequacy in regard to men—a feeling ill-disguised by defensive assertions of her “equality.”She desires to possess masculinity directly, in her own person, rather than partnering with a man. That is what leads her into the spiritual cul de sac of envy. And perhaps even more than she envies the male role itself, the feminist covets the external rewards attached to its successful performance: social status, recognition, power, wealth, and the chance to control wealth directly (rather than be supported).

Of course, there is no way to avoid being a hypocrite, even when seeking to remove oneself from the falseness of this material existence. And perhaps, this attribution of ‘falseness’ is not sufficiently accurate as a descriptor either; yet, how else is it to be articulated if something of it seems inauthentic and insincere as though existence itself were mediated through codes and objects and structures that constrained the domain of possibility, or rather relegated the notion of free will as becoming a reaction to prompts and the construct of independent action as having emerged from latent subsets of choices that presented themselves according to the dynamic interplay of obligation, code, preservation and groupthink?

Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines delusion as "a false conception and persistent belief unconquerable by reason in something that has no existence in fact." As an intuitionist, I'd say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion. It's the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the gods (for Plato) or that brings us beyond the "delusion" of believing in gods (for the New Atheists). The rationalist delusion is not just a claim about human nature. It's also a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power, and it usually comes along with a utopian program for raising more rational children.

We are certain that, in this life at any rate, thought is intimately connected with the brain. The theory that thought therefore is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense, for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction, but of which it would be meaningless to use the words “true” or “false.” We are driven then to some kind of correspondence. But if we assume a one-for-one correspondence, this means that we have to attribute an almost unbelievable complexity and variety of events to the brain. But I submit that a one-for-one relation is probably quite unnecessary. All our examples suggest that the brain can respond—in a sense, adequately and exquisitely correspond—to the seemingly infinite variety of consciousness without providing one single physical modification for each single modification of consciousness. But

The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove, that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers that are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity. One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.

I have decided to write a diary of La Belle et la Bête as the work on the film progresses. After a year of preparations and difficulties, the moment has now come to grapple with a dream. Apart from the numerous obstacles which exist in getting a dream onto celluloid, the problem is to make a film within the limits imposed by a period of austerity. But perhaps these limitations may stimulate imagination, which is often lethargic when all means are placed at its disposal. Everybody knows the story by madame Leprince de Beaumont, a story often attributed to Perrault, because it is found next to "Peau d'Ane" between those bewitching covers of the Bibliothèque Rose. The postulate of the story requires faith, the faith of childhood. I mean that one must believe implicitly at the very beginning and not question the possibility that the mere picking of a rose might lead a family into adventure, or that a man can be changed into a beast, and vice versa. Such enigmas offend grown-ups who are readily prejudiced, proud of their doubt, armed with derision. But I have the impudence to believe that the cinema which depicts the impossible is apt to carry conviction, in a way, and may be able to put a "singular" occurrence into the plural. It is up to us (that is, to me and my unit―in fact, one entity) to avoid those impossibilities which are even more of a jolt in the midst of the improbable than in the midst of reality. For fantasy has its own laws which are like those of perspective. You may not bring what is distant into the foreground, or render fuzzily what is near. The vanishing lines are impeccable and the orchestration so delicate that the slightest false note jars. I am not speaking of what I have achieved, but of what I shall attempt within the means at my disposal. My method is simply: not to aim at poetry. That must come of its own accord. The mere whispered mention of its name frightens it away. I shall try to build a table. It will be up to you then to eat at it, to examine it or to chop it up for firewood.

One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe—that ours is just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call “a false vacuum” or “a scalar field” or “vacuum energy”—some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang—forms too alien for us to imagine—and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can’t understand to one we almost can. “These are very

This popular ideology contends that the religious experience is tranquil and neatly ordered, tender and delicate; it is an enchanted stream for embittered souls and still waters for troubled spirits. The person “who comes in from the field, weary” (Gen. 25:29), from the battlefield and campaigns of life, from the secular domain which is filled with doubts and fears, contradictions and refutations, clings to religion as does a baby to its mother and finds in her lap “a shelter for his head, the nest of his forsaken prayers” and there is comforted for his disappointments and tribulations. This Rousseauian ideology left its stamp on the entire Romantic movement from the beginning of its growth until its final (tragic!) manifestations in the consciousness of contemporary man. Therefore, the representatives of religious communities are inclined to portray religion, in a wealth of colors that dazzle the eye, as a poetic Arcadia, a realm of simplicity, wholeness, and tranquillity. This ideology is intrinsically false and deceptive. That religious consciousness in man’s experience, which is most profound and most elevated, which penetrates to the very depths and ascends to the very heights, is not that simple and comfortable. On the contrary, it is exceptionally complex, rigorous, and tortuous. Where you find its complexity, there you find its greatness. The consciousness of homo religiosis flings bitter accusations against itself and immediately is filled with regret, judges its desires and yearnings with excessive severity, and at the same time steeps itself in them, casts derogatory aspersions on its own attributes, flails away at them, but also subjugates itself to them. It is in a condition of spiritual crisis, of psychic ascent and descent, of contradiction arising from affirmation and negation, self-abnegation and self-appreciation. Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs, and torments.

As we have described, Dennett (1987) theorized that humans have evolved a mentalistic interpretational system that he calls the “intentional stance,” whose function is efficiently to predict and explain other people’s actions by inferring and attributing causal intentional mind states (such as beliefs, intentions, and desires) to them. This system implies an understanding that behavior can be caused by representational mental states that can be either true or false in relation to actual reality. Since intentional mind states (such as beliefs) are not directly visible, they need to be inferred from a variety of behavioral and situational cues that the interpreter needs to monitor constantly. The ability to mentalize, which can be seen as the central mechanism of “social (or mental) reality testing,” is therefore a developmental achievement that unfolds through the gradual sensitization to and learning about the mental significance of relevant expressive, behavioral, verbal, and situational cues that indicate the presence of mind states in persons.

On the one hand, I recognize the power of the placebo effect: if you believe it’s working, it may well work. If you think an object brings you luck, you are more confident. And yet what the Italian students in the “lucky” seats showed wasn’t confidence; it was overconfidence. They thought they were doing better, but the evidence didn’t actually back them up. And then there’s the flip side of the placebo, the nocebo effect: the belief in evil signs or bad luck. It turns out people can literally scare themselves to death. If you think you’ve been cursed or otherwise made ill, you may end up actually getting sick, failing to improve poor health, or, yes, dying altogether. In one medically documented instance, a man was given three months to live after a diagnosis of metastatic cancer of the esophagus. He died shortly after. When his body was autopsied, doctors realized that he had been misdiagnosed: he did indeed have cancer, but a tiny, non-metastatic tumor on his liver. Clinically speaking, it could not have killed him. But, it seems, being told he was dying of a fatal illness brought about that very outcome. In another case, a man thought he was hexed by a voodoo priest. He came close to death, only to recover miraculously after an enterprising doctor “reversed” the curse through a series of made-up words. In yet a third, a man almost died in the emergency room after overdosing on pills. He’d been in a drug trial for depression and decided to end his life with the antidepressants he’d been prescribed. His vitals were so bad when he was admitted that doctors didn’t think he would make it—until they discovered his blood was completely clear of any drugs. He’d been taking a placebo. Once he found out he had not in fact taken a life-threatening quantity of pills, he recovered quickly. The effect our mind has on our body makes for a scary proposition. Belief is a powerful thing. Our mental state is crucial to our performance. And ultimately, while some superstitions may give you a veneer of false confidence, they also have the power to destroy your mental equilibrium. I like to think of this as the black cat effect. You see one cross the parking lot as you walk to a tournament. You brood about the bad luck. Your game is thrown off. You blame the cat. You bust. You feel validated. Superstitions are false attributions, so they give you a false sense of your own abilities and in the end, impede learning.

And this deflation of rivals is no closer to the truth than the self-inflation that is also high on the agenda for that particular conversation. But the deflation is heartfelt; we tend to believe the bad publicity we give rivals, the better to spread it. The Buddha seems to have seen this dynamic clearly. A scripture attributed to him reads: The senses’ evidence, And works, inspire such scorn For others, and such smug Conviction he is right, That all his rivals rank As “sorry, brainless fools.” So what do we do about all this? If our mind keeps getting seized by different modules, and each module carries with it different illusions, how do we change the situation? The answer isn’t simple, but what should already be clear is that getting more control over the situation may have something to do with feelings. A link between feelings and illusion was somewhat apparent back in chapter 3, when I noted that some feelings are in one sense or another “false,” so getting some critical distance from them can clarify things. But the case against being enthralled by our feelings only grows when you realize that their connection to illusion can be described in a second way. Feelings don’t just bring specific, fleeting illusions; they can usher in a whole mind-set and so alter for some time a range of perceptions and proclivities, for better or worse.

Knowledge as a whole has its triadic movement. It begins with sense-perception, in which there is only awareness of the object. Then, through sceptical criticism of the senses, it becomes purely subjective. At last, it reaches the stage of self-knowledge, in which subject and object are no longer distinct. Thus self-consciousness is the highest form of knowledge. This, of course, must be the case in Hegel's system, for the highest kind of knowledge must be that possessed by the Absolute, and as the Absolute is the Whole there is nothing outside itself for it to know. In the best thinking, according to Hegel, thoughts become fluent and interfuse. Truth and falsehood are not sharply defined opposites, as is commonly supposed; nothing is wholly false, and nothing that we can know is wholly true. 'We can know in a way that is false'; this happens when we attribute absolute truth to some detached piece of information. Such a question as 'Where was Caesar born?' has a straightforward answer, which is true in a sense, but not in the philosophical sense. For philosophy, 'the truth is the whole', and nothing partial is quite true. 'Reason,' Hegel says, 'is the conscious certainty of being all reality.' This does not mean that a separate person is all reality; in his separateness he is not quite real, but what is real in him is his participation in Reality as a whole. In proportion as we become more rational, this participation is increased.

The office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock has especially this duty assigned to it by Christ, namely, to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body; for, owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking “men speaking perverse things” (Acts xx. 30), “vain talkers and seducers” (Tit. i. 10), “erring and driving into error” (2 Tim. iii. 13). Still it must be confessed that the number of the enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly, who are striving, by arts, entirely new and full of subtlety, to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, if they can, to overthrow utterly Christ’s kingdom itself. Wherefore We may no longer be silent, lest We should seem to fail in Our most sacred duty, and lest the kindness that, in the hope of wiser counsels, We have hitherto shown them, should be attributed to forgetfulness of Our office. GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION 2. That We make no delay in this matter is rendered necessary especially by the fact that the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies; they lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear.

All the sentiments of the human mind, gratitude, resentment, love, friendship, approbation, blame, pity, emulation, envy, have a plain reference to the state and situation of man, and are calculated for preserving the existence and promoting the activity of such a being in such circumstances. It seems, therefore, unreasonable to transfer such sentiments to a supreme existence or to suppose him actuated by them; and the phenomena, besides, of the universe will not support us in such a theory. All our ideas derived from the senses are confessedly false and illusive, and cannot therefore be supposed to have place in a Supreme Intelligence. And as the ideas of internal sentiment, added to those of the external senses, compose the whole furniture of human understanding, we may conclude that none of the materials of thought are in any respect similar in the human and in the Divine Intelligence. Now, as to the manner of thinking, how can we make any comparison between them or suppose them anywise resembling? Our thought is fluctuating, uncertain, fleeting, successive, and compounded; and were we to remove these circumstances, we absolutely annihilate its essence, and it would in such a case be an abuse of terms to apply to it the name of thought or reason. At least, if it appear more pious and respectful (as it really is) still to retain these terms when we mention the Supreme Being, we ought to acknowledge that their meaning, in that case, is totally incomprehensible; and that the infirmities of our nature do not permit us to reach any ideas which in the least correspond to the ineffable sublimity of the Divine Attributes.

In the EPJ results, there were two statistically distinguishable groups of experts. The first failed to do better than random guessing, and in their longer-range forecasts even managed to lose to the chimp. The second group beat the chimp, though not by a wide margin, and they still had plenty of reason to be humble. Indeed, they only barely beat simple algorithms like “always predict no change” or “predict the recent rate of change.” Still, however modest their foresight was, they had some. So why did one group do better than the other? It wasn’t whether they had PhDs or access to classified information. Nor was it what they thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, optimists or pessimists. The critical factor was how they thought. One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.” The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds. Decades ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a much-acclaimed but rarely read essay that compared the styles of thinking of great authors through the ages. To organize his observations, he drew on a scrap of 2,500-year-old Greek poetry attributed to the warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” No one will ever know whether Archilochus was on the side of the fox or the hedgehog but Berlin favored foxes. I felt no need to take sides. I just liked the metaphor because it captured something deep in my data. I dubbed the Big Idea experts “hedgehogs” and the more eclectic experts “foxes.” Foxes beat hedgehogs. And the foxes didn’t just win by acting like chickens, playing it safe with 60% and 70% forecasts where hedgehogs boldly went with 90% and 100%. Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.

An Aside   To break with this routine I have written this manuscript in a way that challenges my reader to explore on the edge of language instead of drowning in devices intending to take for granted meanings and draw false assumptions burdened by planted biases. In your face are thrown one lie after another that defy what is actually seen and offer nothing of balance to either perspective or clarity on a daily basis... yet, it seems natural to you. Because there is no power to your sense of expectation. None. You are boxed into what is possible and what is not, even unsure of the shape of the earth. Led into debates over something as idiotic as that while you balk at having neighbors from elsewhere. So enormous is this Universe and yet you would limit its possibility to produce any of the wonders on some tiny grain of sand found on a beach in comparison. From written history anomalies have been spied and reported accomplishing what nothing today can. Trans Lunar Phenomena, recorded hundreds of years with thousands of reports demonstrate intelligent presence on the moon while nothing of this is factored into your narrow credulity. When one emerges who can answer resolution to so many anomaly, predicts events with accuracy, and offers what is needed to help you survive a planet crippled to the point of extinction, you cannot quit your routine of acquired preference for the mundane suited to a boxed-in comfort zone long enough to check him out. The few above this are too few. I feel quite privileged to have found four. Others are awakening yet still not shown to be at a point of no return to stifling group thought. If you are, then show me. Show me you are aware we near the point where nothing is left to lose. Where resolute action need not be possessed of fear. I will say this, unified consciousness would have no trouble with accepting this challenge I throw at your feet, but then conditions so favorable to enslavement here may be your problem and not that solely attributable to split consciousness. I am willing to engage with you to the very end of hope to find out. Wake up to the signs and ramifications of the trends set I have touched upon. Help awaits a world ready to receive it.

55. We should, therefore, have a guardian, as it were, to pluck us continually by the ear and dispel rumours and protest against popular enthusiasms. For you are mistaken if you suppose that our faults are inborn in us; they have come from without, have been heaped upon us. Hence, by receiving frequent admonitions, we can reject the opinions which din about our ears. 56. Nature does not ally us with any vice; she produced us in health and freedom. She put before our eyes no object which might stir in us the itch of greed. She placed gold and silver beneath our feet, and bade those feet stamp down and crush everything that causes us to be stamped down and crushed. Nature elevated our gaze towards the sky and willed that we should look upward to behold her glorious and wonderful works. She gave us the rising and the setting sun, the whirling course of the on-rushing world which discloses the things of earth by day and the heavenly bodies by night, the movements of the stars, which are slow if you compare them with the universe, but most rapid if you reflect on the size of the orbits which they describe with unslackened speed; she showed us the successive eclipses of sun and moon, and other phenomena, wonderful because they occur regularly or because, through sudden causes they help into view – such as nightly trails of fire, or flashes in the open heavens unaccompanied by stroke or sound of thunder, or columns and beams and the various phenomena of flames. 57. She ordained that all these bodies should proceed above our heads; but gold and silver, with the iron which, because of the gold and silver, never brings peace, she has hidden away, as if they were dangerous things to trust to our keeping. It is we ourselves that have dragged them into the light of day to the end that we might fight over them; it is we ourselves who, tearing away the superincumbent earth, have dug out the causes and tools of our own destruction; it is we ourselves who have attributed our own misdeeds to Fortune, and do not blush to regard as the loftiest objects those which once lay in the depths of earth. 58. Do you wish to know how false is the gleam that has deceived your eyes? There is really nothing fouler or more involved in darkness than these things of earth, sunk and covered for so long a time in the mud where they belong. Of course they are foul; they have been hauled out through a long and murky mine-shaft. There is nothing uglier than these metals during the process of refinement and separation from the ore. Furthermore, watch the very workmen who must handle and sift the barren grade of dirt, the sort which comes from the bottom; see how soot-besmeared they are! 59. And yet the stuff they handle soils the soul more than the body, and there is more foulness in the owner than in the workman.

Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33 Freyd: You were also looking for some operational criteria for false memory syndrome: what a clinician could look for or test for, and so on. I spoke with several of our scientific advisory board members and I have some information for you that isn't really in writing at this point but I think it's a direction you want us to go in. So if I can read some of these notes . . . TAT: Please do. Freyd: One would look for false memory syndrome: 1. If a patient reports having been sexually abused by a parent, relative or someone in very early childhood, but then claims that she or he had complete amnesia about it for a decade or more; 2. If the patient attributes his or her current reason for being in therapy to delayed-memories. And this is where one would want to look for evidence suggesting that the abuse did not occur as demonstrated by a list of things, including firm, confident denials by the alleged perpetrators; 3. If there is denial by the entire family; 4. In the absence of evidence of familial disturbances or psychiatric illnesses. For example, if there's no evidence that the perpetrator had alcohol dependency or bipolar disorder or tendencies to pedophilia; 5. If some of the accusations are preposterous or impossible or they contain impossible or implausible elements such as a person being made pregnant prior to menarche, being forced to engage in sex with animals, or participating in the ritual killing of animals, and; 6. In the absence of evidence of distress surrounding the putative abuse. That is, despite alleged abuse going from age two to 27 or from three to 16, the child displayed normal social and academic functioning and that there was no evidence of any kind of psychopathology. Are these the kind of things you were asking for? TAT: Yeah, it's a little bit more specific. I take issue with several, but at least it gives us more of a sense of what you all mean when you say "false memory syndrome." Freyd: Right. Well, you know I think that things are moving in that direction since that seems to be what people are requesting. Nobody's denying that people are abused and there's no one denying that someone who was abused a decade ago or two decades ago probably would not have talked about it to anybody. I think I mentioned to you that somebody who works in this office had that very experience of having been abused when she was a young teenager-not extremely abused, but made very uncomfortable by an uncle who was older-and she dealt with it for about three days at the time and then it got pushed to the back of her mind and she completely forgot about it until she was in therapy. TAT: There you go. That's how dissociation works! Freyd: That's how it worked. And after this came up and she had discussed and dealt with it in therapy, she could again put it to one side and go on with her life. Certainly confronting her uncle and doing all these other things was not a part of what she had to do. Interestingly, though, at the same time, she has a daughter who went into therapy and came up with memories of having been abused by her parents. This daughter ran away and is cutoff from the family-hasn't spoken to anyone for three years. And there has never been any meeting between the therapist and the whole family to try to find out what was involved. TAT: If we take the first example -- that of her own abuse -- and follow the criteria you gave, we would have a very strong disbelief in the truth of what she told.

In fact, I am generally proud of having had so many adventures. But today, I had barely pronounced the words than I was seized with contrition; it seems as though I am lying, that I have never had the slightest adventure in my life, or rather, that I don't even know what the word means any more. [...] Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But no adventures. It isn't a question of words; I am beginning to understand. [...] There is nothing brilliant about my life now: but from time to time, for example, for example, when they play music in the cafes, I look back and tell myself: in old days, in London, Meknes, Tokyo, I have known great moments, I have had adventures. Now I am deprived of this. I have suddenly learned, without apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. [...] ... adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makese sense when dead. [...] Each instant appears only as a part of a sequence. I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplacable-and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated. [...] I shall never rediscover either this woman or this night. I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn on early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass. All of a sudden something breaks off sharply. The adventure is over, time resumes its daily routine. I turn; behind me, this beautiful melodious form sinks entirely into the past. It grows smaller, contracts as it declines, and now the end makes one with the beginning. Following this gold spot with my eyes I think I would accept-even if I had to risk death, lost a fortune, a friend-to live it all over again, in the same circumstances, from end to end. But an adventure never returns nor is prolonged." (p.56-57) "... Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life? [...] This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It's rather they way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc., etc. And then you attribute this property to events which appear to you *in* the instants; what belongs to the form you carry over to the content. You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. You see a woman, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you *see* her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure. If I remember correctly, they call that the irreversibility of time. The feeling of advanture would simply be that of the irreversibility of time. But why don't we always have it? Is it that time is not always irreversible? There are moments when you have the impression that you can do what you want, go forward or backward, that it has no importance; and then other times when you might say that the links have been tightened and, in that case, it's not a questino of missing your turn because you could never start again.

Indeed, quite sweeping disparagements of the claims of ‘‘conceptual authority’’ have invaded the academic humanities in recent years, to generally deleterious effect (we shall examine a case in point in 2,v). Within this strain of self-styled post-modernist critique, most appeals to ‘‘conceptual content’’ are dismissed as rigorist shams, representing scarcely more than polite variants upon schoolyard bullying. Run-of-the-mill appeals to ‘‘conceptual authority’’ tacitly masquerade prejudiced predilection in the form of falsely constructed universals which, in turn, covertly shelter the most oppressive codes of Western society. But such sweeping doubts, if rigorously implemented, would render daily life patently unworkable, for we steer our way through the humblest affairs by making conceptual evaluations as we go. In what alternative vocabulary, for example, might we appraise our teenager’s failings with respect to his calculus homeworks? Forced to chose between exaggerated mistrust and blind acceptance of every passing claim of conceptual authority (even those issuing from transparent charlatans), we should plainly select gullibility as the wiser course, for the naïve explorer who trusts her somewhat inadequate map generally fares better than the doubter who accepts nothing. We will have told the story of concepts wrongly if it doesn’t turn out to be one where our usual forms of conceptual evaluation emerge as appropriate and well founded most of the time. Of a milder, but allied, nature are the presumptions of the school of Thomas Kuhn, which contends that scientists under the unavoidable spell of different paradigms often ‘‘talk past one another’’ through their failure to share common conceptual resources, in a manner that renders scientific argumentation more a matter of brute conversion than discourse. We shall discuss these views later as well. Although their various generating origins can prove quite complex, most popular academic movements that promote radical conceptual debunking of these types draw deeply upon inadequate philosophies of ‘‘concepts and attributes.’’ Such doctrines often sin against the cardinal rule of philosophy: first, do no harm, for such self-appointed critics of ‘‘ideological tyranny’’ rarely prove paragons of intellectual toleration themselves.

Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade: That hadst a being ere the world was made, And well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid. Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not, When primitive Nothing Something straight begot; Then all proceeded from the great united What. Something, the general attribute of all, Severed from thee, its sole original, Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall; Yet Something did thy mighty power command, And from fruitful Emptiness’s hand Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, air, and land. Matter the wicked’st offspring of thy race, By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace, And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face. With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join; Body, thy foe, with these did leagues combine To spoil thy peaceful realm, and ruin all thy line; But turncoat Time assists the foe in vain, And bribed by thee, destroys their short-lived reign, And to thy hungry womb drives back thy slaves again. Though mysteries are barred from laic eyes, And the divine alone with warrant pries Into thy bosom, where truth in private lies, Yet this of thee the wise may truly say, Thou from the virtuous nothing dost delay, And to be part with thee the wicked wisely pray. Great Negative, how vainly would the wise Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise, Didst thou not stand to point their blind philosophies! Is, or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate, And True or False, the subject of debate, That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state— When they have racked the politician’s breast, Within thy Bosom most securely rest, And when reduced to thee, are least unsafe and best. But Nothing, why does Something still permit That sacred monarchs should at council sit With persons highly thought at best for nothing fit, While weighty Something modestly abstains From princes’ coffers, and from statemen’s brains, And Nothing there like stately Nothing reigns? Nothing! who dwell’st with fools in grave disguise For whom they reverend shapes and forms devise, Lawn sleeves, and furs, and gowns, when they like thee look wise: French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy, Hibernian learning, Scotch civility, Spaniards’ dispatch, Danes’ wit are mainly seen in thee. The great man’s gratitude to his best friend, Kings’ promises, whores’ vows—towards thee may bend, Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.

It is correct that not all beliefs are true. Some are mere superstitions. A belief can be true or false. If we cannot prove or disprove God from scientific method alone, then we need to evaluate a belief by using other faculties other than physical senses, such as logic and philosophy. If a concept dates back to history, then we ought to evaluate history and archaeology. If the concept is written in a book and millions of people attribute their held views to that book, then one is ought to read and evaluate information in that book. Curiosity demands this continuous probing from a person who is interested in seeking reality, knowledge and truths.

Peled’s inclination to refrain from depicting Labor Zionism as the creator of both the state and its hegemonic, semi-fascist ideology is repeated here as well as in his later works. He avoids attributing responsibility for Israel’s ethnocracy under Labor governments who ruled until 1977. Also, he claims it was the right-wing government, headed by Sharon in 2001, that introduced a new approach of marginalizing Palestinian citizens and limited the democratic defenses the preceding Labor regime had provided for them.

Overview of the Fallacy of Division by Austin Cline In critical thinking, we often come across statements that fall victim to the fallacy of division. This common logical fallacy refers to an attribution placed onto an entire class, assuming that each part has the same property as the whole. These can be physical objects, concepts, or groups of people. By grouping elements of a whole together and assuming that every piece automatically has a certain attribute, we are often stating a false argument. This falls into the category of a fallacy of grammatical analogy. It can apply to many arguments and statements we make, including the debate over religious beliefs. The fallacy of division is similar to the fallacy of composition but in reverse. This fallacy involves someone taking an attribute of a whole or a class and assuming that it must also necessarily be true of each part or member. The fallacy of division takes the form of: X has property P. Therefore, all parts (or members) of X have this property P. Here are some obvious examples of the Fallacy of Division: The United States is the richest country in the world. Therefore, everyone in the United States must be rich and live well. [So pointing out one poor American does not refute the proposition that the United States is a rich country.]

Onora O’Neill (1987) argues that idealization occurs when, in the process of abstraction required by theorizing, we represent objects in ways that distort them. The distortion usually occurs by falsely attributing (putatively) positive features to the object or by downplaying negative ones. As feminist philosophers have consistently argued, practices of abstracting about objects in order to theorize about them risk—under unjust background conditions, at least—not random forms of distortion but rather emphasizing attributes that are associated with the dominant or that justify domination.

The false biologism of white racial supremacy has been discredited, but most westerners are quite happy to abide by what seems to be a value-neutral distinction between ‘white people’ and ‘people of colour’. Consequently, we assume that any Englishman who becomes a ‘Mughal’ must be still, at his core, ‘white’, as if this is the one fundamental truth of his body that trumps its other attributes, including the unexpected changes it may have undergone in India.

In American Homicide, Roth attributes the sharp spike in murder rates during the late 1840s and 1850s to the fact that “Americans could no longer coalesce.…Disillusioned by the course the nation was taking, people felt increasingly alienated from both their government and their neighbors.

Ecopsychology attributes our separation from nature to our collective history (shifting from earth-based to industrial and technological societies) and our individual histories—the lack of healthy bonding with nature, including other people, that we received as children. As human beings living within Earth, it is incredibly important to remember that we are animals. Much of our Western paradigm keeps us alienated from this realization, placing humans in a special category separate from nature. Yet we are animals living among a vast community of living beings. When I was diving into the topic of narcissism, I recalled that some of the early ecopsychology writers briefly touched on narcissism as a cause for materialistic overconsumption in US culture. In a groundbreaking essay from 1995, “The All-Consuming Self,” the ecopsychologists Mary E. Gomes and Allen D. Kanner (building on the work of the psychologist Philip Cushman) stated, “American consumer habits reflect both the grandiose and the empty side of narcissism. In terms of the arrogant false self, Americans feel entitled to an endless stream of new consumer goods and services.”[5] Of course, the various things that we buy are sourced from finite materials from Earth and create an irreversible impact on ecological systems. Our vast consumption is essentially destroying Earth, including ourselves; our sense of entitlement to things—our narcissism—is at the heart of this.

Women who are personally complimented by compliments to their sex [...] There are only some of the reactions to the sex privatization process, the confusion of one's sexuality with one's individuality. [...] Thus sex privatization stereotypes women; it encourages men to see women as "dolls" differentiated only by superficial attributes - not of the same species as themselves - and it blinds women to their sexploitation as a class, keeping them from uniting against it, thus effectively segregating the two classes. A side-effect is the converse: if women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are. Women, because social recognition is granted only for a false individuality, are kept from developing the tough individuality, that would enable breaking through such a ruse. If one's experience in its generality is the only thing acknowledged, why go to the trouble to develop real character?

What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped ‘false gods’. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods.

Human beings are inclined to attribute things to malice that are best explained by apathy, and when we falsely identify other people’s motivations, we create a situation in our minds that not only doesn’t exist but colors all of our future interactions.

Although we cannot find out immediately a plain reconciliation and one free from all difficulties between passages of Scripture (which treat either of names or of numerical and chronological subjects), they must not at once be placed among inexplicable things (alyta). Or if they are called inexplicable (alyta), they will be such only by the inability of the one endeavoring to explain (tē adynamia tou lyontos), not in themselves, so that here it will be wiser to acknowledge our own ignorance than to suppose any contradiction. For these histories are not written so in detail as to contain every circumstance. Many things were undoubtedly brought into a narrow compass; other things which did not appear to be so important were omitted. It could also happen that these places had various relations (scheseis) well known to the writers, although now unknown to us. Hence Peter Martyr well remarks on 2 K. 8:17: 'Although there occur obscure places in chronology, we must not, to get over them, say that the sacred text is false. For God, who of his own mercy wished the divine letters to be preserved for us, has given them to us entire and uncorrupted. Wherefore if it ever happens that we cannot explain the number of years, we must confess our ignorance and recollect that the sacred letters speak so concisely that the place where the calculation must be commenced does not readily appear. Therefore the Scriptures remain uncorrupted, which if weakened in one or another place, will also be suspected in others' (Melachim id est, Regum Libri Duo [1566], p. 259). And: 'It often happens that in this history the number of years assigned to the kings appear to be at variance with each other. But doubts of this kind can be solved in many ways; for sometimes one and the same year is attributed to two persons because it had been completed and perfected by neither. Sometimes sons reigned some years with their parents, and these are assigned now to the reign of the parents and then to that of the children. There occurred also sometimes interregna, and the unoccupied time is attributed now to a former and then to a later king. There were also some years in which rulers were tyrannical and wicked, and therefore these are passed by and not reckoned with the other years of their reigns.' (ibid., p. 127 on 1 K. 15:1).

The ideologists of the bourgeoisie - the bourgeois economists - failed to perceive the real nature of the capitalist mode of production and capitalist society because their class interests and class narrow-mindedness made them regard the historically transient social form as being eternal, natural and supra-historical. They could not discern behind the relations of things - commodities - the relations of people. Bourgeois ideologists are in the power of commodity fetishism. They attribute to things and products of human activity, supra-sensuous, mystical properties. This fetishism, this false viewpoint, inherent in capitalist society, bourgeois ideologists extend to the entire domain of social relations: to the relations of economy and politics, economy and law, being and consciousness. Bourgeois ideology represents these relations in a false topsy-turvy way.

We tend to attribute the complexity and busyness of our lives to a false culprit. We blame it on our environment. The pace of activity in our cities, our workload or office culture, our stage in life, and the current demands on our time are the assumed chief causes of our overwhelmed lives. Quaker missionary Thomas Kelly, writing in 1941, made a different observation after spending a full year “slowing down” and “simplifying” on a twelve-month sabbatical in Hawaii. Like other Americans, he had carried with him to the tropics the “mad-cap, feverish life” he knew on the mainland.15 Your inner life is not a mirror image of your environment. If anything, the opposite is true. We create an environment that mirrors our inner life. Kelly observed: Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! If only we could find the Silence which is the source of sound!16 All of these teachers are circling around the same thing: hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.

In a democracy, you cannot blame only a leading leader but also the entire leadership, including the voters’ choice, if the party fails to fulfill its promises. Prose, whether in the form of a quotation or something else, expresses various colours of character and life in its context and accurately mirrors society; therefore, read not only the content of the writing but also understand and share what you think will enlighten others’ lives. What are the attributes of a leader? When the nation understands and realizes that, it blocks the route for the leadership, with the foresight, upon dishonest, rude, and immoral ones. Otherwise, the rope of idiocy remains in the hands of idiots. The day you vote is an opportunity to vote not for a leader but for a party manifesto and constructive thoughts and plans. Indeed, you will have good fortune, a bright and joyful social status, and prosperity will always be a part of your society and life. You are the real leader of the universe if you also lead the hearts and not just the minds. The mind keeps the knowledge while the heart showers the fragrance of love towards the soul; it is the base and circle of the knowledge. A leader doesn’t mean to have governmental power; it means to lead its people on the right, secure, equal, fair, and visionary way of life. Be a leader, not a lawyer and judge, not an official; express party program(me) honestly for the nation and face all the challenges before accusing, abusing, and blaming others. Indeed, it shows dignity and venerable leadership. The opposition leaders and those in power can keep reputable the four pillars of democracy in the context of constitutional duties, transparent justice, truth, and honesty; they can also discredit those by their wrong character and fallacious decisions and deeds. Real and true leader neither has a special status nor contradict others. If he keeps the distance in any way or shape If he says things that don’t exist If he brings you in a destructive direction If he what promises, but do not keep his words If he put you naked in the open sky and himself in a comfortable tent If he gives you false hopes rather than the practical helping He is just an opportunist, a cheater, and a liar but not a leader. Promises of the leader before the election build expectations in the minds of voters, and after winning the election, those cause humiliation in the eyes of voters if the leader fails to fulfill them. Therefore, fly not so high that you cannot land easily; be honest with yourself. Political leadership is a significant spirit and defense of the armed forces of any state, whereas the armed forces are a protective shield for them. Both are compulsory for each other, as the political leadership has one point, and the armed forces have zero points, which becomes ten points. Otherwise, it stays one or zero, establishing nothing. A selfish and empty of vision and solution leadership prefers its own political and personal benefits and interests instead of its people; indeed, it collapses in the face of ruffians and traitors of the constitution. As a reality, such a state and all institutions face conspiracies in global affairs; consequently, diplomatic isolation and trade failure become destiny; it leads towards destruction with self-adopted strategy and character.

Hatshepsut began to wear the traditional Pharaonic false beard and other accoutrements of office, and men’s clothing with body armor to conceal her breasts and other female attributes, as can be seen in statues created at Deir el-Bahari, her mortuary temple. She also changed her name, giving it a masculine rather than a feminine ending, and became “His Majesty, Hatshepsu.” In other words, she ruled as a man, a male pharaoh, not simply as regent.

My masters at Melk had often told me that it is very difficult for a Northerner to form any clear idea of the religious and political vicissitudes of Italy. The peninsula, where more than in any other country the clergy made a display of power and wealth, for at least two centuries had generated movements of men bent on a poorer life, in protest against the corrupt priests, from whom they even refused the sacraments. They gathered in independent communities, hated equally by the feudal lords, the empire, and the city magistrates. Finally Saint Francis had appeared, spreading a love of poverty that did not contradict the precepts of the church; and after his efforts the church had accepted the summons to severe behavior of those older movements and had purified them of the elements of disruption that lurked in them. There should have followed a period of meekness and holiness, but as the Franciscan order grew and attracted the finest men, it became too powerful, too bound to earthly matters, and many Franciscans wanted to restore it to its early purity. A very difficult matter for an order that at the time when I was at the abbey already numbered more than thirty thousand members scattered throughout the whole world. But so it was, and many of those monks of Saint Francis were opposed to the Rule that the order had established, and they said the order had by now assumed the character of those ecclesiastical institutions it had come into the world to reform. And this, they said, had already happened in the days when Saint Francis was alive, and his words and his aims had been betrayed. Many of them rediscovered then a book written at the beginning of the twelfth century of our era, by a Cistercian monk named Joachim, to whom the spirit of prophecy was attributed. He had foreseen the advent of a new age, in which the spirit of Christ, long corrupted through the actions of his false apostles, would again be achieved on earth. And it had seemed clear to all that, unawares, he was speaking of the Franciscan order.

Governments often use false information to advance their policies or strategies. This is a difficult problem in a time of civil unrest or war. The expression “In war, truth is the first casualty” is attributed to the Greek playwright Aeschylus writing around 550 B.C.

In Palestine, the one sanctuary of the worship of Jahve, the Temple, retained its high prestige. The sacerdotal hierarchy, swayed by the aristocratic Sadducean party, strictly maintained the ritual observances. But the luxury, the depravity, the religious indifference of these sacerdotal leaders, their subserviency to the Roman authorities, their contempt for the Messianic hope and the doctrine of the resurrection, had alienated from them the affection of the people, and, in the eyes of some, even cast discredit on the Temple itself. Some indeed were so much disgusted that they fled from the official sanctuary and its servants, and, afar from the world, devoted themselves to the service of God and a strict observance of the Law. The Essenes represented this movement: grouped in small communities they lived on the borders of the Dead Sea, near Engaddi. The Sadducean priests persecuted Jesus Christ and His disciples. As for the Essenes, they lived alongside of the new Faith, and if they did embrace it, it was but slowly. The Pharisees, so often condemned in the Gospels for their hypocrisy, their false zeal, and their peculiar practices, did not form a special sect; the name was applied generally to all those who were ultra-scrupulous in following the Law, and not the Law only, but the thousand observances with which they had amplified it, attributing as much importance to them as to the fundamental precepts of morality. Still, they were faithful defenders of the Messianic hope and of belief in the resurrection. Beneath their proud and overstrained attachment to details of observance, they had a solid foundation of faith and piety. Amongst them the Gospel made many excellent converts.

Truman enjoyed himself more than anyone she knew; he luxuriated in his success, did not attempt false modesty, did not attribute it to others, or to luck, or to anything but his own talent. And you had to love someone like that.

Regarding the Platonic zoo and its new establishment, what is at issue is thus to learn for all the world whether between the population and the director ship there is merely a difference of degree or a difference in species. According to the first assumption, the distance between those who tend human beings and their fosterlings would obviously only be a contingent and pragmatic one—in this case, one could attribute to the herd the capacity to periodically rotate their herders. However, if a difference in species prevails between the managers of the zoo and its inhabitants, then they would be so fundamentally different from each other that an elected directorship would not be advisable, but rather only a directorship based on insight. Only the false zoo directors, the pseudo-statesmen, and political sophists would then tout themselves with the argument that they are just like their herds, while the one who truly tends the body politic would focus on difference and make it discreetly understood that, because he acts from insight, he stands closer to the gods than to the confused living beings whom he guides.

The office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock has especially this duty assigned to it by Christ, namely, to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body; for, owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking “men speaking perverse things” (Acts xx. 30), “vain talkers and seducers” (Tit. i. 10), “erring and driving into error” (2 Tim. iii. 13). Still it must be confessed that the number of the enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly, who are striving, by arts, entirely new and full of subtlety, to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, if they can, to overthrow utterly Christ’s kingdom itself. Wherefore We may no longer be silent, lest We should seem to fail in Our most sacred duty, and lest the kindness that, in the hope of wiser counsels, We have hitherto shown them, should be attributed to forgetfulness of Our office. GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION 2. That We make no delay in this matter is rendered necessary especially by the fact that the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies; they lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear. We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, nay, and this is far more lamentable, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, feigning a love for the Church, lacking the firm protection of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man.

tainted by the heaps of pestilent offal it must sweep away. As Lord Bacon says (in that play falsely attributed to Shakespeare)—"Ay, there's the rub!" If you were to ask me, NOW, what effect the right of suffrage, office, and all the duties of men has had upon the morals of the women of our State, I should be puzzled what

However many attributes that you can see of yourself at the moment, they are not yours, they are false attributions, they are 'cultured' (developed). 'Your' properties (guna) are of a completely different kind. You have not seen them, you have not known them; You do not Know even a single property.

Aaropit bhaav (false attribution of the belief ‘I am Chandubhai’) is vikalp bhaav (wrong belief that ‘I am Chandubhai’ and all the relative ‘I-ness’ that stems from it), and swabhaavbhaav (the intent as One's inherent nature) is the real intent; it is Parmatmabhaav (the intent as the absolute Self).