A Quote by Michel Onfray
I persist in preferring philosophers to rabbis priests imams ayatollahs and mullahs. Rather than trust their theological hocus-pocus I prefer to draw on alternatives to the dominant philosophical historiography: the laughers materialists radicals cynics hedonists atheists sensualists voluptuaries. They know that there is only one world and that promotion of an afterlife deprives us of the enjoyment and benefit of the only one there is. A genuinely deadly sin.
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Nature is my temple; trees are my priests; birds, my rabbis; rains, my imams! Nature is my only true and eternal religion.
That phrase "hocus-pocus" started out as "hocus-pocus dominocus", and was, in the beginning, a mocking imitation of the holy incantations of the Catholic Church's Latin liturgy. So say the lexicologists.
The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.
The journey that 'In Praise of Slowness' has made since publication shows how far this message resonates. The book has been translated into more than 30 languages. It appears on reading lists from business schools to yoga retreats. Rabbis, priests and imams have quoted from it in their sermons.
I mumble hocus-pocus and the next thing you know, I’m a cat. (Ravyn) I suppose it’s a step up. The last guy I had in my house could only turn into a beer-drinking pig. (Susan)
Hocus was an old cunning attorney. The words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as "Hocus-pocus."
Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
Besides, I’m not looking to get saved. I’m only going with her because it’s what you do when you’re in a relationship. You know? You slide into the third pew from the front and sit there thinking about how desperate all these people are to feel like something loves them. They’ll believe all kinds of hocus-pocus. But your girlfriend likes it, and you like her, so you do it. It’s called compromise. The only way you’re going to get something to last in this world is to work at it.
The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.
I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute ... it may be the most important contribution that we can make.
I am a reformed Taoist, part-time Buddhist, Hindu, animist, pagan, Jewish mystic, and Christian. I always got along great with priests and rabbis and mullahs and gurus, even though I spend most of my life constructively criticizing them.
Hocus was an old cunning attorney. The words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as "Hocus-pocus." - John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, 1874. see Charles Macklin.
The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.
Religion's greatest "sin" lies in displacing human endeavor, thought, time, resources and efforts from this world, our only world, in order to exalt a highly unlikely, unknowable, unseeable, unprovable and unbelievable pretend afterworld. The only afterlife that ought to concern us is leaving our descendants (along with the other animals and life we share our planet with) a secure and pleasant future.
I think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any special expertise. After all, all people - not just philosophers - have attitudes and points of view on various philosophical questions, and they rather resent being told that there are professionals who can think about these things better.
The only deadly sin I know is cynicism.
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