Raising Freethinkers Quotes

“Just remember, education (providing leadership for your kids as they learn life skills) is different from indoctrination (pouring ideas into their heads without inviting critical examination).”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“Organizations and nations are historically much more likely to prosper if they welcome dissent and promote openness.”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“Skepticism—the simple request for reasoning or evidence before accepting a proposition—is a virtue to treasure and cultivate in our kids. But cynicism is something quite different. A cynical position makes negative assumptions as a matter of course, not as a result of the evidence, so a cynic is as uncritical as a dewy-eyed believer. One accepts without thinking; the other rejects without thinking. Both postures are obstacles to critical thinking, and both should be actively avoided.”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“each generation of adults has a choice to pass on traditions of violence and fear—or refuse to do so.”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“The highest ethical duty is often to discard the outmoded ethics of the past.” —Corliss Lamont, humanist philosopher”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“Children’s understanding of morality is the same whether they’re of one religion, another religion or no religion. But if it’s simply indoctrination, it’s worse than doing nothing. It interferes with moral development.” —Larry Nucci, director, Office for Studies in Moral Development, University of Illinois”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“the presence of that lone dissenter reduced the error rates of subjects by 75 percent. This is a crucial realization: If a group is embarking on an unfortunate course of action, a lone dissenter may turn it around by energizing ambivalent group members to join the dissent instead of following the crowd into error.”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“Doubt everything. Find your own light.” —Last words of Gautama Buddha, in Theravada tradition”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“Fear believes—courage doubts. Fear falls upon the earth and prays—courage stands erect and thinks. Fear is barbarism—courage is civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion, courage is science.”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“People in healthy relationships are generous with each other. They don't take cheap shots at each other and put each other down. People in healthy relationships care about their partners and take their needs and feelings seriously. The relationship that you model with your partner shows this generosity in relationships to your kids.”
― Amanda Metskas, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“It is impossible to parent from a place of genuine integrity if you pretend to have convictions you don't really have—or worse yet, pretend to have none at all.”
― Jan Devor, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“I feel too much respect for the idea of respect to grant it automatically to all ideas.”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy … every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world…. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives. And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith…. The science is sound…. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“The doctrine of hell exists solely to paralyze thought.”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“unquestioning obedience to “absolute” rules—turns out to be the single least productive thing we can do for our children’s moral development.”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

“principles of freethought is that no question is unaskable.”
― Dale McGowan, Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief