Betrayal of Humanity?
(Top Posts - Philosophy (General) - 072500)

Quote from "A Tale of a Tub",
by Bergen Evans (1946) ...

From the time of the Peasant's Rebellion on,
all true democratic movements have been
branded as anti-religious. In part this has
been an effort to discredit them, and in part
it has been a perception that democracy is
essentially antiauthoritarian - that it not only
demands the right but imposes the responsibility
of thinking for ourselves.

And belief is the antithesis to thinking. A refusal
to come to an unjustified conclusion is an element
of an honest man's religion.

To him the call to blind faith is really a call to
barbarism and slavery.

In being asked to believe without evidence, he
is being asked to abdicate his integrity.

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are
meaningless without freedom to think. And
there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to
be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all
statements that claim to be facts.

An honorable man will not be bullied by a
hypothesis. For in the last analysis, all tyranny
rests on fraud, on getting someone to accept
false assumptions, and any man who for one
moment abandons or suspends the questioning
spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.

-end quote-