#skepticism

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men. ↗

— Robert G. Ingersoll

#faith #liberty #religion #skepticism #slavery

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#mysticism #skepticism #faith

There was a time when skepticism was an act of rebellion. Since to a degree I both believe in evolution and have faith, I can only conclude that, as prophesied, to have faith will someday be an act of rebellion. ↗

— Criss Jami

#apologetics #atheism #evolution #faith #god

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#freedom-of-thought #independent-thought #skepticism #freedom

Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#rationality #science #skepticism #intelligence

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#doubt #inteligencia #intelligence #la-duda #skepticism

In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, of all things. ↗

— René Descartes

#life

Holy Writ was intended to teach men how to go to Heaven not how the heavens go. ↗

— Galileo Galilei

#science #skepticism #men

It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#skepticism #men

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#christianity #faith #skepticism #faith