Robert A. Heinlein Intellectual Quotations

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.

A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.

Faith is intellectual laziness.

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness.

If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship.

But I contend that the disgusting behavior of many of their alleged 'holy men' relieves us of any intellectual obligation to take the stuff seriously. No amount of sanctimonious rationalization can make such behavior anything but pathological.