Too easy Quote by Walter Kaufmann

““Not all deceptions are palatable. Untruths are too easy to come by, too quickly exploded, too cheap and ephemeral to give lasting comfort. Mundus vult decipi, but there is a hierarchy of deceptions. Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat. On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish. Near the top of the ladder we encounter curious mixtures of untruth and truth that exert a lasting fascination on the intellectual community.””

Walter Kaufmann

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Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired…

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It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much…

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The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems,…

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“One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. Experiences and aspirations of which intimations may be found in Plato, Nietzsche, and Spinoza have found their most evocative expression…

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In all three cases, and for most human beings, the problem of suffering poses no difficult problem at all: one has a world picture…

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The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that.…

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The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism.

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Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than…

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“Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a…

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Let people who do not know what to do with themselves in this life, but fritter away their time reading magazines and watching television, hope for eternal life... The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There…

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