September 2021 Touchstones Readings From the Common Bowl

September 2021 Touchstones Ministry Theme: Reason

September 1: “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” ~ Margaret Mead

September 2: “You must never feel badly about making mistakes … as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.” ~ Norton Juster

September 3: “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” ~ Gilles Deleuze

September 4: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” ~ Galileo Galilei

September 5: “To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” ~ Thomas Paine

September 6: “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.” ~ Immanuel Kant

September 7: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.” ~ Blaise Pascal

September 8: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” ~ Gautama Buddha

September 9: “Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” ~ George Gordon Byron

September 10: “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

September 11: “How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.” ~ Jane Austen

September 12: “There’s nothing more annoying than cold logic and reason when you’ve got a good fit going.” ~ James Patterson

September 13: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” ~ Albert Einstein

September 14: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” ~ Immanuel Kant

September 15: “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” ~ Galileo Galilei

September 16: “You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.” ~ Ben Goldacre

September 17: “I hope you weren’t looking to me to be the voice of reason. I keep to a strict diet of ill-advised enthusiasm and heartfelt regret.” ~ Leigh Bardugo

September 18: “It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them—and then they leap.” ~ Yann Martel

September 19: “One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.” ~ Thomas Paine

September 20: “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” ~ Albert Camus

September 21: “Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it.” ~ Ayn Rand

September 22: “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.” ~ Immanuel Kant

September 23: “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” ~ Jonathan Swift

September 24: “The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.” ~ Voltaire

September 25: “Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.” ~ Andrew Solomon

September 26: “I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!” ~ J.K. Rowling

September 27: “If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?” ~ Sam Harris

September 28: “Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which it soars to the truth.” ~ Pope John Paul II

September 29: “Human reason can excuse any evil; that is why it’s so important that we don’t rely on it.” ~ Veronica Roth

September 30: “All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.” ~ Aristotle

Bonus Day: “Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons for why they are.” ~ Jonathan Safran Foer