Paul Vitz Quotes

“Are public school textbooks biased? Are they censored? The answer to both is yes. And the nature of the bias is clear: Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been reliably excluded from children's textbooks.”

“It indicates where the problem lies for Descartes. It lies in other people.”

“Religious concepts and vocabulary are certainly censored in school textbooks.”

“School textbooks have almost completely excised any reference to America's true religious heritage.”

“Besides abuse, rejection, or cowardice, one way in which a father can be seriously defective is simply by not being there.”

“Many children, of course, interpret death of their father as a kind of betrayal or an act of desertion. In this respect it is remarkable that the pattern of a dead father is so common in the lives of many prominent atheists. Baron d’Holbach, the French rationalist and probably the first public atheist, is apparently an orphan by the age of 13 and living with his uncle. Bertrand Russell’s father died when young Bertrand was 4-years-old; Nietzsche was the same age as Russell when he lost his father; Sartre’s father died before Sartre was born and Camus was a year old when he lost his father… the information already available is substantial; it is unlikely to be an accident.”

“Freud introduced the unconscious, which in effect dethroned man as the uncontested master of his own rational faculties. Instead, our lives and our decisions, our loves and our hates, are more often the result of forces working elsewhere than in our conscious mind, and we are the dupes of those forces, rather than their master. Indeed, thinking, as Descartes conceived it, accounts for considerably less than half the story of our being in the world.”

“The man who would have no imitators had legions of them, each infected with the mimetic dilemma that Rousseau personified: how to get others to notice how disinterested one is in whether they notice or not.”

“The single greatest cultural contribution of postmodernity is that it eliminates the presumption of intellectual neutrality that modernity automatically associated with skeptical rationalism. It shows, not that truth is socially constructed, but that the uniquely human act of bearing witness to the truth is always a moral as well as an intellectual or empirical or noetic act.”