The Inevitable Triumph Of Reason Over Religion

But reason has an enemy…

Its name is religion. Religion has the ability to amplify the desire to be understood, but nearly nullifies the desire to understand others who are not like-minded. Religion retards intellectual growth, represses individual thought, is the adversary of science, the restraint against invention and the stalwart of what would otherwise advance our species into a peaceful existence, without want.

The Incredible Shrinking Apology…

Every day the pool of apologetics gets smaller while the ocean of evidence that counters religious doctrine, dogma and superstition grows deeper. Every day, by default, the fundamentally religious become more willfully ignorant.

Progress…

The voices of reason are getting louder, more prevalent and numerous. We are making slow and steady inroads into areas of our existence that, fifty years ago, would have seemed impossible.

Mightier Than The Sword…

But we will prevail, because if evolution has taught us anything, the desire to explore new ideas and learn new ways of doing things is almost unavoidable. From the time some of our ancestors started to write things down, other ancestors carried those words abroad, bringing new ideas and instructions for new technologies with them.

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In politics, the concrete usually wins over the abstract [Because thinking is hard!]

. . . [M]ost people value [Christian privilege] as an abstract principle, they don’t make decisions based on abstractions. They tend to look at the concrete manifestations of those abstractions. . . . So while many people will say they support [Christian privilege], they are going to be angry if [women workers] access to their contraceptive services are taken away. The situation is similar to those older Tea [Bagee] supporters who say they support getting government out of health care as an abstract principle but will fight tooth and nail to retain their Medicare.

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Anarchism Is Not What You Think It Is—And There’s a Whole Lot We Can Learn from It

On February 8, 1921 twenty thousand people, braving temperatures so low that musical instruments froze, marched in a funeral procession in the town of Dimitrov, a suburb of Moscow. They came to pay their respects to a man, Petr Kropotkin, and his philosophy, anarchism.

Some 90 years later few know of Kropotkin. And the word anarchism has been so stripped of substance that it has come to be equated with chaos and nihilism.  This is regrettable, for both the man and the philosophy that he did so much to develop have much to teach us in 2012. . . .

The precipitating event that led Kropotkin to embrace anarchism was the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859. . . .

He spent the rest of his life promoting that concept and the theory of social structure known as anarchism. To Americans anarchism is synonymous with a lack of order. But to Kropotkin anarchist societies don’t lack order but the order emerges from rules designed by those who feel their impact, rules that encourage humanly scaled production systems and maximize individual freedom and social cohesion.

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Paul Krugman: Severe [Reactionary] Syndrome

How did American [reactionism] end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. . . .

The point is that today’s dismal [White-Wing Party] field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic [reactionaries] played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” [reactionism] in the worst way. . . .

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Quote: Baron d’Holbach

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (08 December 1723 – 21 January 1789)
French-German Author, Philosopher, Encyclopedist,
Polemicist against organized religion, and Avowed Atheist

Religion is the art of intoxicating men with enthusiasm [this word in the eighteenth century meant religious fervor], to prevent them from dealing with the evils with which their governors oppress them. . . . The art of reigning has become nothing more than that of profiting from the errors abjection of mind and soul into which superstition has plunged the nations. . . . By means of threatening men with invisible powers, they [Church and state] force them to suffer in silence the miseries with which visible powers afflict them. They are made to hope that if they agree to being unhappy in this world, they will be happy in the next.