It has been said as a rule that those selling the advice often profit more than those buying the advice. This can be applied to financial advisers but all you have to do is go to the televangelist church parking lots and see the preachers expensive cars versus the flocks vehicles. The poor giving to the rich for misleading advice is part of society. When it comes to prosperity tv preachers, get rich schemes and books, or those in positions of self proclaimed authority this is often the case and it is why the shield of skepticism and doubt combined with the sword of reason and free inquiry are the weapons to fight off this lazy numb servitude to the superfluous and sophomoric pushers of false status. Who benefits? The saying goes, “it all depends on whose ox is being gored.”

The advice of authority or those who claim authority usually benefits those in authority. Obey my law, pay me, give me, trust me, and somehow all this servitude will benefit you. The divine right of kings, the pope is always right, the teacher never makes mistakes and other platitudes based on titles are empty without the respect of reason and common sense. The shield of skepticism is of more value than the shield of faith because one gives you the protection against charlatans, con artists, demagogues and authoritarians of all stripes and the other makes you more likely to become a victim of the former and succumb to these vultures who feast on the naive and the gullible. In a world such as ours skepticism is a virtue and faith is a vice.

While Diogenes was relaxing in the sunlight in the morning, Alexander, thrilled to meet the famous philosopher, asked if there was any favour he might do for him. Diogenes replied, "Yes, stand out of my sunlight". Alexander then declared, "If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes."

When Plato is asked what sort of man Diogenes is, he responds, “A Socrates gone mad”
He is labeled mad for acting against convention, but Diogenes points out that it is the conventions which lack reason.
Diogenes is a harsh critic of Plato, regularly disparaging Plato’s metaphysical pursuits and thereby signaling a clear break from primarily theoretical ethics.

One guiding principle is that if an act is not shameful in private, that same act is not made shameful by being performed in public. For example, it was contrary to Athenian convention to eat in the marketplace, and yet there he would eat for, as he explained when reproached, it was in the marketplace that he felt hungry. The most scandalous of these sorts of activities involves his indecent behavior in the marketplace (masturbation), to which he responded “he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 46).

Diogenes is clearly contentious, but he is so for the sake of promoting reason and virtue. In the end, for a human to be in accord with nature is to be rational, for it is in the nature of a human being to act in accord with reason. Diogenes has trouble finding such humans, and expresses his sentiments regarding his difficulty theatrically. Diogenes is reported to have “lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, ‘I am searching for a human being’” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 41).

As a homeless and penniless exile, Diogenes experienced the greatest misfortunes of which the tragedians write, and yet he insisted that he lived the good life: “He claimed that to fortune he could oppose courage, to convention nature, to passion reason”

"Man is the most intelligent of animals -- and the most silly."
“When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man”

“Diogenes, when asked from what country he came, replied, "I am a citizen of the world”

"Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?"

Diogenes


Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"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."

Thomas Jefferson-To his nephew he writes as follows regarding the Bible:

"Read the Bible as you would Livy or Tacitus. For example, in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still for several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of their statues, beasts, etc. But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine, therefore, candidly, what evidence there is of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions believe it. On the other hand, you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature" (Works, Vol. ii., p. 217).

In a letter to John Adams, written August 22, 1813, Jefferson says:

"It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticism that three are one and one is three, and yet, that the one is not three, and the three are not one.... But this constitutes the craft, the power, and profits of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of fictitious religion, and they would catch no more flies" (Ibid, p. 205).

Writing to John Adams a year later -- July 5, 1814 -- he again refers to this subject:

"The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticisms of Plato materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence"
Three years before his death he writes John Adams: "His [Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever man worshiped a false God, he did. The being described in his five points is ... a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin" (Works, Vol. iv., p. 363).

 I TOO AM AN EPICUREAN. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.

Monticello, October 31, 1819


"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites."

"You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel."  - Jesus according to Matthew 23:24

When one thinks of Creationism and the Christian apologists this verse from Matthew describes their operation of obfuscation. Such skepticism of everything scientific and yet they swallow the camel of dogmatic sacred scripture! If one thinks the scientific theory of evolution is problematic how can they then swallow the inconsistent and yet infallible book of the Bible? This is intellectual dishonesty and inconsistency.

This argument from Christian apologists who say that there needs to be a higher degree of biblical scholarship before commenting and yet most of the Christian beliefs they defend are believed by people who have no such scholarship. IF more Christians studied the Bible at a higher level I think there would be more doubt and less fundamentalism. Is this what christian apologists want? More likely they use it to bully people into silence and obfuscation.

"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep."
-Nietzsche