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  fortune index  all fortunes 
  
 |  |  | #2896 |  | They [preachers] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions
 of the duperies on which they live.
 - Thomas Jefferson
 
 |  |  |  | #2897 |  | Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent. - George Orwell
 
 |  |  |  | #2898 |  | As I argued in "Beloved Son", a book about my son Brian and the subject of religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction
 in the methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless
 conversions -- to anything -- less likely.  Brian now realizes this and
 has, after eleven years, left the sect he was associated with.  The
 problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to
 a religious philosophy -- and it does not matter whether that philosophy
 is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and
 irrational -- the powers of reason are suprisingly ineffective in
 changing the believer's mind.
 - Steve Allen, comdeian, from an essay in the book "The Courage of
 Conviction", edited by Philip Berman
 
 |  |  |  | #2899 |  | Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
 - Fyodor Dostoevski
 
 |  |  |  | #2900 |  | We may not be able to persuade Hindus that Jesus and not Vishnu should govern their spiritual horizon, nor Moslems that Lord Buddha is at the
 center of their spiritual universe, nor Hebrews that Mohammed is a major
 prohpet, nor Christians that Shinto best expresses their spiritual
 concerns, to say nothing of the fact that we may not be able to get
 Christians to agree among themselves about their relationship to God.
 But all will agree on a proposition that they possess profound spiritual
 resources.  If, in addition, we can get them to accept the further
 proposition that whatever form the Deity may have in their own theology,
 the Deity is not only external, but internal and acts through them, and
 they themselves give proof or disproof of the Deity in what they do and
 think; if this further proposition can be accepted, then we come that
 much closer to a truly religious situation on earth.
 - Norman Cousins, from his book "Human Options"
 
 |  |  |  | #2901 |  | The Messiah will come.  There will be a resurrection of the dead -- all the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated.
 - Rabbi Meir Kahane
 
 |  |  |  | #2902 |  | The world is no nursery. - Sigmund Freud
 
 |  |  |  | #2903 |  | If one inquires why the American tradition is so strong against any connection of State and Church, why it dreads even the rudiments of
 religious teaching in state-maintained schools, the immediate and
 superficial answer is not far to seek....
 The cause lay largely in the diversity and vitality of the various
 denominations, each fairly sure that, with a fair field and no favor,
 it could make its own way; and each animated by a jealous fear that,
 if any connection of State and Church were permitted, some rival
 denomination would get an unfair advantage.
 - John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher,
 from "Democracy in the Schools", 1908
 
 |  |  |  | #2904 |  | Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be
 submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality.  All proffered
 samples of learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to
 common tests.  It is the essence of all dogmatic faiths to hold that
 any such "show-down" is sacrilegious and perverse.  The characteristic
 of religion, from their point of view, is that it is intellectually
 secret, not public; peculiarly revealed, not generall known;
 authoritatively declared, not communicated and tested in ordinary
 ways...It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is
 conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists,
 there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in
 religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics
 where the method of free inquiry has made its way.  The "religious"
 would be the last to be willing that either the history of the
 content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those
 to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device,
 but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against
 its being taught in any other spirit.
 - John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher,
 from "Democracy in the Schools", 1908
 
 |  |  |  | #2905 |  | In the broad and final sense all institutions are educational in the sense that they operate to form the attitudes, dispositions, abilities
 and disabilities that constitute a concrete personality...Whether this
 educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-
 democratic way becomes, therefore, a question of transcendent importance
 not only for education itself but for its final effect upon all the
 interests and activites of a society that is committed to the democratic
 way of life.
 - John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher
 
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