Jonathan MS Pearce > Quotes

“To mystics, the only path to salvation was to completely withdraw from all worldly affairs and completely devote yourself to prayer and austerity; therefore, the issue of government had no place in mystical thought. While mystics were able to challenge many aspects of jurist thinking, they never played in the political arena, and therefore they produced no coherent political philosophy of their own. The”
― Jonathan MS Pearce, Not Seeing God: Atheism in the 21st Century

“Bertrand Russell:   The expression “free thought” is often used as if it meant merely opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. But this is only a symptom of free thought, frequent, but invariable. “Free thought” means thinking freely—as freely, at least, as is possible for a human being. The person who is free in any respect is free from something; what is the free thinker free from? To be worthy of the name, he must be free of two things; the force of tradition, and the tyranny of his own passions. No one is completely free from either, but in the measure of a man’s emancipation he deserves to be called a free thinker. A man is not to be denied this title because he happens, on some point, to agree with the theologians of his country. An Arab who, starting from the first principles of human reason, is able to deduce that the Koran was not created, but existed eternally in heaven, may be counted as a free thinker, provided he is willing to listen to counter arguments and subject his ratiocination to critical scrutiny... What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.[4]”
― Jonathan M.S. Pearce, Beyond An Absence of Faith: Stories About the Loss of Faith and the Discovery of Self

“arguably shows that we individuals do not have free will because it appears that we can only act in one given way.”
― Jonathan MS Pearce, 30 Arguments against the Existence of "God", Heaven, Hell, Satan, and Divine Design

“To me, it is far nobler to create my own meaning derived from that around me, using my critical faculties, than to accept unquestioningly the meaning that a superdeity has enforced upon me. The same with beauty and the universe around us. There is something worth dwelling on in that notion that we don’t need for a god to cause and define that universe—that beauty, that spectacle—when we are appreciating it. Whether it be an incredibly complex yet symmetrical mathematical equation, a butterfly’s wings or the expansive Hubble space telescope pictures of nebulae and clouds of space dust and gases, there is much to marvel at in the universe. It’s even more marvelous that there is no painter at nature’s easel.”
― Jonathan MS Pearce, Filling The Void: A Selection Of Humanist And Atheist Poetry