nicholasmagus88
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A History of Christianity's Harm to and Suppression of Science, Knowledge, books. reason, the mind, technology, and Human Progress.
Part 3: Critiques of Christian Epistemology. Reason and Knowledge vs. faith and belief.
- Down with Intelligence
-Knowledge Gnosis and Gnosticism.
-Belief Faith and Gullibility
-Reason vs. Faith.
- reason as man's means of truth.
- Christian morality as agaisnt the mind.
-More on the Anti-Mind.
- Reason as the reason for the Reniassance/Enlightenment.
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Segment from the book, Atheist Manifesto, by Michael Onfray. pg. 67-68.
Down with Intelligence.
Down with intelligence! Monotheism loathes intelligence, that sublime gift defined as the art of connecting what at first and for most people seems unconnected. Intelligence reveals unexpected but undeniable causalities; it produces rational, convincing explanations based on reasoning; it rejects every manufactured fiction. With its help, we can spurn myths and fairy tales. We need no posthumous paradise, no salvation or redemption of the soul, no all-knowing, all-seeing God. Properly and rationally directed, intelligence wards off all magical thinking.
The advocates of Mosaic law, Christian tale-spinning, and their Koranic clones share the same fable on the origins of negativity in the world. In Genesis 3:6 ¡ª common to the Torah and to the Old Testament of the Christian Bible ¡ª and in the Koran (2:29) we find the same story of Adam and Eve in a paradise where a God forbids them to approach a tree while a demon urges disobedience. In this monotheistic version of the Greek Pandora fable, a woman (of course) commits the irreparable, and her act spreads evil all over the world.
This story, in normal circumstances just good enough to earn a place in the roster of fairy tales or cautionary fables, has had incalculable consequences for human civilizations! Loathing of women and the flesh, guilt and desire for atonement, the quest for an impossible amends and submission to necessity, fascination with death and passion for suffering¡ªall so many occasions for activating the death instinct.
What do the files on this story tell us? We find a God who orders the primal couple not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Clearly we are in the presence of metaphor. It took the church fathers to sexualize the story, for the text is clear: eating this fruit removes the scales from our eyes and allows us to distinguish between good and evil, and thus to resemble God. One verse (Genesis 3:6) mentions a tree to be desired to make one wise. Defying God's prohibition meant preferring knowledge to obedience, seeking to know rather than submitting. Or in different terms: opting for philosophy against religion.
What does this ban on intelligence mean? You can do anything in this magnificent Garden, except become intelligent ¡ª the Tree of Knowledge ¡ª or immortal ¡ª the Tree of Life. What a fate God has in store for men: stupidity and mortality! A God who offers such a gift to his creatures must be perverse . . . Let us then praise Eve who opted for intelligence at risk of death, whereas Adam did not realize right away what was at stake. The bliss of ignorance!
What do the poor wretches learn, once the lady tastes the sublime fruit? They see reality. Reality and nothing else. Nudity, their natural state. And with their freshly acquired nowledge, they discover their cultural allotment: the choice of fig leaves (rather than grape leaves) to cover their nakedness was symbolic of a future cultural heritage. Worse: they discover the hardship of daily life, the sorrow in every destiny, the battle between the sexes, the gulf forever separating man and woman, the inevitability of backbreaking toil, the pain of childbirth, and the sovereignty of death. Once liberated from their state of ignorance, they avoid the additional transgression that would have given them eternal life (the Tree of Life grew next to the Tree of Knowledge), for the one true God¡ªdecidedly gentle, good, loving, generous ¡ª spared them that fate by expelling Adam and Eve from paradise. And we have remained outside ever since.
Lesson number one: if we lose the illusion of faith, the consolation of God, and the fables of religion, if we prefer seeking knowledge and intelligence, then reality appears to us as it is, tragic. But which is better? A truth that removes all hope of immortality yet saves us from losing our life altogether by living it only half alive? Or a story that briefly consoles us but makes us waste the only thing we really possess: life here and now?
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Segment from the book, The Jesus Mysteries, Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God? by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, pg. 71.
Knowledge Beyond Belief
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus writes, 'Human opinions are toys for children.¡¯(1) The sages of the Pagan Mysteries were disparaging about mere beliefs or opinions; they were interested in knowledge. Plato argued that belief is concerned only with the appearances of things, while knowledge penetrates to the underlying reality.(2) The highest level of understanding, he proclaimed, is that knowledge through which the mind becomes unified with the object of knowledge.(3) The Gnostics inherited these Pagan teachings and were also disparaging of pistis (faith) in comparison with Gnosis (knowledge).
Gnosis is not an idea that is open to doubt, but a mystical experience of the Truth which is immediate, certain and completely non-conceptual. Whilst Literalist Christians extolled the spiritual value of blind faith and commanded the faithful not to question what they were told by the bishops, the Gnostic masters, like the Pagan sages before them, taught that through initiation into the Inner Mysteries initiates could directly experience Gnosis and know the Truth for themselves.
For the Gnostics, faith was only a stepping-stone leading to Gnosis. The Gnostic teacher Heracleon explains that at first people believe through faith in the testimony of others, but they need to go on to experience the Truth directly.(4) Clement taught:
'Faith is the foundation; Gnosis the superstructure.(5) By Gnosis faith is perfected(6) for to know is more than to believe.(7) Gnosis is proof of what has been received through faith.¡¯(8) Like the Pagan sages, the Gnostics taught that all doctrines were merely approaches to the Truth, which was itself beyond words and concepts, and could only be found through experiencing Gnosis for oneself.(9) The Gospel of Philip explains:
'Names can be very deceptive, for they divert our thoughts from what is accurate to what is inaccurate. Thus one who hears the word "God" does not perceive what is accurate, but does perceive what is inaccurate. So also with "the Father" and "the Son", and "the Holy Spirit", and "life" and "light", and "resurrection", and "the church", and all the rest -people do not perceive what is accurate, but they perceive what is inaccurate.¡¯(10)
Bibliography:
1- Quoted in Kahn, C. H. (1979), 55. See also 109, where Kahn notes Heraclitus' favoured use of ginoskein for the knowledge which goes beyond opinion.
2- Plato, Phaedrus and Letters vii and viii, 53. The editor of this version of Phaedrus notes that
Plato repeatedly contrasts episteme, 'knowledge', with doxa, 'opinions'. True knowledge can only beobtained by the pursuit of pure philosophy. The sensible world canonly ever be the source of doxa.
3- Fidler, D. (1993), 9
4- Pagels,E. (1979), 48
5- Clement, Stromata, 6.26
6- Ibid., 7.55
7- Ibid., 6.109
8- Ibid., 7.57
9- 81 Pagels, op. cit., 125
10- 82 Quoted in Robinson, J. M. (1978), 142; see also Pagels, op. cit., 59
Segment from the book, The Jesus Mysteries, Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God? by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, pg. 71-73.
The most important injunction on the spiritual path of the Pagan Mysteries was inscribed over the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi: Gnothi Seauton - 'Know Thy Self¡¯. The Gnosis or Knowledge which initiates of the Pagan Mysteries sought was Self-knowledge.(1) The Gnostic Book of Thomas the Contender likewise teaches:
'Whoever has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same time already achieved Gnosis about the depth of all things.'(2)
In The Testimony of Truth Jesus advises a disciple to become 'a disciple of his own mind¡¯ which is 'the father of Truth'.(3) The Gnostic sage Silvanus encourages:
'Knock on yourself as upon a door and walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk on the road, it is impossible for you to go astray. Open the door for yourself so that you may know what is.'(4)
But what is the self? The Pagan sages taught that every human being has a mortal lower self called the 'eidolon¡¯ and an immortal Higher Self called the 'Daemon¡¯.(5) The eidolon is the embodied self, the physical body and personality.(6) The Daemon is the Spirit, the true Self which is each person's spiritual connection to God. The Mysteries were designed to help initiates realize that the eidolon is a false self and that their true identity is the immortal Daemon.(7)
From the eidolon's point of view the Daemon appears to be an independent Guardian Angel.(8) Initiates who still identify with the eidolon, therefore, do not experience the Daemon as their own true Self, but as a spirit guide whose job it is to lead them to their spiritual destination. Plato teaches, 'We should think of the most authoritative part of the soul as a Guardian Spirit
given by God which lifts us to our heavenly home.'(9)
The Gnostic sages taught exactly the same Mystery doctrine.(10) Valentinus explains that a person receives Gnosis from their Guardian Angel, but that this angelic being is actually the seeker's own Higher Self.(11) In ancient Egypt the Daemon had for millennia been pictured as a Heavenly Twin of the eidolon.(12) This image is also found in Gnosticism. The Gnostic sage Mani was said to have been conscious of having a protecting angel from the age of four and, aged 12, to have realized it was his Heavenly Twin, whom he called the 'most beautiful and largest mirror image of my own person'.(13)
In The Acts of John, John observes that Jesus sometimes held converse with a Heavenly Twin who descended to join him:
'When all of us, his disciples, were sleeping in one house at Gennesaret, I alone having wrapped myself up, watched from under my garment what he did; and first I heard him say, "John, go thou to sleep", and thereupon I feigned to be asleep; and I saw another like unto him come down, whom I also heard saying to my Lord, "Jesus, do they whom thou hast chosen still not believe in thee?" And my Lord said, "Thou sayest well, for they are men."¡¯(14)
The Pistis Sophia relates a charming myth of the child Jesus meeting his own Heavenly Twin for the first time. His mother Mary recalls:
'When thou wert a child, before the Spirit had descended upon thee, when thou wert in the vineyard with Joseph, the Spirit came down from the height, and came unto me in the house, like unto thee, and I knew Him not, but thought that he was thou. And he said unto me, "Where is Jesus, my brother, that I may go to meet him?"'(15)
Mary relates to Jesus that when his Twin finally found him, 'He embraced thee and kissed thee, and thee also didst kiss him; ye became one and the same being.'(16)
The goal of Gnostic initiation was, likewise, to bring the lower self into union with the Higher Self, for it is when they are made one that enlightenment occurs.(17) Irenaeus relates that the Gnostic 'believes himself to be neither in heaven nor on earth, but to have embraced his Guardian Angel'.(18) The great Gnostic master Valentinus writes:
'When the human self and the divine "I" are interconnected they can achieve perfection and eternity.¡¯(19)¡¡
Bibliography:
1- It was this command which set Socrates on his quest for true knowledge. See Plato, Apology, 22e-3c.
2- Quoted in Pagels, op. cit., 141
3- Quoted in Robinson, J. M. (1978), 448
4- Quoted Pagels, op. cit., 136, 141
5- Socrates is the most famous exponent of the doctrine of the Daemon. See Apology 3Id, Phaedrus 242 and The Republic 496c. He describeshis Daemon as an inner voice which has come to him with advicethroughout his life, see Plato, Phaedrus and Letters vii and viii, 43,note 3. That the doctrine predates Socrates is evidenced by Empedocles, fr. 132. Empedocles believed in a divine self alien to thebody - which he calls not psyche but Daemon, an exile from thegods to whom it longs to return. See Guthrie, W. K. C. (1962), 318.
6- The relationship between Daemon and eidolon - between the Higherand lower self - was sometimes conceived as like that between thebody and its shadow. This doctrine underlies the myth of Plato'scave, in which chained men watch their flickering shadows cast onthe wall and mistake them for real life.
7- Burkert, W. (1985), 202, notes that in Greek myth the god often has amortal double. The twins Castor and Pollux became part of Mithraic iconography for this reason: on alternate days one is alive and theother dead, a symbol of the relationship between the Daemon andeidolon. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas records Jesus' cryptic saying: 'Two will rest on a bed, the one will die and the other will live.'
8- See Epictetus, The Teachings of Epictetus, 145, and On Providence, 4. Epictetus explains: 'God has placed at every man's side a guardian, the Daemon of each man, who is charged to watch over him; a Daemon that cannot sleep, nor be deceived. To what greater and more watchful guardian could he have committed us? So, when you have shut the doors, and made darkness in the house, remember, never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone, but God is there, and your Daemon is there.'
9- Quoted in Freke and Gandy (1998), 40
10- Mead, G. R. S. (1906), 599. An anonymous Gnostic recounts his vision of the Daemon and eidolon, which appeared to him as a giant and a dwarf: 'I stood on a lofty mountain, and saw a gigantic man and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder and drewnigh for to hear; and he spake unto me and said, I am thou and thouart I, and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou wiliest, thou gatherest me; and gathering me thou gatherest thyself.'
11- Valentinus, in Segal, R. A. (1992), 237, describes how the Guardian Angel, which is the Self, gives the person Gnosis. Only when theeidolon and Daemon become One can the individual achieveperfection and eternity. Segal writes: It is becoming ever clearer that this is the characteristic and basic assumption of Gnosis.'
12- Pyramid Text Utterance 215 assures the deceased: 'You shall not perish and your double shall not perish. For you are your double.'
13- Quoted in Lane-Fox, R. (1986), 565. Mani began preaching hisuniversal Gnostic religion in 242 CE in Babylon. It spread rapidlythroughout the Roman Empire. St Augustine was a Manichaean 'hearer' for eight years. In 304 Manichaeanism was made a capitaloffence in the West, for its Persian background made it highlysuspect. In the more tolerant East it eventually spread as far asChina. It reappeared in the West in the Middle Ages and
wasvigorously persecuted.
14- Quoted in Hollroyd, S. (1994), 69
15- Quoted in Mead, G. R. S. (1906), 475ff
16- Ibid.
17- See Segal, R. A. (1992), 51. Quispel refers to the mysterium conjunctionis between angel and man. Carl Jung used this as the title of one of his many works which were inspired by Gnosticism.
18- Quoted in Inge, W. R. (1899), 82
19- Quoted in Segal, R. A. (1992), 237
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Belief, Faith, and Gullibility.
Segment from the book, White Man's Bible, by Ben Klassen pg. 201.
Capitalize on Superstition and Gullibility. The Christian churches strongly discourage anyone from seeking legitimate evidence. For that matter, they also vigorously condemn logic, reason, or the idea of thinking for yourself. They put a high premium on faith, i.e., child-like gullibility. They do not like to have you asking questions. They want gullible fools whose minds can be programmed to believe whatever they are told to believe. Otherwise, they make it plain, hell fire and damnation will be your dire penalty. Either you believe the spooks in the sky story as they tell it, or you fry in the hereafter. It is a powerful club and it has worked wonders on the gullible and superstitious for centuries. As we have pointed out earlier, the combination of gullibility and superstition has wreaked havoc on the White Race, and the Jewish mind manipulators have exploited those two human weaknesses to the utmost ¡ª to our detriment and to their benefit.
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Segment from the book, Nature's Eternal Religion, by Ben Klassen, pg.
To succumb to the Christian philosophy is to indulge in a cowardly flight from reality, to escape to an Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy world, and to destroy reason and common sense. We repeat: Christianity despises fact, evidence and reasoning. Christianity despises logic. To become a Christian is to succumb to the perversion of one's mind by Jewish mind manipulation. A "born again" Christian is a pervert. He has had his instincts warped, his mind unhinged, and his total outlook on life, outlook on sex, and on the survival of his kind, completely perverted from that, which, as a natural human being, he was originally created by Nature. He becomes a destroyer of his own race.
Although the matter of becoming a Christian is a matter of degree, and very few people of the White Race actually take it seriously, nevertheless, everybody pretty well passively consents to its domination of our outlook and our society. This in itself is a very significant concession and one that has had catastrophic effects on the culture, government, and outlook of the White Race over the last 2000 years. And herein lies the White Man's dilemma.
In politics, in business, in warfare, and in all his other actions, he uses the instincts and common sense with which Nature endowed him so richly. He invokes the laws of survival, the laws of Nature, and those of his own experience. Then he goes to church on Sunday and has his brains re-manipulated to repudiate all his common sense. He goes off into orbit into an unreal, nebulous world. His brain slips a cog and completely derails from reality. He comes out confused and conscience stricken, betwixt and between, his brain in limbo, to again tackle the problems of the world on Monday. He remains torn, betwixt and between two incompatible worlds the world of reality and an unreal world as prescribed by a bunch of Jewish scriptwriters of unknown identity. His mind is paralyzed with the fear of hell, that fiery pit, that ghastly confined torture chamber prepared by your kind, loving, merciful, gracious (and Jewish) God, for 99 percent of his "beloved" victims.
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Reason vs. Faith.
Segment from the book, The Voice of Reason by Ayn Rand. pg. 70. From a Lecture titled: "Religion vs. America". by Leonard Peikoff.
More on Faith
Intellectually speaking, the period of the Middle Ages was the exact opposite of classical Greece. Its leading philosophic spokesman, Augustine, held that faith was the basis of man's entire mental life. "I do not know in order to believe," he said, "I believe in order to know."
In other words, reason is nothing but a handmaiden of revelation; it is a mere adjunct of faith, whose task is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion. What if a dogma cannot be clarified? So much the better, answered an earlier Church father, Tertullian. The truly religious man, he said, delights in thwarting his reason; that shows his commitment to faith.
Thus, Tertullian's famous answer, when asked about the dogma of God's self-sacrifice on the cross: "Credo quia absurdum" ("I believe it because it is absurd").
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Segment from the book, The Voice of Reason, by Ayn Rand.pg. 66-67. From a Lecture by Leonard Peikoff titled "Religion vs. America.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "religion" as "a particular system of faith an worship," and goes on, in part: "Recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship."
The fundamental concept here is "faith." "Faith" in this context means belief in the absence of evidence.
This is the essential that distinguishes religion from science.
A scientist may believe in the entities which he cannot observe, such as atoms or electrons, but he can do so only if he can prove their existence logically, by inference from things he does observe.
A religious man, however, believes in some "higher unseen power" which he cannot observe and cannot
logically prove. As the whole story of philosophy demonstrates, no study of the natural universe can warrant jumping outside it to a supernatural entity.
¡¡
The five arguments for God offered by the greatest of all religious thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, are widely recognized by philosophers to be logically defective; they have each been refuted many times, and they are the best arguments that have ever been offered on this subject.
Many philosophers indeed now go further: they point out that God is not only an article of faith, but that this is essential to religion. A God susceptible of proof, they argue, would actually wreck religion. A God open to human logic, to scientific study, to rational understanding, would have to be definable, delimited, finite, amenable to human concepts, obedient to scientific law, and thus incapable of miracles.
Such a thing would be merely one object among others within the natural world; it would be merely another datum for the scientist, like some new kind of galaxy or cosmic ray, not a transcendent power running the universe and demanding man's worship. What religion rests on is a true God, i.e., a God not of reason, but of faith.
If you want to concretize the idea of faith, I suggest that you visit, of all places, the campuses of the Ivy League, where, according to The New York Times, "a religious revival is now occurring. Will you find students eagerly discussing proofs or struggling to reinterpret the ancient myths of the Bible into some kind of consistency with the teachings of science? On the contrary. The students, like their parents, are insisting that the Bible be accepted as literal truth, whether it makes logical sense or not. "Students today are more reconciled to authority," one campus religious official notes. "There is less need for students to sit on their own mountain top"--i.e., to exercise their own independent mind and judgment. Why not? They are content simply to believe. At Columbia University, for instance, a new student group gathers regularly not to analyze, but to "sing, worship and speak in tongues." "People are coming back to a religion in a way that some of us once went to the counterculture," says a chaplain at Columbia. (4) This is absolutely true. And note what they are coming back to: not reason or logic, but faith.
"Faith" names the method of religion, the essence of its epistemology; and, as the Oxford English Dictionary states, the belief in some "higher unseen power" is the basic content of religion, its distinctive view of reality, its metaphysics. This higher power is not always conceived as a personal God; some religions construe it as an impersonal dimension of some kind. The common denominator is the belief in the supernatural--in some entity, attribute, or force transcending and controlling this world in which we live.
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Reason as Man's means of Knowledg and Standard of Truth.
Segment from the book, For the New Intellectual, by Ayn Rand pg. 139-141.
¡¡¡¡
"Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders¡¯ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.
¡¡
"Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.
"All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one¡¯s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one¡¯s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
"Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man¡¯s only means of nowledge, is his only standard of truth.
"The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth¡ª and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man¡¯s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.
"You who speak of a ¡®moral instinct¡¯ as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason¡ªman¡¯s reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?¡ªRight or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow¡ªright or wrong? Is a man¡¯s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life¡ª right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power¡ªright or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have¡ªand the answers came from a man¡¯s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.
"A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest¡ªbut if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
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Segment from the book, For the New Intellectual. by Ayn Rand. pg. 133-136.
"Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your selfinterest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason¡ªthat in reason there¡¯s no reason to be moral.
"Whatever else they fought about, it was against man¡¯s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man¡¯s mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.
"Man¡¯s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch¡ªor build a cyclotron¡ªwithout a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.
"But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ¡®human nature,¡¯ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival¡ªso that for you, who are a human being, the question ¡®to be or not to be¡¯ is the question ¡®to think or not to think.¡¯
"A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ¡®Value¡¯ is that which one acts to gain and keep, ¡®virtue¡¯ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ¡®Value¡¯ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? ¡®Value¡¯ presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.
"There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence¡ªand it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ¡®Life¡¯ that makes the concept of ¡®Value¡¯ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
"A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.
"An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.
"Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ¡®instinct¡¯ is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man¡¯s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer¡ªand that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
"A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.
"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice¡ªand the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man¡ªby choice; he has to hold his life as a value¡ªby choice; he has to learn to sustain it¡ªby choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues¡ªby choice.
"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
"Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man¡¯s Life is its standard of value.
"All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.
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Segment from the book, For the New Intellectual, by Ayn Rand. pg. 154-155.
"They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man. "No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his
pain¡ªand they point at the torture rack to which they¡¯ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.
"They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth¡ªand that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine
it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.
"They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost¡ªyet such is their image of man¡¯s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.
"Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to
ignore? It was man¡¯s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and a soul moved by mystic revelations¡ªhe was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a Dictaphone.
"And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he¡¯ll find no solution and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent¡ªand if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness impotent.
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Sement from the book, For the New Intellectual. by Ayn Rand. pg. 155-156.
"As products of the split between man¡¯s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter¡ªthe enslavement of man¡¯s body, in spirit¡ªthe destruction of his mind.
"The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man¡¯s power to conceive¡ªa definition that invalidates man¡¯s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society¡ªa thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.
Man¡¯s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man¡¯s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man¡¯s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man¡¯s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man¡¯s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man¡¯s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man¡¯s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth¡ªto his great-grandchildren.
"Selfishness¡ªsay both¡ªis man¡¯s evil. Man¡¯s good¡ªsay both¡ªis to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man¡¯s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice¡ªcry both¡ªis the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man¡¯s reach.
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Sement from the book, The Voice of Reason, by Ayn Rand. pg. 72-74. From a Lecture titled, "Religion vs. America." by Leonard Peikoff.
What--or who--ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said in opposition to Augustine, does not rest on faith; it is a self-contained, natural faculty, which works on sense experience. Its essential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world. Men, Aquinas declared forthrightly, must use and obey reason; whatever one can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true. Aquinas himself thought he could prove the existence of God, and he thought that faith is valuable as a supplement to reason. But this did not alter the nature of his revolution. His was the charter of liberty, the moral and philosophical sanction, which the West had desperately needed. His message to mankind, after the long ordeal of faith, was in effect: "It's all right. You don't have to stifle your mind anymore. You can think."
The result, in historical short order, was the revolt against the authority of the Church, the feudal breakup, the Renaissance. Renaissance means "rebirth," rebirth of reason and man's concern with this world. Once again, as in the pagan era, we see secular philosophy, natural science, man-glorifying art, and the pursuit of earthly happiness. It was a gradual, tortuous change, with each century becoming more worldly than the preceding, from Aquinas to the Renaissance to the Age of Reason to the climax and end of this development: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. This was the age in which America's founding fathers were educated and in which they created the United States.
The Enlightenment represented the triumph (for a short while anyway) of the pagan Greek, and specifically of the Aristotelian, spirit. Its basic principle was respect for man's intellect and, correspondingly, the wholesale dismissal of faith and revelation. Reason the Only Oracle of Man, said Ethan Allen of Vermont, who spoke for his age in demanding unfettered free thought and in ridiculing the primitive contradictions of the Bible.
"While we are under the tyranny of Priests," he declared in 1784, ". . . it ever will be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith." (7)
Elihu Palmer, another American of the Enlightenment, was even more outspoken. According to Christianity, he writes, God "is supposed to be a fierce, revengeful tyrant, delighting in cruelty, punishing his creatures for the very sins which he causes them to commit; and creating numberless millions of immortal souls, that could never have offended him, for the express purpose of tormenting them to all eternity." The purpose of this kind of notion, he says elsewhere, "the grand object of all civil and religious tyrants . . . has been to suppress all the elevated operations of the mind, to kill the energy of thought, and through this channel to subjugate the whole earth for their own special emolument." "It has hitherto been deemed a crime to think," he observes, but at last men have a chance--because they have finally escaped from the "long and doleful night" of Christian rule, and have grasped instead "the unlimited power of human reason"--"reason, which is the glory of our nature." (8)
Allen and Palmer are extreme representatives of the Enlightenment spirit, granted; but they are representatives. Theirs is the attitude which was new in the modern world, and which, in a less inflammatory form, was shared by all the Founding Fathers as their basic, revolutionary premise. Thomas Jefferson states the attitude more sedately, with less willful provocation to religion, but it is the same essential attitude. "Fix reason firmly in her seat," he advises a nephew, "and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." (9) Observe the philosophic priorities in this advice: man's mind comes first; God is a derivative, if you can prove him. The absolute, which must guide the human mind, is the principle of reason; every other idea must meet this test. It is in this approach--in this fundamental rejection of faith--that the irreligion of the Enlightenment lies.
The consequence of this approach was the age's rejection of all the other religious priorities. In metaphysics: this world once again was regarded as real, as important, and as a realm not of miracles, but of impersonal natural law. In ethics: success in this life became the dominant motive; the veneration of asceticism was swept aside in favor of each man's pursuit of happiness--his own happiness on earth, to be achieved by his own effort, by self-reliance and self-respect leading to self-made prosperity. But can man really achieve fulfillment on earth? Yes, the Enlightenment answered; man has the means, the potent faculty of intellect, necessary to achieve his goals and values. Man may not yet be perfect, people said, but he is perfectible; he must be so, because he is the rational animal.
Such were the watchwords of the period: not faith, God, service, but reason, nature, happiness, man.
.....
This was the intellectual context of the American Revolution. Point for point, the Founding Fathers' argument for liberty was the exact counterpart of the Puritans' argument for dictatorship--but in reverse, moving from the opposite starting point to the opposite conclusion. Man, the Founding Fathers said in essence (with a large assist from Locke and others), is the rational being; no authority, human or otherwise, can demand blind obedience from such a being -- not in the realm of thought or, therefore, in the realm of action either. By his very nature, they said, man must be left free to exercise his reason and then to act accordingly, i.e., by the guidance of his best rational judgment. Because this world is of vital importance, they added, the motive of man's action should be the pursuit of happiness. Because the individual, not a supernatural power, is the creator of wealth, a man should have the right to private property, the right to keep and use or trade his own product. And because man is basically good, they held, there is no need to leash him; there is nothing to fear in setting free a rational animal.
Part 3: Critiques of Christian Epistemology. Reason and Knowledge vs. faith and belief.
- Down with Intelligence
-Knowledge Gnosis and Gnosticism.
-Belief Faith and Gullibility
-Reason vs. Faith.
- reason as man's means of truth.
- Christian morality as agaisnt the mind.
-More on the Anti-Mind.
- Reason as the reason for the Reniassance/Enlightenment.
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Segment from the book, Atheist Manifesto, by Michael Onfray. pg. 67-68.
Down with Intelligence.
Down with intelligence! Monotheism loathes intelligence, that sublime gift defined as the art of connecting what at first and for most people seems unconnected. Intelligence reveals unexpected but undeniable causalities; it produces rational, convincing explanations based on reasoning; it rejects every manufactured fiction. With its help, we can spurn myths and fairy tales. We need no posthumous paradise, no salvation or redemption of the soul, no all-knowing, all-seeing God. Properly and rationally directed, intelligence wards off all magical thinking.
The advocates of Mosaic law, Christian tale-spinning, and their Koranic clones share the same fable on the origins of negativity in the world. In Genesis 3:6 ¡ª common to the Torah and to the Old Testament of the Christian Bible ¡ª and in the Koran (2:29) we find the same story of Adam and Eve in a paradise where a God forbids them to approach a tree while a demon urges disobedience. In this monotheistic version of the Greek Pandora fable, a woman (of course) commits the irreparable, and her act spreads evil all over the world.
This story, in normal circumstances just good enough to earn a place in the roster of fairy tales or cautionary fables, has had incalculable consequences for human civilizations! Loathing of women and the flesh, guilt and desire for atonement, the quest for an impossible amends and submission to necessity, fascination with death and passion for suffering¡ªall so many occasions for activating the death instinct.
What do the files on this story tell us? We find a God who orders the primal couple not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Clearly we are in the presence of metaphor. It took the church fathers to sexualize the story, for the text is clear: eating this fruit removes the scales from our eyes and allows us to distinguish between good and evil, and thus to resemble God. One verse (Genesis 3:6) mentions a tree to be desired to make one wise. Defying God's prohibition meant preferring knowledge to obedience, seeking to know rather than submitting. Or in different terms: opting for philosophy against religion.
What does this ban on intelligence mean? You can do anything in this magnificent Garden, except become intelligent ¡ª the Tree of Knowledge ¡ª or immortal ¡ª the Tree of Life. What a fate God has in store for men: stupidity and mortality! A God who offers such a gift to his creatures must be perverse . . . Let us then praise Eve who opted for intelligence at risk of death, whereas Adam did not realize right away what was at stake. The bliss of ignorance!
What do the poor wretches learn, once the lady tastes the sublime fruit? They see reality. Reality and nothing else. Nudity, their natural state. And with their freshly acquired nowledge, they discover their cultural allotment: the choice of fig leaves (rather than grape leaves) to cover their nakedness was symbolic of a future cultural heritage. Worse: they discover the hardship of daily life, the sorrow in every destiny, the battle between the sexes, the gulf forever separating man and woman, the inevitability of backbreaking toil, the pain of childbirth, and the sovereignty of death. Once liberated from their state of ignorance, they avoid the additional transgression that would have given them eternal life (the Tree of Life grew next to the Tree of Knowledge), for the one true God¡ªdecidedly gentle, good, loving, generous ¡ª spared them that fate by expelling Adam and Eve from paradise. And we have remained outside ever since.
Lesson number one: if we lose the illusion of faith, the consolation of God, and the fables of religion, if we prefer seeking knowledge and intelligence, then reality appears to us as it is, tragic. But which is better? A truth that removes all hope of immortality yet saves us from losing our life altogether by living it only half alive? Or a story that briefly consoles us but makes us waste the only thing we really possess: life here and now?
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Segment from the book, The Jesus Mysteries, Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God? by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, pg. 71.
Knowledge Beyond Belief
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus writes, 'Human opinions are toys for children.¡¯(1) The sages of the Pagan Mysteries were disparaging about mere beliefs or opinions; they were interested in knowledge. Plato argued that belief is concerned only with the appearances of things, while knowledge penetrates to the underlying reality.(2) The highest level of understanding, he proclaimed, is that knowledge through which the mind becomes unified with the object of knowledge.(3) The Gnostics inherited these Pagan teachings and were also disparaging of pistis (faith) in comparison with Gnosis (knowledge).
Gnosis is not an idea that is open to doubt, but a mystical experience of the Truth which is immediate, certain and completely non-conceptual. Whilst Literalist Christians extolled the spiritual value of blind faith and commanded the faithful not to question what they were told by the bishops, the Gnostic masters, like the Pagan sages before them, taught that through initiation into the Inner Mysteries initiates could directly experience Gnosis and know the Truth for themselves.
For the Gnostics, faith was only a stepping-stone leading to Gnosis. The Gnostic teacher Heracleon explains that at first people believe through faith in the testimony of others, but they need to go on to experience the Truth directly.(4) Clement taught:
'Faith is the foundation; Gnosis the superstructure.(5) By Gnosis faith is perfected(6) for to know is more than to believe.(7) Gnosis is proof of what has been received through faith.¡¯(8) Like the Pagan sages, the Gnostics taught that all doctrines were merely approaches to the Truth, which was itself beyond words and concepts, and could only be found through experiencing Gnosis for oneself.(9) The Gospel of Philip explains:
'Names can be very deceptive, for they divert our thoughts from what is accurate to what is inaccurate. Thus one who hears the word "God" does not perceive what is accurate, but does perceive what is inaccurate. So also with "the Father" and "the Son", and "the Holy Spirit", and "life" and "light", and "resurrection", and "the church", and all the rest -people do not perceive what is accurate, but they perceive what is inaccurate.¡¯(10)
Bibliography:
1- Quoted in Kahn, C. H. (1979), 55. See also 109, where Kahn notes Heraclitus' favoured use of ginoskein for the knowledge which goes beyond opinion.
2- Plato, Phaedrus and Letters vii and viii, 53. The editor of this version of Phaedrus notes that
Plato repeatedly contrasts episteme, 'knowledge', with doxa, 'opinions'. True knowledge can only beobtained by the pursuit of pure philosophy. The sensible world canonly ever be the source of doxa.
3- Fidler, D. (1993), 9
4- Pagels,E. (1979), 48
5- Clement, Stromata, 6.26
6- Ibid., 7.55
7- Ibid., 6.109
8- Ibid., 7.57
9- 81 Pagels, op. cit., 125
10- 82 Quoted in Robinson, J. M. (1978), 142; see also Pagels, op. cit., 59
Segment from the book, The Jesus Mysteries, Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God? by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, pg. 71-73.
The most important injunction on the spiritual path of the Pagan Mysteries was inscribed over the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi: Gnothi Seauton - 'Know Thy Self¡¯. The Gnosis or Knowledge which initiates of the Pagan Mysteries sought was Self-knowledge.(1) The Gnostic Book of Thomas the Contender likewise teaches:
'Whoever has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same time already achieved Gnosis about the depth of all things.'(2)
In The Testimony of Truth Jesus advises a disciple to become 'a disciple of his own mind¡¯ which is 'the father of Truth'.(3) The Gnostic sage Silvanus encourages:
'Knock on yourself as upon a door and walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk on the road, it is impossible for you to go astray. Open the door for yourself so that you may know what is.'(4)
But what is the self? The Pagan sages taught that every human being has a mortal lower self called the 'eidolon¡¯ and an immortal Higher Self called the 'Daemon¡¯.(5) The eidolon is the embodied self, the physical body and personality.(6) The Daemon is the Spirit, the true Self which is each person's spiritual connection to God. The Mysteries were designed to help initiates realize that the eidolon is a false self and that their true identity is the immortal Daemon.(7)
From the eidolon's point of view the Daemon appears to be an independent Guardian Angel.(8) Initiates who still identify with the eidolon, therefore, do not experience the Daemon as their own true Self, but as a spirit guide whose job it is to lead them to their spiritual destination. Plato teaches, 'We should think of the most authoritative part of the soul as a Guardian Spirit
given by God which lifts us to our heavenly home.'(9)
The Gnostic sages taught exactly the same Mystery doctrine.(10) Valentinus explains that a person receives Gnosis from their Guardian Angel, but that this angelic being is actually the seeker's own Higher Self.(11) In ancient Egypt the Daemon had for millennia been pictured as a Heavenly Twin of the eidolon.(12) This image is also found in Gnosticism. The Gnostic sage Mani was said to have been conscious of having a protecting angel from the age of four and, aged 12, to have realized it was his Heavenly Twin, whom he called the 'most beautiful and largest mirror image of my own person'.(13)
In The Acts of John, John observes that Jesus sometimes held converse with a Heavenly Twin who descended to join him:
'When all of us, his disciples, were sleeping in one house at Gennesaret, I alone having wrapped myself up, watched from under my garment what he did; and first I heard him say, "John, go thou to sleep", and thereupon I feigned to be asleep; and I saw another like unto him come down, whom I also heard saying to my Lord, "Jesus, do they whom thou hast chosen still not believe in thee?" And my Lord said, "Thou sayest well, for they are men."¡¯(14)
The Pistis Sophia relates a charming myth of the child Jesus meeting his own Heavenly Twin for the first time. His mother Mary recalls:
'When thou wert a child, before the Spirit had descended upon thee, when thou wert in the vineyard with Joseph, the Spirit came down from the height, and came unto me in the house, like unto thee, and I knew Him not, but thought that he was thou. And he said unto me, "Where is Jesus, my brother, that I may go to meet him?"'(15)
Mary relates to Jesus that when his Twin finally found him, 'He embraced thee and kissed thee, and thee also didst kiss him; ye became one and the same being.'(16)
The goal of Gnostic initiation was, likewise, to bring the lower self into union with the Higher Self, for it is when they are made one that enlightenment occurs.(17) Irenaeus relates that the Gnostic 'believes himself to be neither in heaven nor on earth, but to have embraced his Guardian Angel'.(18) The great Gnostic master Valentinus writes:
'When the human self and the divine "I" are interconnected they can achieve perfection and eternity.¡¯(19)¡¡
Bibliography:
1- It was this command which set Socrates on his quest for true knowledge. See Plato, Apology, 22e-3c.
2- Quoted in Pagels, op. cit., 141
3- Quoted in Robinson, J. M. (1978), 448
4- Quoted Pagels, op. cit., 136, 141
5- Socrates is the most famous exponent of the doctrine of the Daemon. See Apology 3Id, Phaedrus 242 and The Republic 496c. He describeshis Daemon as an inner voice which has come to him with advicethroughout his life, see Plato, Phaedrus and Letters vii and viii, 43,note 3. That the doctrine predates Socrates is evidenced by Empedocles, fr. 132. Empedocles believed in a divine self alien to thebody - which he calls not psyche but Daemon, an exile from thegods to whom it longs to return. See Guthrie, W. K. C. (1962), 318.
6- The relationship between Daemon and eidolon - between the Higherand lower self - was sometimes conceived as like that between thebody and its shadow. This doctrine underlies the myth of Plato'scave, in which chained men watch their flickering shadows cast onthe wall and mistake them for real life.
7- Burkert, W. (1985), 202, notes that in Greek myth the god often has amortal double. The twins Castor and Pollux became part of Mithraic iconography for this reason: on alternate days one is alive and theother dead, a symbol of the relationship between the Daemon andeidolon. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas records Jesus' cryptic saying: 'Two will rest on a bed, the one will die and the other will live.'
8- See Epictetus, The Teachings of Epictetus, 145, and On Providence, 4. Epictetus explains: 'God has placed at every man's side a guardian, the Daemon of each man, who is charged to watch over him; a Daemon that cannot sleep, nor be deceived. To what greater and more watchful guardian could he have committed us? So, when you have shut the doors, and made darkness in the house, remember, never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone, but God is there, and your Daemon is there.'
9- Quoted in Freke and Gandy (1998), 40
10- Mead, G. R. S. (1906), 599. An anonymous Gnostic recounts his vision of the Daemon and eidolon, which appeared to him as a giant and a dwarf: 'I stood on a lofty mountain, and saw a gigantic man and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder and drewnigh for to hear; and he spake unto me and said, I am thou and thouart I, and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou wiliest, thou gatherest me; and gathering me thou gatherest thyself.'
11- Valentinus, in Segal, R. A. (1992), 237, describes how the Guardian Angel, which is the Self, gives the person Gnosis. Only when theeidolon and Daemon become One can the individual achieveperfection and eternity. Segal writes: It is becoming ever clearer that this is the characteristic and basic assumption of Gnosis.'
12- Pyramid Text Utterance 215 assures the deceased: 'You shall not perish and your double shall not perish. For you are your double.'
13- Quoted in Lane-Fox, R. (1986), 565. Mani began preaching hisuniversal Gnostic religion in 242 CE in Babylon. It spread rapidlythroughout the Roman Empire. St Augustine was a Manichaean 'hearer' for eight years. In 304 Manichaeanism was made a capitaloffence in the West, for its Persian background made it highlysuspect. In the more tolerant East it eventually spread as far asChina. It reappeared in the West in the Middle Ages and
wasvigorously persecuted.
14- Quoted in Hollroyd, S. (1994), 69
15- Quoted in Mead, G. R. S. (1906), 475ff
16- Ibid.
17- See Segal, R. A. (1992), 51. Quispel refers to the mysterium conjunctionis between angel and man. Carl Jung used this as the title of one of his many works which were inspired by Gnosticism.
18- Quoted in Inge, W. R. (1899), 82
19- Quoted in Segal, R. A. (1992), 237
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Belief, Faith, and Gullibility.
Segment from the book, White Man's Bible, by Ben Klassen pg. 201.
Capitalize on Superstition and Gullibility. The Christian churches strongly discourage anyone from seeking legitimate evidence. For that matter, they also vigorously condemn logic, reason, or the idea of thinking for yourself. They put a high premium on faith, i.e., child-like gullibility. They do not like to have you asking questions. They want gullible fools whose minds can be programmed to believe whatever they are told to believe. Otherwise, they make it plain, hell fire and damnation will be your dire penalty. Either you believe the spooks in the sky story as they tell it, or you fry in the hereafter. It is a powerful club and it has worked wonders on the gullible and superstitious for centuries. As we have pointed out earlier, the combination of gullibility and superstition has wreaked havoc on the White Race, and the Jewish mind manipulators have exploited those two human weaknesses to the utmost ¡ª to our detriment and to their benefit.
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Segment from the book, Nature's Eternal Religion, by Ben Klassen, pg.
To succumb to the Christian philosophy is to indulge in a cowardly flight from reality, to escape to an Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy world, and to destroy reason and common sense. We repeat: Christianity despises fact, evidence and reasoning. Christianity despises logic. To become a Christian is to succumb to the perversion of one's mind by Jewish mind manipulation. A "born again" Christian is a pervert. He has had his instincts warped, his mind unhinged, and his total outlook on life, outlook on sex, and on the survival of his kind, completely perverted from that, which, as a natural human being, he was originally created by Nature. He becomes a destroyer of his own race.
Although the matter of becoming a Christian is a matter of degree, and very few people of the White Race actually take it seriously, nevertheless, everybody pretty well passively consents to its domination of our outlook and our society. This in itself is a very significant concession and one that has had catastrophic effects on the culture, government, and outlook of the White Race over the last 2000 years. And herein lies the White Man's dilemma.
In politics, in business, in warfare, and in all his other actions, he uses the instincts and common sense with which Nature endowed him so richly. He invokes the laws of survival, the laws of Nature, and those of his own experience. Then he goes to church on Sunday and has his brains re-manipulated to repudiate all his common sense. He goes off into orbit into an unreal, nebulous world. His brain slips a cog and completely derails from reality. He comes out confused and conscience stricken, betwixt and between, his brain in limbo, to again tackle the problems of the world on Monday. He remains torn, betwixt and between two incompatible worlds the world of reality and an unreal world as prescribed by a bunch of Jewish scriptwriters of unknown identity. His mind is paralyzed with the fear of hell, that fiery pit, that ghastly confined torture chamber prepared by your kind, loving, merciful, gracious (and Jewish) God, for 99 percent of his "beloved" victims.
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Reason vs. Faith.
Segment from the book, The Voice of Reason by Ayn Rand. pg. 70. From a Lecture titled: "Religion vs. America". by Leonard Peikoff.
More on Faith
Intellectually speaking, the period of the Middle Ages was the exact opposite of classical Greece. Its leading philosophic spokesman, Augustine, held that faith was the basis of man's entire mental life. "I do not know in order to believe," he said, "I believe in order to know."
In other words, reason is nothing but a handmaiden of revelation; it is a mere adjunct of faith, whose task is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion. What if a dogma cannot be clarified? So much the better, answered an earlier Church father, Tertullian. The truly religious man, he said, delights in thwarting his reason; that shows his commitment to faith.
Thus, Tertullian's famous answer, when asked about the dogma of God's self-sacrifice on the cross: "Credo quia absurdum" ("I believe it because it is absurd").
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Segment from the book, The Voice of Reason, by Ayn Rand.pg. 66-67. From a Lecture by Leonard Peikoff titled "Religion vs. America.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "religion" as "a particular system of faith an worship," and goes on, in part: "Recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship."
The fundamental concept here is "faith." "Faith" in this context means belief in the absence of evidence.
This is the essential that distinguishes religion from science.
A scientist may believe in the entities which he cannot observe, such as atoms or electrons, but he can do so only if he can prove their existence logically, by inference from things he does observe.
A religious man, however, believes in some "higher unseen power" which he cannot observe and cannot
logically prove. As the whole story of philosophy demonstrates, no study of the natural universe can warrant jumping outside it to a supernatural entity.
¡¡
The five arguments for God offered by the greatest of all religious thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, are widely recognized by philosophers to be logically defective; they have each been refuted many times, and they are the best arguments that have ever been offered on this subject.
Many philosophers indeed now go further: they point out that God is not only an article of faith, but that this is essential to religion. A God susceptible of proof, they argue, would actually wreck religion. A God open to human logic, to scientific study, to rational understanding, would have to be definable, delimited, finite, amenable to human concepts, obedient to scientific law, and thus incapable of miracles.
Such a thing would be merely one object among others within the natural world; it would be merely another datum for the scientist, like some new kind of galaxy or cosmic ray, not a transcendent power running the universe and demanding man's worship. What religion rests on is a true God, i.e., a God not of reason, but of faith.
If you want to concretize the idea of faith, I suggest that you visit, of all places, the campuses of the Ivy League, where, according to The New York Times, "a religious revival is now occurring. Will you find students eagerly discussing proofs or struggling to reinterpret the ancient myths of the Bible into some kind of consistency with the teachings of science? On the contrary. The students, like their parents, are insisting that the Bible be accepted as literal truth, whether it makes logical sense or not. "Students today are more reconciled to authority," one campus religious official notes. "There is less need for students to sit on their own mountain top"--i.e., to exercise their own independent mind and judgment. Why not? They are content simply to believe. At Columbia University, for instance, a new student group gathers regularly not to analyze, but to "sing, worship and speak in tongues." "People are coming back to a religion in a way that some of us once went to the counterculture," says a chaplain at Columbia. (4) This is absolutely true. And note what they are coming back to: not reason or logic, but faith.
"Faith" names the method of religion, the essence of its epistemology; and, as the Oxford English Dictionary states, the belief in some "higher unseen power" is the basic content of religion, its distinctive view of reality, its metaphysics. This higher power is not always conceived as a personal God; some religions construe it as an impersonal dimension of some kind. The common denominator is the belief in the supernatural--in some entity, attribute, or force transcending and controlling this world in which we live.
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Reason as Man's means of Knowledg and Standard of Truth.
Segment from the book, For the New Intellectual, by Ayn Rand pg. 139-141.
¡¡¡¡
"Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders¡¯ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.
¡¡
"Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.
"All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one¡¯s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one¡¯s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
"Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man¡¯s only means of nowledge, is his only standard of truth.
"The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth¡ª and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man¡¯s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.
"You who speak of a ¡®moral instinct¡¯ as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason¡ªman¡¯s reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?¡ªRight or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow¡ªright or wrong? Is a man¡¯s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life¡ª right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power¡ªright or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have¡ªand the answers came from a man¡¯s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.
"A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest¡ªbut if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
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Segment from the book, For the New Intellectual. by Ayn Rand. pg. 133-136.
"Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your selfinterest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason¡ªthat in reason there¡¯s no reason to be moral.
"Whatever else they fought about, it was against man¡¯s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man¡¯s mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.
"Man¡¯s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch¡ªor build a cyclotron¡ªwithout a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.
"But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ¡®human nature,¡¯ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival¡ªso that for you, who are a human being, the question ¡®to be or not to be¡¯ is the question ¡®to think or not to think.¡¯
"A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ¡®Value¡¯ is that which one acts to gain and keep, ¡®virtue¡¯ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ¡®Value¡¯ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? ¡®Value¡¯ presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.
"There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence¡ªand it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ¡®Life¡¯ that makes the concept of ¡®Value¡¯ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
"A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.
"An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.
"Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ¡®instinct¡¯ is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man¡¯s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer¡ªand that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
"A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.
"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice¡ªand the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man¡ªby choice; he has to hold his life as a value¡ªby choice; he has to learn to sustain it¡ªby choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues¡ªby choice.
"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
"Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man¡¯s Life is its standard of value.
"All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.
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Segment from the book, For the New Intellectual, by Ayn Rand. pg. 154-155.
"They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man. "No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his
pain¡ªand they point at the torture rack to which they¡¯ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.
"They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth¡ªand that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine
it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.
"They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost¡ªyet such is their image of man¡¯s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.
"Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to
ignore? It was man¡¯s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and a soul moved by mystic revelations¡ªhe was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a Dictaphone.
"And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he¡¯ll find no solution and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent¡ªand if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness impotent.
________________________________________________________________
Sement from the book, For the New Intellectual. by Ayn Rand. pg. 155-156.
"As products of the split between man¡¯s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter¡ªthe enslavement of man¡¯s body, in spirit¡ªthe destruction of his mind.
"The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man¡¯s power to conceive¡ªa definition that invalidates man¡¯s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society¡ªa thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.
Man¡¯s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man¡¯s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man¡¯s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man¡¯s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man¡¯s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man¡¯s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man¡¯s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth¡ªto his great-grandchildren.
"Selfishness¡ªsay both¡ªis man¡¯s evil. Man¡¯s good¡ªsay both¡ªis to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man¡¯s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice¡ªcry both¡ªis the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man¡¯s reach.
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Sement from the book, The Voice of Reason, by Ayn Rand. pg. 72-74. From a Lecture titled, "Religion vs. America." by Leonard Peikoff.
What--or who--ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said in opposition to Augustine, does not rest on faith; it is a self-contained, natural faculty, which works on sense experience. Its essential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world. Men, Aquinas declared forthrightly, must use and obey reason; whatever one can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true. Aquinas himself thought he could prove the existence of God, and he thought that faith is valuable as a supplement to reason. But this did not alter the nature of his revolution. His was the charter of liberty, the moral and philosophical sanction, which the West had desperately needed. His message to mankind, after the long ordeal of faith, was in effect: "It's all right. You don't have to stifle your mind anymore. You can think."
The result, in historical short order, was the revolt against the authority of the Church, the feudal breakup, the Renaissance. Renaissance means "rebirth," rebirth of reason and man's concern with this world. Once again, as in the pagan era, we see secular philosophy, natural science, man-glorifying art, and the pursuit of earthly happiness. It was a gradual, tortuous change, with each century becoming more worldly than the preceding, from Aquinas to the Renaissance to the Age of Reason to the climax and end of this development: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. This was the age in which America's founding fathers were educated and in which they created the United States.
The Enlightenment represented the triumph (for a short while anyway) of the pagan Greek, and specifically of the Aristotelian, spirit. Its basic principle was respect for man's intellect and, correspondingly, the wholesale dismissal of faith and revelation. Reason the Only Oracle of Man, said Ethan Allen of Vermont, who spoke for his age in demanding unfettered free thought and in ridiculing the primitive contradictions of the Bible.
"While we are under the tyranny of Priests," he declared in 1784, ". . . it ever will be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith." (7)
Elihu Palmer, another American of the Enlightenment, was even more outspoken. According to Christianity, he writes, God "is supposed to be a fierce, revengeful tyrant, delighting in cruelty, punishing his creatures for the very sins which he causes them to commit; and creating numberless millions of immortal souls, that could never have offended him, for the express purpose of tormenting them to all eternity." The purpose of this kind of notion, he says elsewhere, "the grand object of all civil and religious tyrants . . . has been to suppress all the elevated operations of the mind, to kill the energy of thought, and through this channel to subjugate the whole earth for their own special emolument." "It has hitherto been deemed a crime to think," he observes, but at last men have a chance--because they have finally escaped from the "long and doleful night" of Christian rule, and have grasped instead "the unlimited power of human reason"--"reason, which is the glory of our nature." (8)
Allen and Palmer are extreme representatives of the Enlightenment spirit, granted; but they are representatives. Theirs is the attitude which was new in the modern world, and which, in a less inflammatory form, was shared by all the Founding Fathers as their basic, revolutionary premise. Thomas Jefferson states the attitude more sedately, with less willful provocation to religion, but it is the same essential attitude. "Fix reason firmly in her seat," he advises a nephew, "and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." (9) Observe the philosophic priorities in this advice: man's mind comes first; God is a derivative, if you can prove him. The absolute, which must guide the human mind, is the principle of reason; every other idea must meet this test. It is in this approach--in this fundamental rejection of faith--that the irreligion of the Enlightenment lies.
The consequence of this approach was the age's rejection of all the other religious priorities. In metaphysics: this world once again was regarded as real, as important, and as a realm not of miracles, but of impersonal natural law. In ethics: success in this life became the dominant motive; the veneration of asceticism was swept aside in favor of each man's pursuit of happiness--his own happiness on earth, to be achieved by his own effort, by self-reliance and self-respect leading to self-made prosperity. But can man really achieve fulfillment on earth? Yes, the Enlightenment answered; man has the means, the potent faculty of intellect, necessary to achieve his goals and values. Man may not yet be perfect, people said, but he is perfectible; he must be so, because he is the rational animal.
Such were the watchwords of the period: not faith, God, service, but reason, nature, happiness, man.
.....
This was the intellectual context of the American Revolution. Point for point, the Founding Fathers' argument for liberty was the exact counterpart of the Puritans' argument for dictatorship--but in reverse, moving from the opposite starting point to the opposite conclusion. Man, the Founding Fathers said in essence (with a large assist from Locke and others), is the rational being; no authority, human or otherwise, can demand blind obedience from such a being -- not in the realm of thought or, therefore, in the realm of action either. By his very nature, they said, man must be left free to exercise his reason and then to act accordingly, i.e., by the guidance of his best rational judgment. Because this world is of vital importance, they added, the motive of man's action should be the pursuit of happiness. Because the individual, not a supernatural power, is the creator of wealth, a man should have the right to private property, the right to keep and use or trade his own product. And because man is basically good, they held, there is no need to leash him; there is nothing to fear in setting free a rational animal.
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