The Logical Atheist

The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us. -- H. L. Mencken

True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them.... They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm their enemy. -- H. L. Mencken

Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World's contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.  True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his child...

What reality is is the one and only system of necessary connections. That is the causa sui , the thing that explains itself, outside of which nothing can be conceived. It is logic itself, not its rules but its applications -- and the vast and infinite system of logical entailments that are not merely abstract, as we usually conceive of them, but rather coated with the substance of being..... Outside of this infinite system of necessary connections there can be . . . nothing. This infinite system composes the the entire explanatory nexus, and were there to be anything outside of it, that something would be ipso facto inexplicable. And there can be nothing inexplicable in the universe -- this is the beating heart of Spinoza's rationalism -- no arbitrary elements that are simply there for no reason at all. The denial of a thing's explicability is tantamount to the denial of that thing's reality. To be is to be explicable. --Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Je...

I heartily recommend Robert Tracinski's "Why I Don't 'Believe' in 'Science.'" Please don't think you know what you'll find in it. Tracinski says things that are worth saying and digesting. Pertinent quote: Some people may use “I believe in science” as vague shorthand for confidence in the ability of the scientific method to achieve valid results, or maybe for the view that the universe is governed by natural laws which are discoverable through observation and reasoning. But the way most people use it today—especially in a political context—is pretty much the opposite. They use it as a way of declaring belief in a proposition which is outside their knowledge and which they do not understand. There are a lot of people these days who like things that sound science-y, but have little patience for actual science. These are the kind of people who gush when Elon Musk tells them he’s going to put a million people on Mars but seem less excited about di...

Many philosophers, including St Thomas, have held that the voice of individual conscience is   the voice of God speaking to the individual, whether he is a believer or not. This would resolve the alleged conflict [between obeying God and exercising  moral autonomy] because in following one's conscience one would at the same time be discharging his obligations as a worshiper to obey God. However, this manoeuvre is unsatisfying, since if taken seriously it would lead to the conclusion that, in speaking to us through our 'consciences', God is merely tricking us: for he is giving us the illusion of self-governance while all the time he is manipulating our thoughts from without. Moreover, in acting from conscience we are acting under the view that our actions are right and not merely that they are decreed by a higher power. Plato's argument in the  Euthyphro  can be adapted to this point: If in speaking to us through the voice of conscience, God is informing us of what is...

What we have, then, is a conflict between the role of a worshiper, which by its very nature commits one to total subservience to God, and the role of moral agent, which necessarily involves autonomous decision-making. The point is that the role of worshiper takes precedence over every other role which the worshiper has -- when there is any conflict, the worshiper's commitment to God has priority over any other commitments which he might have. But the first commitment of a moral agent is to do what in his own heart he thinks right. Thus the following argument might be constructed: (a) If any being is God, he must be a fitting object of worship. (b) No being could possibly be a fitting object of worship, since worship requires the abandonment of one's role as an autonomous moral agent. (c) Therefore, there cannot be any being who is God. --James Rachels, "God and Human Attitudes"