Friday, March 28, 2008

Quote of the Week

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

- George Bernard Shaw

2 comments:

Kelvin Oliver said...

This is a very interesting quote. I do have to agree that someone who is a believer will be happy rather than a person who is confused and really don't understahdn. Someone who is not drunk may be just the normal type of person whereas a drunk person is happy to be drinking his or her problems away.

Stephen J. Gallagher said...

I love this one. Having enjoyed more than my share of interludes of happy intoxication in my life, the analogy seems apt. :-) As humans sober up from humanity's drunken frat-house youth (those eons when we worshipped gods), the hangover is going to hurt like heck. Europe's already worked through the hangover (the entire long, horrible history of 20th-century Europe is really just a hangover from the death of God), and now Europe is clean, sober and secular. For America, the news of the death of God is, as Nietzsche described it, "still on the way.