The Necessity of Atheism

The Necessity of Atheism
By DR. D. M. BROOKS
FREETHOUGHT PRESS ASSOCIATION NEW YORK
1933 BY FREETHOUGHT PRESS ASSOCIATION
(From Free Books)

Freethought has dethroned the gods from the pedestal, and has replaced, not an empty idol, but an ideal, the ideal of a man who is his own god.

It was Spinoza who remarked that, "The proper study of a wise man is not how to die but how to live." Religious creeds can but teach how man should live, so that when he dies, he may be assured of salvation; and the important thing is not what he does to help his fellow men while he is living, but how closely he lives in conformity to a reactionary code of dogmas.

Carlos Casaneda

A man, any man, deserves everything that is a man's lot--joy, pain, sadness and struggle. The nature of his acts is unimportant as long as he acts as a warrior. Since death is going to overtake us regardless of anything. To seek the perfection of the warrior's spirit is the only task worthy of our temporariness, and our manhood.

其实，一个人干什么并不重要，生活的方式有千万种，好与不好只是相对而言。酸甜苦辣是一定的。 重要的是，他是不是以一个勇士的身份出现，敢不敢于面对生活的挑战，他是不是在驾驭生活，还是被生活所驾驭。如果一个人缺乏精神的话，不管他其它方面多么富有，他的生活都不会稳定。

John Muir

We all flow from one source-soul. - John Muir

What we dread the most

From Father Brown Crime Stories
Page vii: What we dread most, is a maze with no center. We ourselves are the most unknowable labyrinths. We hide ourselves as though we were "scene shifters"; we build our houses, dress our bodies, speak our speeches to conceal our real natures, but in the act of hiding, we are revealed.

To Be Understood

Emerson: "to be great is to be misunderstood."

Truth Is Made

William James of Pragmatism: "Truth is not a stagnant property. Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are make, in the course of experience."

What Is College For?

What the college was, or should be -what Meiklejohn hoped to make Amherst into - was a place to be thought of as "liberal," that is, "essentially intellectual": "The college is primarily not a place of the body, nor of the feelings, nor even of the will; it is, first of all, a place of the mind." Introducing "the boys" to the intellectual life led for its own sake, would save them from pettiness and dullness.

There are those among us who will find so much satisfaction in the countless trivial and vulgar amusements of a crude people that they have no time for the joys of the mind. There are those who are so closely shut up within a little round of petty pleasures they that have never dreamed of the fun of reading and conversing and investigating and reflecting.

A liberal education would rescue boys from stupidity, its purpose being to draw from that "reality-loving American boy" something like "an intellectual enthusiasm." But this result could not be achieved, Meiklejohn added, without a thorough reversal of the curriculum: "I should like to see every freshman at once plunged into the problems of philosophy," he said with enthusiasm.