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Think For Yourself
by Dr. Charlie Webb
| Why would you let other people think for you? |
As innocent children we are all raised having faith in the great myths and legends of our cultures. These were mine: 1.) America is the best country in the world, defender of justice and freedom, a people who would never start a war. 2.) Christianity is the faith of love and truth, the savior of the world. |
Growing up and finding the truth can be difficult and painful. The Viet Nam war showed me the folly of myth number one. I can thank Bertrand Russell for teaching me the naiveté of myth number two. |
"We may define 'faith' as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence," explained Russell. "When there is evidence, no one speaks of 'faith.' We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the world is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence." |
And of course the emotion used to keep us all from thinking for ourselves is always the same: fear. Nationalism tells us to trust and obey the government or else the evil enemy will get us. Christianity and Islam each command us to believe and to obey them or else we will burn in Hell forever. |
Fear tends to paralyze thought. With enough fear, people will sacrifice all freedom of thought for the perceived security of faith. |
Most religions even warn us that thinking is dangerous. The Old Testament tells us that we are all cursed because our ancestors ate from the Tree of Knowledge. The Koran tells us that "there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet." Jesus said that he was "the way, the truth, and the life, and no man cometh unto the Father but by me." |
In other words, have faith or else. Clearly these ideologies care everything about intimidation and nothing about truth. |
"Faith" is nothing more than thought control. Blind faith is legalized slavery. Faith tells us never to question the evidence for truth. But should we care about the truth? Absolutely! Because if we don't know what reality is, how can we ever expect to know how to deal with reality? |
To find the truth we simply need to think for ourselves and examine the evidence. Evidence is everything. |
All the world's evidence tells us that whoever wrote the Bible and whoever wrote the Koran knew absolutely nothing about geography, geology, astronomy, biology, or evolution. They thought their world was flat! They shared the profound ignorance of their time, and yet we are told to have "faith" that these primitive people knew more than we do. Only blind faith could swallow such a yarn. |
"To thine own self be true," said William Shakespeare," and thou cannot then be false to any other man." Any truth will be supported by evidence. Think about it. And don't let other people do your thinking for you! |
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