When a culture teaches its young that religious mythology is truth and that modern science is a conspiracy of lies then that culture will breed a generation of dogmatic stagnation not fluid exploration.

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."   George Orwell

"Telling a story is one of the most persuasive means of communication...How we persuade is how we deliver and tell our story to the jury. Storytelling is the most basic means of communication."
-Gerry Spence, renowned Trial Attorney

"I am against religion because
it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
"
-Richard Dawkins

Sir Martin Rees - "I think it would be a real cultural deprivation if everyone could not share the mystery and wonder of the cosmos that modern science reveals to us the emergence, from simple beginnings, of stars and planets, and the intricate evolution on Earth of life and intelligence."
 
 
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By the time children blunder into adulthood, other forces have come to assert their power against them. Mother Nature has stricken them with the ultimate disease—falling in love. Her weapon, the evil bitch, is chemical warfare. The hormone, a magic potion still not fully understood by science, strikes at the human brain, causing its victims to fall prey to the disease, to mate, and to thereby plunge into a new slavery from which they will likely never recover. The forces of the malady cause them to woo, to fight, to copulate, and to produce children. Now they must provide their offspring a nest and nourishment, and, in an utterly predictable progression, they must make certain bargains, which usually require them to sell themselves as a commodity at the slave market. Thereafter they make their bargains from year to year, from job to job, and the bargains ensnare them until they are rolled into their graves.

    We are creatures enslaved by our genes. We are, indeed, like salmon predictably fulfilling our genetic course. Mindlessly we swim with the school into the great seas and back up the river of our birth to spawn, to die, and to be eaten by the waiting grizzly on the bank. Such freedom as we experience is only that which we encounter within the genetic cage of our birth, within the confines of the mammalian creature that we are—confines from which we can never escape nor, ultimately, wish to escape. We were not born to become free. We were born to fall in love with Mary Jane or Billy Joe, to marry her or him, to parent those three little drippy-nosed rascals who will bedevil us until the day we gasp our last exhausted breath, and then, as true to the equation as dandelions going to seed and withering in the first frost, we, too, will complete this seemingly purposeless cycle established by the ultimate force, which some call God.

...For those who have been lulled into the sweet security of bondage, and exist contentedly within the walls of the zoo, for those who embrace myth and splash like happy babies in the bath of blissful conformity, the question naturally arises: Why should they who are content in their servitude be disturbed? Why make happy slaves miserable freemen?     But the destiny of the human race can never be fulfilled under the yoke.

 
 
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"I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief."

"Skepticism, not cleanliness, is next to godliness. Skepticism is the father of freedom. It is like the pry that holds open the door for truth to slip in."

Is it not time to arise from the grave? Is it not time to speak out, to cry out, to fly, to test wings, to fall, and to laugh with joy over the divine bruises?

—Gerry Spence
from Give Me Liberty, 1998

"We endure every manner of indignity and outrage, every agony and tedium, because we are afraid—afraid to throw off the traces and experience the naked terror that so dominates the idea of freedom. We kiss our shackles."

"Cages are cages whether constructed of steel and concrete or from the fabric of the mind."

"In his preface to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote of an army of managers who, without coercion, controlled a population of slaves who were perfectly manageable because they loved their servitude. "To make them love it," he wrote, "is the task assigned in present-day totalitarian states."

"The fence of time captures him. There is a time to sleep, a time to arise, a time to go to school, to eat, to play, and a time once more to go to bed. Never has the child been permitted to revolt against any of the enslaving forces that domesticate the human animal and convert him from the wild aborigine of his genes to the human machine that will eventually perform as predictably as a windup toy. "

"The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, “Are we free?” I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?"

"The most formidable chains are forged from beliefs. Ah, beliefs! Beliefs tear out the eyes and leave us blind and groping in the dark. If I believe in one proposition, I have become locked behind the door of that belief, and all other doors to learning and freedom, although standing open and waiting for me to enter, are now closed to me. If I believe in one God, one religion, yes, if I believe in God at all, if I have closed my mind to magic, to spirit, to salvation, to the unknown dimension that exist in the firmament, I have plunged my mind into slavery. Test all beliefs. Distrust all beliefs."