“Faith” designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance
induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof.
Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little.
Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you
know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to
the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority.
Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give
you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not
make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths
accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but
the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit
destroying the mind.
Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.
Faith and force . . . are corollaries: every period of history dominated
by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.