Rational Thinker Quotes

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

I treat my thoughts like an old person treats their valuables: I cannot for the life of me proceed to throwing them out.

I wonder if I have a problem. I definitely have a tendency to seek spiritual inspiration from super-rational thinkers rather than from rabbis and priests and theologians.

What a paradox it is, the sane causes more problems than the insane! It is! The real problems of the world do not come from the insane but, the sane!

Dare to exercise rational thinking.

People often ask me, what my religion is. I tell them, I am a Christian to the Christian, a Jew to the Jew, a Muslim to the Muslim, a Hindu to the Hindu, an atheist to the atheist, but the brightest nightmare to the fundamentalist.

We have no rational evidence that there exist another world, but we have a clear feeling that man does not exist only to produce and to consume. Scientists or thinkers who try to discover the truth cannot find that higher life by thinking alone, but their own life, spent in search for the truth and neglecting the physical living, is just that higher form of human existence.

Rationality is the application of reason to form beliefs based on facts and evidence, instead of guesswork, opinions, and feelings. That is to say, the rational thinker wants to know what is really true and not just what he or she would like to be true.

The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.

Real teachers like Jesus, Buddha, Nanak, Rumi have much more to teach humanity, than the imaginary figure Krishna, concocted by an ancient Indian man named Vyasa.

Never trust books on the question of whether or not to trust your rational thinking. Trust your rational thinking on the question of whether or not to trust the books.

My interpretation of scientific knowledge, for example, was a triviality for physicists like Mach, Boltzmann, Einstein and Bohr. But the ideas of these great thinkers were distorted beyond recognition by the rodents of neopositivism and the competing rodents of the church of 'critical' rationalism.

Most philosophers do not want intellectual matters to reduce to a question of morality (obedience or rebellion to God's Word). They want to hold the intellect or reason to be above matters of moral volition. They hold that truth is obtainable and testable no matter what ethical condition the thinker is in. Hence, they maintain that all disputes must be rationally resolvable, and a rational case for a philosophic position relies on a valid chain of discursive argumentation that takes us back to incontestable first principles or facts.

Among the things that can drive a thinker to despair is the knowledge that the illogical is necessary for man and that much good comes from it. It is so firmly lodged in the passions, in speech, in art, in religion, and generally in everything which endows life with value, that one cannot extricate it without doing irreparable harm to these beautiful things. Only the very naive are capable of thinking that the nature of man can be transformed into a purely logical one; but, if there were degrees of approximation to this goal, how much would not have to vanish along this path! Even the most rational man needs nature again from time to time, that is, his illogical basic attitude to all things.

The way most people use their minds is analogous to an ambulance that is used only as an umbrella.

Even as a rational person, your emotions are crucial for the decisions you make in your life. Learn how to recognize your own and other people’s emotions and use them to your advantage.

Henceforth the Cartesian surgical operation in which spirit and matter become totally separated dominated scientific and philosophic thought The domain of science was matter which was a pure "it" divorced completely from any ontological aspect other than pure quantity. Although there were protests here and there especially among English and German thinkers, this view became the very factor that determined the relationship between man and nature, scientifically and philosophically. Thus seventeenth-century rationalism is the unconscious background of all later scientific thought up to the present day. Whatever discoveries are made in the sciences and whatever changes are brought about in conceptions of time, space, matter and motion, the background of seventeenth-century rationalism remains. For this very reason, other interpretations of nature, especially the symbolic, have never been seriously considered and accepted.

The over-whelming preponderance of people have not freely decided what to believe, but, rather, have been socially conditioned (indoctrinated) into their beliefs. They are unreflective thinkers. Their minds are products of social and personal forces they neither understand, control, nor concern themselves with. Their personal beliefs are often based in prejudices. Their thinking is largely comprised of stereotypes, caricatures, oversimplifications, sweeping generalizations, illusions, delusions, rationalizations, false dilemmas, and begged questions. Their motivations are often traceable to irrational fears and attachments, personal vanity and envy, intellectual arrogance and simple-mindedness. These constructs have become a part of their identity.

You become powerful when you can tap into both your rational brain and your emotional brain. The rider and the elephant need to work in harmony. And that’s where emotional intelligence comes into play.

The influence of the Sermon on the Mount is truly past reckoning. Any rational human being with a conscientious mind is bound to be influenced by its exuberant content regardless of religious background.

You are modern humans of the civilized world. And modern humans rise beyond all laws and superstitions of the society. They help their fellow beings to rise from the ashes of ignorance, illusion and fear.

Perhaps too much is said in universities about how "exciting" it is to think. Thinking undoubtedly has its excitements and satisfactions, but these feelings do not disclose its general character, and there is something very much wrong with the idea they should. We do not think in order to have fun but because life is troubling and problematic. We think because we are compelled to. And while thinking occasionally brings exciting discoveries, the periods in between these discoveries are likely to place heavy demands not only on the thinker's energies but on his patience as well. When thinking, we should not need to tell ourselves that it is an exhilarating experience; it should be enough to realize that we are behaving with the seriousness, the rationality, and the self-discipline that the human situation requires of us.

Indeed, perhaps the central tension of the Enlightenment is that many of these European thinkers were espousing liberalism, rationalism, and human progress while providing the kindling for slavery and colonialism.

The desired modernization and rationalisation of Turkey will never be realised till the day the Modern Turks of Atatürk come to power because only modern and rational minds can create a modern and a rational country!

nor did it go unnoticed by the latest litter of Archimboldians, recent graduates, boys and girls, their doctorates tucked still warm under their arms, who planned, by any means necessary, to impose their particular readings of Archimboldi, like missionaries ready to instill faith in God, even if to do so meant signing a pact with the devil, for most were what you might call rationalists, not in the philosophical sense but in the pejorative literal sense, denoting people less interested in literature than in literary criticism, the one field, according to them—some of them, anyway—where revolution was still possible, and in some way they behaved not like youths but like nouveaux youths, in the sense that there are the rich and the nouveaux riches, all of them generally rational thinkers, let us repeat, although often incapable of telling their asses from their elbows,

emerge from the rough-and-tumble of argument, such as that you have to provide reasons for your beliefs, you’re allowed to point out flaws in the beliefs of others, and you’re not allowed to forcibly shut people up who disagree with you. Add in the rule that you should allow the world to show you whether your beliefs are true or false, and we can call the rules science. With the right rules, a community of less than fully rational thinkers can cultivate rational thoughts.31

It is somewhat paradoxical that AI-Ghazzali spearheaded the attack against free-thinkers and the proponents of logic, but in doing so had to use the weapon of his adversaries. Indeed, the stubborn ghost of Greek dialectics withstood exorcism by the greatest Asharite of all time.

Great thinkers proffered that man is born broken and he spends a lifetime healing. All men share a germinal sense of innocence, but life leads us into our vices. Temptation surrounds us, and we willingly march into the den of iniquity. We rationalize and attempt to justify commission of great sins.

Philosophy is dead. Only ontological mathematics can resurrect it. Ontological mathematics mathematizes metaphysics and shows how it underpins physics, thus returning metaphysics to the pinnacle of intellectual activity. Ontological mathematics restores the grand tradition of philosophy, Big Philosophy. Come and join the real thinkers.

———————————— WHAT WE TEACH YOU How to address your lodge. How to give toasts. How to tell dialect stories. How to propose to a lady. How to entertain banquets. How to make convincing selling-talks. How to build big vocabulary. How to create a strong personality. How to become a rational, powerful and original thinker. How to be a MASTER MAN!

In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.

In decision-making, outlining the rational pros and cons was never an issue for me. My problem was that I completely disregarded the emotional side. When I started giving my feelings more attention, I got a more accurate view of the emotional variables. Since I had a more complete picture with both rational and emotional variables, I could make an optimal decision.

The really dangerous people are not the great heretics and unbelievers, but the swarm of petty thinkers, the rationalizing intellectuals, who suddenly discover how irrational all religious dogmas are. Anything not understood is given short shrift, and the highest values of symbolic truth are irretrievably lost. What can a rationalist do with the dogma of the virgin birth, or with Christ’s sacrificial death, or the Trinity?

Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language – which is to describe reality – is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. The fundamental speech-act is only superficially represented by the assertoric grammar. Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance. As a result Newspeak developed its own special syntax, which – while closely related to the syntax deployed in ordinary descriptions – carefully avoids any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument. Françoise Thom has argued this in her brilliant study La langue de bois.5 The purpose of communist Newspeak, in Thom’s ironical words, has been ‘to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things’.

Hume’s purported fideism had serious impact on some religious thinkers. One of these, the German philosopher J. G. Hamann, decided that Hume, intentionally or not, was the greatest voice of religious orthodoxy—for insisting that there was no rational basis for religious belief, and that there was no rational evidence for Christianity. When the Dialogues appeared, Hamann became quite excited; he translated the first and last dialogues into German so that Immanuel Kant might read them and become a serious Christian. Hamann’s use of Hume as the voice of orthodoxy led the great Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard to become the most important advocate of fideistic Christianity in the nineteenth century. So, although most of Hume’s influence has been in creating doubts and leading thinkers to question accepted religious views, he also played an important role in the development of fideistic orthodoxy, culminating in Kierkegaard’s views.

The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse — to challenge others to form free opinions.

In my freshman and sophomore years of college, I read dozens of books by the great thinkers of Western civilization. From Plato to Nietzsche, Homer to Shakespeare - you name it, I read it. At times it drove me crazy - picture reading hundreds of pages that sound like this every week: "All rational knowledge is either material and concerned with some object, or formal and concerned only with the form of understanding and of reason themselves and with the universal rules of thought in general without regard to differences of its objects." Come again, Kant?

It caused my opposition to any ideologies—Marxist, Fascist, National Socialist, what you will—because they were incompatible with science in the rational sense of critical analysis. I again refer back to Max Weber as the great thinker who brought that problem to my attention; and I still maintain today that nobody who is an ideologist can be a competent social scientist." It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich, because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research. Because of this attitude I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian—not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bête noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably, I have never answered such criticisms; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry, but they cannot be partners in a discussion. Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language—meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies.

God is dead” —Nietzsche. “Nietzsche is dead” —God. Nietzsche did not make this claim in a narcissistic or triumphant manner. The great thinker’s opinion stemmed from his fear that all the Judeo-Christian values serving as the foundation of Western civilization had been made dangerously subject to casual rational criticism, and that the most important axiom upon which they were predicated—the existence of a transcendent, all-powerful deity—had been fatally challenged. Nietzsche concluded from this that everything would soon fall apart, in a manner catastrophic both psychologically and socially.

You are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are always telling me that I ignore the cruelty of nature. If you had been an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the kindness and benevolence of nature. You are an atheist, and you praise the deists of the eighteenth century. Read them instead of praising them, and you will find that their whole universe stands or falls with the deity. You are a materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific hero. See what he said and you will think him an insane mystic. No, the great Free-thinker, with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy Christianity. What he does destroy is the Free-thinker who went before. Free-thought may be suggestive, it may be inspiriting, it may have as much as you please of the merits that come from vivacity and variety. But there is one thing Free-thought can never be by any possibility—Free-thought can never be progressive. It can never be progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest. Who

possibility is that the crisis happened partly because the economic models of the mainstream rendered that outcome ostensibly so unlikely in theory that they ended up making it far more likely in practice. The insouciance encouraged by the rational-expectations and efficient-market hypotheses made regulators and investors careless. As Minsky argued, stability destabilizes. This is an aspect of what George Soros, the successful speculator and innovative economic thinker, calls ‘reflexivity’: the way human beings think determines the reality in which they live.5 Naive economics helps cause unstable economies. Meanwhile,

It is not difficult to imagine the Catholic Church adopting, after a Tychonic transition, the Copernican cosmology some 200 years earlier than she eventually did. The Galileo affair was an isolated episode in the history of relations between science and theology. But its dramatic circumstances, magnified out of all proportion, created a popular belief that science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought. Some historians wish to make us believe that the decline of science in Italy was due to the "terror" caused by the trial of Galileo. But the next generation saw the rise of Toricelli, Cavallieri, Borelli, whose contributions to science were more substantial than those of any generation before or during Galileo's lifetime. The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement. This becomes evident if we shift our attention from Italy to the Protestant countries of Europe, and to France. Kepler, Descartes, Barrow, Leibniz, Gilbert, Boyle and Newton himself, the generation of pioneers contemporary with and succeeding Galileo, were all deeply and genuinely religious thinkers. The pioneers of the new cosmology, from Kepler to Newton and beyond, based their search into nature on the mystic conviction that there must exist laws behind the confusing phenomena; that the world was a completely rational, ordered, harmonic creation.

Just as we don’t have to explain why molecular biologists discovered that DNA has four bases—given that they were doing their biology properly, and given that DNA really does have four bases, in the long run they could hardly have discovered anything else—we may not have to explain why enlightened thinkers would eventually argue against African slavery, cruel punishments, despotic monarchs, and the execution of witches and heretics. With enough scrutiny by disinterested, rational, and informed thinkers, these practices cannot be justified indefinitely. The universe of ideas, in which one idea entails others, is itself an exogenous force, and once a community of thinkers enters that universe, they will be forced in certain directions regardless of their material surroundings.

Every religion offers an interpretation of the world, a worldview, a counterpart to the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption. Translated into worldview terms, creation refers to a theory of origins: Where did we come from? What is ultimate reality? Fall refers to the problem of evil: What’s wrong with the world, the source of evil and suffering? Redemption asks, How can the problem be fixed? What must I do to become part of the solution? These are the three fundamental questions that every religion, worldview, or philosophy seeks to answer.16 The answers offered by Romanticism were adapted from neo-Platonism.17 In neo-Platonism, the counterpart to creation, or the ultimate source of all things, is a primordial spiritual essence or unity referred to as the One, the Absolute, the Infinite. Even thinking cannot be attributed to the One because thought implies a distinction between subject and object—between the thinker and the object of his thought. In fact, for the Romantics, thinking itself constituted the fall, the cause of all that is wrong with the world. Why? Because it introduced division into the original unity. More precisely, the fault lay in a particular kind of thinking—the Enlightenment reductionism that had produced the upper/lower story dichotomy in the first place. Coleridge wrote that “the rational instinct” posed “the original temptation, through which man fell.” The poet Friedrich Schiller blamed the “all-dividing Intellect” for modern society’s fragmentation, conflict, isolation, and alienation. And what would redeem us from this fall? The creative imagination. Art would restore the spiritual meaning and purpose that Enlightenment science had stripped from the world.

Notice in any event that at every point in Aquinas’s account of the soul, as at every point in his arguments for God’s existence, the appeal is to what follows rationally from such Aristotelian metaphysical notions as the formal and final causes of a thing. There is no appeal to “faith,” or to parapsychology, ghost stories, near-death experiences, or any other evidence of the sort materialists routinely dismiss as scientifically dubious. Whatever one’s ultimate appraisal of these arguments, the New Atheist’s pretense that a religious view of the world can only ever be the result of wishful thinking rather than objective rational argumentation is thereby exposed as a falsehood, the product, if not of willful deception, at least of inexcusable ignorance of the views of the most significant religious thinkers. That alone suffices to show that the arguments of Dawkins and his gang are worthless. For even if, per impossibile, their atheism turned out to be correct, they would not have arrived at it by rational means, shamelessly caricaturing as they do the best arguments for the other side, when they are not ignoring them altogether.

I don’t believe it too harsh to say that the history of philosophy when boiled down consists mostly of failed models of the brain. A few of the modern neurophilosophers such as Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett have made a splendid effort to interpret the findings of neuroscience research as these become available. They have helped others to understand, for example, the ancillary nature of morality and rational thought. Others, especially those of poststructuralist bent, are more retrograde. They doubt that the “reductionist” or “objectivist” program of the brain researchers will ever succeed in explaining the core of consciousness. Even if it has a material basis, subjectivity in this view is beyond the reach of science. To make their argument, the mysterians (as they are sometimes called) point to the qualia, the subtle, almost inexpressible feelings we experience about sensory input. For example, “red” we know from physics, but what are the deeper sensations of “redness”? So what can the scientists ever hope to tell us in larger scale about free will, or about the soul, which for religious thinkers at least is the ultimate of ineffability?

Congress decided to put him on a committee to write a declaration explaining why the colonies were seeking independence. It was back in the days when Congress knew how to appoint really good committees: Franklin and Jefferson and John Adams were on it. They knew that leadership required not merely asserting values, but finding a balance when values conflict. We can see that in the deft editing of the famous sentence that opens the second paragraph of the Declaration. “We hold these truths to be sacred . . . ,” Jefferson had written. On the copy of his draft at the Library of Congress we can see the dark printer’s ink and backslashes of Franklin’s pen as he changes it to “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” His point was that our rights would come from rationality and the consent of the governed, not the dictates and dogma of any religion. Jefferson’s draft sentence went on to say that all men have certain inalienable rights. We can see Adams’s hand making an addition: “They are endowed by their Creator” with these inalienable rights. So just in the editing of one half of one sentence we can see how Franklin and his colleagues struck a unifying balance between the grace of divine providence and the role of democratic consent in the founding values of our nation.

Nietzsche is a favourite, since he made the point explicitly: ‘There are no truths,’ he wrote, ‘only interpretations.’ Either what Nietzsche said is true – in which case it is not true, since there are no truths – or it is false. But it is only from the standpoint of the Enlightenment that this response seems like a refutation. The new curriculum is in the business of marginalizing refutation, just as it marginalizes truth. This explains the appeal of those recent thinkers – Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty – who owe their intellectual eminence not to their arguments but to their role in giving authority to the rejection of authority, and to their absolute commitment to the impossibility of absolute commitments. In each of them you find the view that truth, objectivity, value or meaning are chimerical, and that all we can have, and all we need to have, is the warm security of our own opinion.1 Hence it is in vain to argue against the new authorities. No argument, however rational, can counter the massive ‘will to believe’ that captures their normal readers. After all, a rational argument assumes precisely what they ‘put in question’ – namely, the possibility of rational argument. Each of them owes his reputation to a kind of religious faith: faith in the relativity of all opinions, including this one. For this is the faith on which a new form of membership is founded – a first-person plural of denial.

There is one exception to this trend, however, and that is that after the debacle of Arab nationalism, a number of secularized Arab thinkers, having no access to the earlier Islamic philosophical tradition except through Western eyes, in contrast to the living Islamic philosophical tra- dition, which has had a continuous life in such places as Iran, have adopted the view of Western rationalism. Then they have tried to look within the Islamic world for a figure with whom they could identify, and they have turned to Ibn Rushd, whom they are now interpreting as the last serious Islamic philosopher, who was also a rationalist. Many gov- ernments have been in favor of this trend, because they have thought that this would create a kind of secularism against the Islamic sentiments of the population and expedite modernism. In recent years, there have been a number of conferences in Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt, as well as Turkey (which claims to be secu- larist), and other places on Ibn Rushd, trying to present him as the last Islamic philosopher and a rationalist to be used as a model by present- day Muslim thinkers. That phenomenon is there, I agree, but that is not the most important phenomenon, because most of the people who talk in these terms, although they are now popular in the Arab world, do not have that much of a philosophical substance to carry the day; nor is their thought connected to the worldview of their society.

Nietzsche, one of the main thinkers being channeled by rightist chan culture knowingly or otherwise, argued for transgression of the pacifying moral order and instead for a celebration of life as the will to power. As a result, his ideas had appeal to everyone from the Nazis to feminists like Lily Braun. Today, the appeal of his anti-moralism is strong on the alt-right because their goals necessitate the repudiation of Christian codes that Nietzsche characterized as slave morality. Freud, on the other hand, characterized transgression as an anti-civilizational impulse, as part of the antagonism between the freedom of instinctual will and the necessary repressions of civilization. Perhaps the most significant theorist of transgression Georges Bataille inherited his idea of sovereignty from de Sade, stressing self-determination over obedience. Although rightist chan culture was undoubtedly not what Bataille had in mind, the politically fungible ideas and styles of these aesthetic transgressives are echoed in the porn-fuelled shocking content of early /b/ and in the later anti-liberal transgressions of the later /pol/. Bataille revered transgression in and of itself, and like de Sade viewed non-procreative sex as an expression of the sovereign against instrumentalism, what he called ‘expenditure without reserve’. For him excessive behavior without purpose, which also characterizes the sensibility of contemporary meme culture in which enormous human effort is exerted with no obvious personal benefit, was paradigmatically transgressive in an age of Protestant instrumental rationality.

Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake. The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material form reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality - real, noumenal reality - is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products… Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitute mechanism. He held that the mind - and not reality - sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosphy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard. What a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about it? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason… Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a women’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices[…]”. No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of women’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. The gives reasons lots to do withing the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason… Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason - objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty - Kant rejected objectivity.

One of the best means of preserving the balance of political community and promoting the necessary social and political changes is by keeping the dialogue open with all the political actors who accept the basic rules of the game and are committed to preserving the basic values of the society. This ... explains why many of the thinkers studied in this book, from [Raymond] Aron and [Norberto] Bobbio to [Adam] Michnik, successfully practiced the art of dialogue across the aisle and refused to see the world in black-and-white contrasts. If they adopted the role of committed or engaged spectators, they also maintained a certain degree of detachment and skepticism in their attitudes and political judgments. Their invitation to dialogue and their willingness to speak to their critics illustrated their courage and determination not to look for 'safe spaces' and lukewarm solutions. Instead, they saw themselves as mediators whose duty was to open a line of communication with their opponents who disagreed with them. The dialogue they staged was at times difficult and frustrating, and their belief in the (real or symbolic) power of discussion was an open act of defiance against the crusading spirit of their age, marked by political sectarianism, monologue, and ideological intransigence. Aron and the other moderates studied here were convinced that we can improve ourselves not so much by seeking a fictitious harmony with our critics as by engaging in an open debate with them, as long as we all remain committed to civility and rational critique. In this regard, they all acted as true disciples of Montaigne, who once acknowledged that 'no premise shocks me, no belief hurts me, no matter how opposite they may be. ... When I am contradicted it arouses my attention not my wrath.' This is exactly how Aron and other moderates felt and behaved. They were open to being challenged and did not shy away from correcting others when they thought fit. Yet, in so doing, they did not simply seek to refute or defeat their opponents' arguments, being aware that the truth is almost never the monopoly of a single camp or group.

No doubt most Americans would reject the notion that their country is ideological, in the manner of the Soviet Union or Iran (or, insofar as they have heard of it, the Electoral Palatinate). Surely, most would say, the United States is self-evidently rational. But the argument we have been making implies that every country is, in a sense, ideological, because every country or every regime has some vision of the good society, both domestic and international. The United States has value-shaped ends or goals as much as these other states. Following Thomas Jefferson, Americans believe that their country is not ideological because they believe that the truths in the Declaration of Independence are self-evident. True they are, but if their truth were self-evident then U.S. counterterrorism and counterinsurgency would not need to win the “hearts and minds” of millions of people. Indeed, across history countless thinkers have thought that all persons are not equal. The truly self-evident truth is that American values are contested around the world. That means that to many around the world the United States is an ideological country, not a rational one.

The same is true of species. Evolution has no attachment to the attributes modern thinkers imagine are essentially human – self-awareness, rationality and the like. Quite the contrary: by enabling the increase in human power that has taken place over the past few centuries, these very attributes may bring about humanity’s obsolescence.

Plato thought it was impossible for rational beings to do wrong knowingly. 25 But Aristotle disagreed, and he felt that Plato’s view contradicted the observed facts about ordinary human beings. He believed that a person may have the knowledge but may not use it. 26 Indian thinkers seem to have shared Aristotle’s practical view. They believed that ‘people do, in fact, act against their moral convictions and this is an unhappy fact about ourselves’. 27

The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered and most richly fed. —WILLIAM JAMES1

Paul was not only a spirited man, as any reading of his more polemical letters will attest, but also a man of the Spirit. It is important that we not downplay this factor, and it is equally important that we not anachronistically contrast it with the notion of Paul being a profound and rational thinker. We are talking about a person who manifests both life in the Spirit and life of the mind, and in fact we see a marriage of the two. No doubt Paul might have said that the only people really in their right minds are those who are filled with and inspired by the Spirit to think God’s thoughts after God has revealed those thoughts.

MSB: Isn't there something of this sort in Nietzsche's view of Jesus, who, in The Antichrist, appears as a sort of idiot? RG: Nietzsche wanted to separate Christ from Christianity. He's not the only thinker who's wanted to do this. But against the view of Christ as naïve and unsophisticated, let me put the passage in Matthew I referred to earlier, where Jesus says, “You build the tombs of the prophets…, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have joined them in shedding the prophets' blood’” (Matthew 23:29–30). Here Christ is denouncing the mimetic repetition of the past—the mimetic mechanism by which sons imagine they are better than their fathers, imagine that they do not traffic in violence. The same mechanism still operates today. It must be true that the Jews built false tombs for the prophets. This passage couldn't have been added to the Gospels. It couldn't have been invented by Matthew. Its psychological power is extraordinary! A naïve person couldn't possibly have said such a thing. Neither Myshkin nor Stavrogin could have said such a thing. MSB: In contrast to the dominant perspective in philosophy and the human sciences today, could your method fairly be characterized as “rational realism”? RG: Perhaps, but I have no certainty on the level of method and I have no philosophy. In a way, I don't understand the imperatives, the prohibitions of philosophy—for example, the rejection of reality we see today. Or, rather, I do understand them, but wanting to jettison emotion and personal involvement I find incomprehensible.

When one seriously comes to understand the classical philosophical tradition represented by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas – and not merely the potted caricatures of it that even many professional philosophers, to their shame, tend to rely on – one learns just how contingent and open to question are the various modern, and typically “naturalistic,” philosophical assumptions that most contemporary thinkers (and certainly most secularists) simply take for granted without rational argument.

Therefore, the more rationally you think, the more you'll be able to determine your own path in life.

Albert Kropp, the clearest thinker among us and therefore only a lance-corporal; Müller, who still carries his school textbooks with him, dreams of examinations, and during a bombardment mutters propositions in physics; Leer, who wears a full beard and has a preference for the girls from officers’ brothels. He swears that they are obliged by an army order to wear silk chemises and to bathe before entertaining guests of the rank of captain and upwards. And as the fourth, myself, Paul Bäumer. All four are nineteen years of age, and all four joined up from the same class as volunteers for the war. Close behind us were our friends: Tjaden, a skinny locksmith of our own age, the biggest eater of the company. He sits down to eat as thin as a grasshopper and gets up as big as a bug in the family way; Haie Westhus, of the same age, a peat-digger, who can easily hold a ration-loaf in his hand and say: Guess what I’ve got in my fist; then Detering, a peasant, who thinks of nothing but his farm-yard and his wife; and finally Stanislaus Katczinsky, the leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose

science,” for the Aristotelian, is an organized body of demonstrated truths concerning the things falling within some domain and their causes. Hence, not only physics, chemistry, biology, and the like, but also metaphysics, ethics, natural theology, and indeed the philosophy of nature itself (since, for the Aristotelian-Thomistic thinker, these fields of inquiry rest on rational arguments and analysis no less than physics, chemistry, etc. do) count as sciences.

before we are thinkers, we are believers; before we can offer our rational explanations of the world, we have already assumed a whole constellation of beliefs—a worldview—that governs and conditions our perception of the world. Our primordial orientation or comportment to the world is not as thinkers but as believers. Beliefs, we might say, are more “basic” than ideas.[

The self-serving critical thinker is highly rational and can use critical thinking well but does so for their advantage. They use arguments to confuse and manipulate others on purpose. You will be better than that, for the downfall of self-serving critical thinkers is that there is always a bias to their thinking. So it isn’t critical thinking at all, just an illusion of it.

Don't you dare pledge obedience to me! Don't you turn me into another religious band! I want you to endeavor into unknown, I want you to explore and expand.

By contrast, what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out. And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.

Nevertheless, Spinoza does find a way of making room for a kind of freedom, though it is not of the sort that philosophers are used to. Each individual, says Spinoza, is a localised concentration of the attributes of reality, really a quasi-individual, since the only true individual is the universe in totality. Insofar as the quasi-individual is ruled by his emotions, he is unfree and at the mercy of finite understanding. To become free, the individual must, by means of rational reflection, understand the extended causal chain that links everything as one. To become aware of the totality of the universe is to be freed, not from causal determinism, but from an ignorance of one’s true nature.

Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most widely recognized and cited thinkers of existential philosophy. A movement of thinking that took form during the 19th century, fashioned by individuals like Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and then further popularized by individuals including Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and of course, Sartre. In Sartre’s lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, he famously summarized the primary existential principle with the line, “Existence precedes essence.” The essence here meaning the qualities of a thing that creates its purpose. For example, Sartre references how a paper-knife is designed with a specific purpose in mind before it is made. And only once it is given a predetermined purpose and designed accordingly, is it manufactured into being. In which case, its essence precedes its existence. With exception to itself, humanity does this with nearly everything it makes. As rational beings, we create out of reason. Even if the reason is to make the point that we can create things for no reason, we have merely found ourselves in the paradox of creating for the reason of having none, which remains a reason. We exist with the innate desire for a reason. What we do. Who we are. Why we are. And so on. And here lies the beginning of our existential problem. According to Sartre and many others, there is no predetermined meaning or reason to human life. There is no authority figure designing us or our lives. And there is no essence to our existence prior to our existence. But rather, life exists for itself, and beyond itself, it is intrinsically meaningless. Whenever our sense of reason and logic confront this potential realization, that the nature of life, including the most essential part of our life, our self, appears to not agree with the same order of reason, we can often find ourselves in a sort of existential crisis. However, Sartre and the existentialists don’t see this as despairing, but rather, justification for living.

Buried within the canon of philosophy are the histories of numerous other philosophies, repressed systems of thought that sometimes emerge like cerebral ghosts to haunt the rational, daylight world of the lumen naturale. Plato’s transmigration of souls, Descartes’ pineal gland, Berkeley’s tar water, Nietzsche’s eternal return—these are the notions that embarrass philosophy, that are explained away with reference to ignorance of the times or idiosyncrasies of the thinker. But sometimes these cryptophilosophies refuse to go away: they appear again and again, in the work of thinker after thinker, a mass hallucination that occurs not in a crowd in space but in a series over time. Such is the case of exophilosophy. What is it? Like its peer exobiology, exophilosophy is the study of life beyond earth—specifically the philosophical study of life beyond earth. In the broadest sense its objects include all theological entities (gods and angels and demons as extraterrestrial life forms) and the thousand other alien figures that populate philosophy: the daemon of Socrates, the Übermensch of Nietzsche, the Other of phenomenology. Not only advocacy but also the critical analysis of supramundane entities pertains as well, and thus the ghosts scorned by Spinoza and the spiritualists exposed by Schopenhauer also take their rightful place in the history of exophilosophy.

Nietzsche did not make this claim in a narcissistic or triumphant manner. The great thinker’s opinion stemmed from his fear that all the Judeo-Christian values serving as the foundation of Western civilization had been made dangerously subject to casual rational criticism, and that the most important axiom upon which they were predicated—the existence of a transcendent, all-powerful deity—had been fatally challenged. Nietzsche concluded from this that everything would soon fall apart, in a manner catastrophic both psychologically and socially.

Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti. A rationalist’s guide to the perils of the human mind. The “spiritual” book that I keep returning to. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. A history of the human species, with observations, frameworks, and mental models that will have you looking at history and your fellow humans differently. Everything by Matt Ridley. Matt is a scientist, optimist, and forward thinker. Genome, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist—they’re all great. How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? Suffering is a moment of clarity, when you can no longer deny the truth of a situation and are forced into uncomfortable change. I’m lucky that I didn’t get everything I wanted in my life, or I’d be happy with my first good job, my college sweetheart, my college town.

Even a flower cannot survive on last week's water, and you want the mind to survive on centuries old beliefs!

By imagining ourselves as rational beings, we welcome vulnerable to malformed affections and habits. When we deny the reality of our social modes of reasoning, we become caught up in mindless swarms: trying to become a community of rational thinkers, we become a swarm of atomized, emoters.

In the last dark age, one can search the inquiries of this era's preserved of thinkers from Augustine to Ockham, and fail to discover a single page of criticism of the established social framework, however rationally insupportable feudal bondage, absolute paternalism, divine right of kings and the rest may be. In the current final order, is it so different? Can we see in any media or even university press a paragraph of clear unmasking of a global regime that condemns a third of all children to malnutrition with more food than enough available? In such a social order, thought becomes indistinguishable from propaganda. Only one doctrine is speakable, and a priest caste of its experts prescribes the necessities and obligations to all. Social consciousness is incarcerated within the role of a kind of ceremonial logic, operating entirely within the received framework of an exhaustively prescribed regulatory apparatus protecting the privileges of the privileged. Methodical censorship triumphs in the guise of scholarly rigor, and the only room left for searching thought becomes the game of competing rationalizations.

what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out. And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.

It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment … to provide for debate in the public realm standards and methods of rational justification by which alternative courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or unenlightened. So, it was hoped, reason would displace authority and tradition. Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those cultural and social particularities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be the mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places.

But “the market”—like “dialectical materialism”—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers—mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers—who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.

All in The Mind (The Sonnet) God is all in the mind, What's wrong with that! Art is also all in the mind, So, is art nothing but dirt! Yes, plenty harm has been done, In the name of God. The same can be said, About science and art. Dividers will always divide, Haters will always hate. Apes will find one excuse or another, To justify their authoritarian trait. For example, 9/11 wasn't religion's fault, Any more than Hiroshima was science's fault.

But Stanovich sees it differently. In his book, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, he coined the term “dysrationalia”—the inability to think and behave rationally despite having high intelligence. Research in cognitive psychology suggests there are two principal causes of dysrationalia. The first is a processing problem. The second is a content problem. Stanovich believes we process poorly. When solving a problem, he says, people have several different cognitive mechanisms to choose from. At one end of the spectrum are mechanisms with great computational power, but they are slow and require a great deal of concentration. At the opposite end of the spectrum are mechanisms that have low computational power, require very little concentration, and make quick action possible. “Humans are cognitive misers,” Stanovich writes, “because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even if they are less accurate.”9 In a word, humans are lazy thinkers. They take the easy way out when solving problems and as a result, their solutions are often illogical. The second cause of dysrationalia is the lack of adequate content. Psychologists who study decision making refer to content deficiency as a “mindware gap.” First articulated by David Perkins, a Harvard cognitive scientist, mindware refers to the rules, strategies, procedures, and knowledge people have at their mental disposal to help solve a problem. “Just as kitchenware consists in tools for working in the kitchen, and software consists in tools for working with your computer, mindware consists in the tools for the mind,” explains Perkins. “A piece of mindware is anything a person can learn that extends the person’s general powers to think critically and creatively.

« Reason, l’esprit, the intellect of the writing and reasoning nation, is constantly fighting against the darkness of « illiteracy ». You must know how to read and write to be a real member of a civilized nation.(…) In clearing up the underbrush of the privilege and prejudice, liberalism or rationalism was convinced that it held in its hand the naked truth, undisguised, unstained by dogma or tradition. Reason discovering nature can test everything by experiment. There is no room for traditional habits: Fashion takes the place of habit. But it is precisly Fashion which enslave Reason. The Philosophizing mind had its prison of sensuality and drudgery exactly like a pupil of the Jesuits or a child in a backwoods village. Its fairy-tale and its prejudice are not dependent upon miracles or dogmas or incenses or witchcraft, but the apparatus of Reason is subject to the same laws of sensuous disguise as any other part of the human soul. Superstition sends us to the medicine man, physical pain to the physician. We have a native sense that urges us on toward Reason and Philosophy: this sense is curiosity. Without a sense for novelty, no thinker can succeed or affect the life of the community. The self-indulgence of Reason is its predilection for the new. »

What right have we to read the future into the past?...The universal uniformity of nature cannot be verified from the experience of the independent thinker in any final sense since that principle exceeds the bounds of his experience...So the most fundamental premise of all autonomous science, the uniformity of nature, is neither empirically nor rationally justifiable.

The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for your ‘reflexes’ to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes. “They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his ‘minimum sustenance’—his food, his clothes, his shelter—with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it—from whom? Blank-out. Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world. Created—by whom? Blank-out. Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as ‘an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.’ Supplied—by whom? Blank-out. Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being—but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out. Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind—and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce—on whom? Blank-out. Random females with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand—of whom? Blank-out.

A Universal Fact The problem before us now is this: if the reality behind the UFO phenomenon is both physical and psychic in nature, and if it manipulates space and time in ways our scientific concepts are inadequate to describe, is there any reason for its effects to be limited to our culture or to our generation? We have already established that no country has had the special privilege of these manifestations. Yet we must carry the argument further: if the UFO phenomenon is not tied to social conditions specific to our time, or to specific technological achievements, then it may represent a universal fact. It may have been with us, in one form or another, as long as the human race has existed on this planet. Something happened in classical times that is inadequately explained by historical theories. The suggestion that the same thing might be happening again should make us extremely interested in bringing every possible light to bear on this problem. Beginning in the second century B.C. and continuing until the fall of the Roman Empire, the intellectual elites of the Mediterranean world, raised in a spirit of scientific rationalism, were confronted and eventually defeated by irrational element similar to that contained in modern apparitions of unexplained phenomena, an element that is amplified by their summary rejection by our own science. It accompanied the collapse of ancient civilizations. Commenting on this parallel, French science writer Aime Michel proposes the following scene. Consider one of the Alexandrian thinkers, a man like Ptolemaeus, the second-century astronomer thoroughly schooled in the rational methods of Archimedes, Euclid, and Aristotle. And imagine him reading the Apocalypse, various writings about Armageddon. How would he react to such an experience? He would merely shrug, says Aime Michel: "It would never occur to him to place the slightest credence in such a compendium of what must regard as insanities. Such a scene must have taken place thousands of times at the end of classical antiquity. And we know that every time there was the same rejection, the same shrugging, because we have no record of any critical examination of the doctrines, ideas, and claims of the counterculture that expressed itself through the Apocalypse. This counterculture was too absurd to retain the attention of a reader of Plato. A short time – a very short time – elapsed, the counterculture triumphed, and Plato was forgotten for a thousand years. Could it happen again?" Only a thorough examination of the ancient records can save us from the effects of such cultural myopia.

I resented the implication that I should grow out of pessimism. I took it to mean I should grow out of truth. That living would rid me of the necessity of making sense of it, of justifying my efforts, of looking further than my instincts for why it is I persist with no demonstrable reason for doing so. I despised the convention that had certain thinkers playing to little more than the sentiments and passions of youth, to immaturity, to precocious spite, and how wallowing in Schopenhauer, Cioran, Chamfort, Leopardi, Unamuno, Zapffe, Mainlander and their ilk is to remain persistently juvenile and so beneath the serious attention of fully rational adults.

Numerous longitudinal research studies have shown that spanking can cause increased levels of aggression, depression, and low self-esteem among children and adults.

Blame doesn’t achieve anything, solve anything, and it’s a bit like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. You just fester on the inside and become angry and bitter at whoever it is you’re blaming for your trouble, rather than seeking out real solutions to your problems.

The most ineffective way to deal with racism is to attack or insult them. Why? Because the only thing we’d accomplish is just fueling their narrative of victimhood and getting them sympathy— maybe even from people who otherwise disagree with their views.

and forward thinker. Genome, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist—they’re all great.

AT MY FIRST meditation retreat, a two-week period of silent attention to mind and body, I was amazed to find myself sitting in the dining hall with an instant judgment about each of the hundred other meditators, based on nothing besides how they looked while eating. Instinctively, I was searching out whom I liked and whom I did not: I had a comment for each one. The seemingly simple task of noting the physical sensations of the in and out breath had the unfortunate effect of revealing just how out of control my everyday mind really was. Meditation is ruthless in the way it reveals the stark reality of our day-to-day mind. We are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath: comforting ourselves, in a perverse fashion, with our own silent voices. Much of our interior life is characterized by this kind of primary process, almost infantile, way of thinking: “I like this. I don’t like that. She hurt me. How can I get that? More of this, no more of that.” These emotionally tinged thoughts are our attempts to keep the pleasure principle operative. Much of our inner dialogue, rather than the “rational” secondary process that is usually associated with the thinking mind, is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist. None of us has moved very far from the seven-year-old who vigilantly watches to see who got more.

But apart from examining the arguments for and against God, how can the atheist justifiably make such an accusation? How does he know that God does not exist? Shouldn’t we at least look at the evidence? That is surely correct. Some philosophers have even argued that if the evidence for these two options were absolutely equal, a rational person ought to choose to believe in God. That is, if the evidence is equal, it seems positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and destruction to life, meaningfulness, and happiness. As Pascal said, we have nothing to lose and infinity to gain. But my aim in this chapter is more modest than that. I only hope to have gotten you to think about these issues, to realize that the question of God’s existence has profound consequences for our lives and that therefore we cannot afford to be indifferent about it. What I’ve at least done is to clearly spell out the alternatives. If God does not exist, then life is futile. If God does exist, then life is meaningful. Only the second of these two alternatives enables us to live happily and consistently. Therefore, it makes a huge difference whether God exists, a difference we should care about. Who cares? You should.

It is more practical to make people transform their mindset about religion and religiousness and walk in the path of creed-less religious harmony, than to convert the entire religious population on earth into atheists.

Then on the fifth of October, to cheer the populace, we are given a new calendar. From this day forward, no one is to celebrate the Catholic festivals or use the calendar that dates from Christ’s birth. “We are a nation of thinkers,” Danton declares, “and as such, we shall celebrate the glorious rationalism that has brought us to such liberty.” Not a single journalist in all of Paris dares to point out that our new liberty has imprisoned us within the city. That our dead are buried the same day they die—in mass graves—because there is no longer room and even gravediggers are not allowed outside the city gates. And so we all must pretend to embrace this new calendar. Those who do not use it are branded enemies of the patrie.

Psychics, astrology, tarot cards - all these mystical non-sense are signs of a weak mind. Whenever such garbage starts grabbing hold of you, seek the help of a physician or therapist.

Among Plato's successors, the most remarkable thinker to pick up this strain of argument is Plotinus. He offers little to those who would pin him down to rational argument. His intricately defined system combines ideas owed to both Plato and Aristotle. He categorizes our world in terms of four hierarchical steps, each of which is subtended between two quantities that have no existence of their own. At the upper end there is the abstract quantity he calls the One, or the Good. It cannot be described by any sequence of positive terms. Every other existence can be so described, but the One the Good, cannot; we'll leave that to Plotinus. Now to the lower end of our range of observation: That is where we find matter miserable, contemptible, poor to the degree that it, again, has no existence of its own. But it contains a potential for all physical phenomena. We might say that it is fighting for its existence: "Its Essence can be described in some measure by such images as utter poverty, constant want, perennial longing for making its appearance in the realm of reality." In and by itself, matter is shapeless; as Plotinus says: "The very idea of matter implies absence of form." As a result, it will not make its appearance in the real world. If, however, it does show up, that must be due to its having taken on a specific form, to its having changed. This feature of Plotinus's matter- its ability to take on shapes notwithstanding its own lack of all shape-reminds us of Aristotle's Materia Prima. Matter, according to Plotinus, is the carrier of all properties of bodies. This includes all physical extent: "Absolute matter must take its magnitude, as every other property, from outside itself." Plotinus also mentions a different form of matter, a form tied to the spiritual world-but I will not discuss this here. "Matter," he says, "is understood to be a certain base, a recipient of Form-Ideas...There is, therefore, a matter accepting the shape, a permanent sub stratum....The matter must be...ready to become anything....Matter, not delimited, having in its own nature no stability , swept into any or every form by turns, ready to go Here, There, and Everywhere becomes a thing of Multiplicity: driven into all shapes, becoming all things....The distinctive character of Matter is unshape, the lack of qualification and form....Matter is therefore nonexistent." The concept of existence is rooted deep in Plotinus's mystical thinking. It can be rationally approached only to the extent that thing's immutable were distinguished by the ancient philosophers from things that are subject to transformation, change, passing.

I have a little urge to all the rational thinkers in the world, both scientists and non-scientists. Because of the fact that many of the scientists and science communicators still use the phrase “Theory of Evolution”, the general population still quite mistakenly hail Evolution as some sort of unproven hypothesis. So, we need to change that. The only way to do that, is stop using the word “Theory” along with “Evolution”. It’s been long since we have proven Evolution to be not just a hypothesis, but an empirical truth. Since the publication of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection” piles of evidence from various fields of biology have emerged through the painstaking efforts of scientists, and have taken Evolution from the domain of falsifiable hypotheses into the domain of scientific facts. So, evolution is not a matter of belief or opinion, it is an irrefutable fact of this natural world.

In fact, there is good scientific evidence to support the notion that being really intelligent and knowledgeable can be a disadvantage to some thinkers because of the increased ability to come up with rationalizations in defense of a position one originally adopted for inadequate reasons. There are many reasons why smart people sometimes believe dumb things. The smarter one is, the easier it is to see patterns, fit data to a hypothesis, and draw inferences. The smarter one is, the easier it is to explain away strong evidence contrary to one’s beliefs. Also, smart people are often arrogant and incorrectly think that they cannot be deceived by others, the data, or themselves.

The European prosperity driven by silver and Atlantic trade was the context of the rationalizing assertions of Enlightenment thinkers.

The evangelical tradition itself arose from the 18th century movement that came to be known as the Enlightenment. The philosophers, religious leaders, and political thinkers of the Enlightenment had declared freedom and democracy to be the principle values of human society, and reason to be the source of all authority. The Enlightenment promoted a vigorous public life, an emphasis on rational discourse as the path to truth, and an embrace of the scientific method. Leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson considered the ideas of the Enlightenment to be the very foundation of the new American republic, and documents such as the Declaration of Independence to be the height of Enlightenment thinking.

Since the capitalist system defined itself as thoroughly rational, there was no longer, ironically enough, any need for a philosophy that pointed out what was intellectually and morally correct, or what was irrationally and morally reprehensible. Questions like this were believed to be perfectly well handled by science, the market and representative democracy. Totalistic philosophy had, in other words, made itself redundant. Because totalistic thought was intimately connected to the abolished Aristotelian/ Ptolemaic world-view, a fact which its practitioners refused to see, it could be reduced to a sort of therapeutic museum activity. To acknowledge the need of a new world-view would undermine the whole of their activity, and not many thinkers were willing to pay that price. Particularly not in a society where social exclusion meant rapid transportation to the proudest invention of the humanist sciences: the mental hospital.

It became forbidden to use rational thought. Early Church leader Tertullian, advocating faith rather than rational thought said, “The son of god died: It must needs be believed because it is absurd”. He (Christ) was buried and rose again: it is certain because it is impossible”. Early Catholic leaders consciously proscribed and established as heretical any thinking that might incite challenge. Theodosius I, Emperor of Byzantium issued an edict allowing worship only of the Christian father and son, banning the worship of any deities or pagan ideas, in 389 CE. The writings of the early Church fathers were thus left undisputed by rival philosophies and in time they came to have the same weight as the Bible itself. All of this was revealed “truth”. It is of great importance to understand that most of what has passed down to Christians as “sin” especially sexual sin, had nothing to do with the man called Christ or even of the books (new testament) written by those who never knew him (Mark 60 CE., Mathew 90 CE, Luke 90 CE., John 90 CE.). Instead these views of sin and what it was to be Christian came from a few influential fathers of the early Church, writing as the Roman empire died.Augustine, the greatest early Christian “thinker” of them all said: “This is the disease of curiosity… It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.” With these words, Augustine set the spirit and tone for the Dark Ages to come. Early Church fathers greatly feared any challenge to their ideas. Their fear of knowledge led to a shutting down of all free thought. Bishops deliberately outlawed and declared heretical any thoughts that might lead to a more open minded atmosphere. They strove to codify as fact, a narrow interpretation of the gospels. To do so they altered some gospels and outlawed hundreds of others to project the particular “truth” they had chosen. Their thought centered on sin, the depravity of sex and the merit of suffering as much as Christ. Since Christian fathers had little interest in the vast wealth of learning compiled by the pagan Greeks and Romans, they simply stopped copying and disseminating these works and substituted a carefully edited and selected group of books to comprise the Bible. Almost the only other learning that was supported were the works of the early Church fathers designating a selected and censored Christianity.