Thursday 5 May 2011

Lovely quote about bigotry and intolerance




Just a quick blog here. I saw this quote today and felt I wanted to share it, thanks to Peter Smith for bringing it to my attention!


As a certain group of well known skeptics and journalists are doing a 'tour' at the minute I thought this was particularly relevant.








I have never known a clergyman or a professor who could be more narrow, bigoted, and intolerant than some scientists, or pseudo-scientists… Intolerance is a closed mind. Bigotry is an exaltation of authorities. Narrowness is ignorance unwilling to be taught. And one of the outstanding truths I have learned in my University (of Nature) is that the moment you reach a final conclusion on anything, set that conclusion up as a fact to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away, and refuse to listen to any new evidence, you have reached an intellectual dead-centre, and nothing will start the engine again short of a charge of dynamite… Ossified knowledge is a dead-weight to the world, and it does not matter in what realm of man’s intellectual activities it is found… Any obstinate clinging to outworn doctrines, whether of religion or politics or morality or of science, are equally damning and equally damnable.

- Luther Burbank
Quoted from page 21 of The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in Direct Perception of Nature by Stephen Harrod Buhner ISBN-13: 978-978-159143035-3 or ISBN-10: 159143035-6 Bear & Company, Rochester, Vermont


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Jo Rhodes is a participant in the Amazon Europe S.à r.l. Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk.