"...growing up in church desensitizes you to logical inconsistencies, and that opens up large numbers of people to manipulation tactics employed by individuals and institutions keen on controlling groups of people for their own self-serving purposes."

 

—Neil Carter in How Faith Breaks Your Thinker 

APRIL 10, 2018

SOURCE: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2018/04/10/how-faith-breaks-your-thinker/

Excellent resource on logical inconsistencies:
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge.  It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.  No agnostic has ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
--Daniel J. Boorstin

One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it.  The also believed the world was flat.
--Mark Twain

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.  It's nothing to brag about.  And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsesnse that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.
--Bill Maher

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
--Kurt Vonnegut

The most costly of all follies it to believe passionately in the palpably not true.
--H.L. Mencken

An agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.
--Studs Terkel

I was raised an atheist.  Every Sunday, we went nowhere.  We prayed for nothing.  And all our prayers were answered.
--Heidi Joyce

If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: They're hobbies.
--Jon Stewart

CHILDREN’S HEALTHCARE IS A LEGAL DUTY
http://childrenshealthcare.org/?page_id=28

To Doctors: If you detect signs of abuse or exploitation, you as a doctor are legally bound to report it. There are more cults and troubled families out there than people realize.

In some communities or “groups”, sexual abuse especially of girls, and the use of children especially teens for hard labor is common. These children are not likely to come to you as a doctor, but you may run across them in other parts of your life. You are duty bound to protect children at every age from everyone, including potentially their family.

Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the attendant of truth.
Doubt is the key to the door of knowledge; it is the servant of discovery.
A belief which may not be questioned binds us to error, for there is incompleteness and imperfection in every belief.
Let no one fear for the truth, that doubt may consume it; for doubt is a testing of belief.
For truth, if it be truth, arises from each testing stronger, more secure.
Those that would silence doubt are filled with fear; their houses are built on shifting sands.
But those who fear not doubt, and know its use, are founded on rock.
They shall walk in the light of growing knowledge.
Therefore let us not fear doubt, but let us rejoice in its help.
It is to the wise as a staff to the blind; doubt is the attendant of truth.

--Responsive reading by Robert T. Weston in Singing the Living Tradition

I'm listening to an interview on NPR with an author (C. Beha) who is talking about the loss of his Catholic faith, and his subsequent exploration of the question of faith. (You can listen to it here: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=3&islist=true&id=13&d=07-26-2012) He appears to be drawing an equivalence between having faith, and having a personal experience of God. I think that this equivalence is mistaken. I do not have faith, and yet I have mystical experiences on a regular basis. I do not Believe that these experiences are God because I know that there are too many other explanations to be sure of that attribution. I remain agnostic: I've had and heard of no mystical experiences that cannot be explained by other phenomena, yet there could of course be a spirit manipulating it all. I suppose that puts me in the camp of the faithless.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
-- T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets". It appears in the second poem called "East Coker"

He recently said that an anti-abortion position is a libertarian position based on faith. Faith in what? The bogusness of global warming? HIS god? I am offended. Faith has no legitimacy as a basis for social law, because we don't all have faith in the same things. I had thought that Ron Paul was for the true and full separation of church and state, and that he could be counted on to keep them separate in his own dealings. He has just proven me wrong. The man I had thought was the last moral politician has fallen by the wayside. It all comes down to that same old debate about when life begins.

SOURCE
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/04/ron-paul-anti-abortion.html

May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactly
where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite
possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May you
use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has
been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this
knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to
sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.
--author unknown