Chapman Cohen Quotes

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

You can’t be a rational person six days a week and on one day of the week, go to a building, and think you are drinking the blood of a two thousand year old space god. That doesn’t make you a person of faith…, that makes you a schizophrenic.

Most people wish to be consoled, confirmed. They want their prejudices reinforced and their structured belief systems validated. After all, it hurts to think, and it's absolute agony to think twice.

Nothing pains some people more than having to think

The question isn't 'Do we worship?' The question is 'Who (or what) do we worship?'

George Bush says he speaks to god every day, & Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.

Most people don't like to think. This is why human religions are so popular. It almost doesn't matter what the belief system is, as long as it's firm, consistent, clear in its expectation of the follower, and rigid. Given those characteristics, you can find people who believe in almost anything. It's God's way, they say. God's word. And there are those who will accept that. Gladly. Because, you see, it eliminates the need to think.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

Faith itself is a horrible mechanism that stunts the growth of ideas. It also stunts the act of questioning, and it does this by pushing the idea that you have to have faith - and that nothing has to be proven.

Honest investigation is utterly impossible within the pale of any church, for the reason, that if you think the church is right you will not investigate, and if you think it wrong, the church will investigate you.

You can always get someone to do your thinking for you.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

Went to church and fasted all day.

Worship is the act of the abandoned heart adoring its God

Whoever truly worships the gods loves their priests.

Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about.

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion.

Worship is an inward feeling and outward action that reflects the worth of God.

Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

When going to the temple to adore Divinity neither say nor do any thing in the interim pertaining to the common affairs of life.