Excluding certain ideas and thoughts, calling them hate speech, is an important piece in the progressive movement’s puzzle. If you can’t win an argument logically, demonize your opponent, make him out to be a bad person and all of a sudden the ideas he stands for become bad as well.
Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them.
Cursed luck! —said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, —for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, —and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.
She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is offensive.
He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
Billions of years ago God was creating universes and life; thousands of years ago he was creating angry floods, sin-saving human sacrifices and audible burning bushes. Today he occasionally appears on a piece of toast. To state that God has become reclusive over the years would be an overwhelming understatement.
Are we not all one flesh? One mind? A sword brings power. Knowledge brings coin. With either, one can make blood reckoned, can earn names. The only thing that differs between a noble man and a working man is that they have now, while the other does not have it yet. Such things can be taken. They are always taken.
Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.
When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then... what?
Elohim was, in logical terminology, the genus of which ghosts, Chemosh, Dagon, Baal, and Jahveh were species. The Israelite believed Jahveh to be immeasurably superior to all other kinds of Elohim. The inscription on the Moabite stone shows that King Mesa held Chemosh to be, as unquestionably, the superior of Jahveh.
This may seem labouring the obvious, but in Japan one meets intelligent people who claim that ‘logic’ is something invented in the West to allow Westerners to win discussions. Indeed, the belief is widespread that the Japanese can as happily do without logic now as they supposedly have for centuries past.
Religion, like science, is only noteworthy when it emphasizes a matter of what is true rather than whose belief is greater or lesser or which deity works for whom. Sincere religion and tested science are similar in that their assertions can be argued logically and objectively; otherwise, we get false cults and babble.
Comparison is the most abused intellectual tool of all. We compare men and women, man and God, good and bad, equal and unequal, forgetting that this sin only results in a punishment so severe that we can't even trace it back to its origins. All we're left with in the end is ambiguity, uncertainty, lethargy and and Kafka!
Religion is a subject which, if the believers used the same "reasoning" to address problems at work as they use to defend their beliefs, they'd soon find themselves unemployed. And if they found their child applying that kind of "reasoning" on a homework assignment they'd wonder what the hell was the wrong with their child.
