October 31

Nothing obstructs the spread of truth as much as stubborn adherence to time-honored traditions.

1

It is said that God created man in his own image. This likely means that it is man who created God in his own image.

— Lichtenberg

2

In this tendency to accept what we find, to believe what we are told, is at once good and evil. It is this which makes social advance possible; it is this which makes it so slow and painful. Each generation thus obtains without effort the hard-won knowledge bequeathed to it; it is thus, also, enslaved by errors and perversions which it in the same way receives.

— Henry George

3

Humankind is progressing slowly but constantly towards an ever greater understanding of the truth about the meaning and purpose of its life and towards establishing a way of life that is consistent with this greater understanding. And that is why people’s understanding of their lives and human life itself are always changing. Those who are more sensitive to truth understand life according to the highest light that they can see, and they organize their life according to that light, while those who are less sensitive stick to a former understanding and way of life and try to defend it.

Thus it is always the case in the world that alongside the people showing us the most advanced expression of truth and trying to live according to this expression there are people who are trying to defend the former, obsolete and no longer useful understanding of truth and former ways of life.

4

Of all the deceptions of faith, the cruelest is the teaching of false faith to children. It consists in the fact that in reply to a child asking his elders, who had lived before him and had a chance to assimilate the wisdom of their ancestors, about the meaning of the world and his life and the relationship between the one and the other, the elders reply not what they themselves think, but what people who had lived thousands of years ago thought and what the majority of people no longer believe and cannot believe. Instead of the spiritual life he needs, of which the child is asking, he is given a poison ruinous to his health, whose damage can only be healed by means of the greatest effort and suffering.

Disregard for tradition has not caused one-thousandth of the harm caused by a respect for customs, laws and institutions that no longer have any rational justification in our time.