You want to prepare your child to think as he gets older. You want him to be critical in his judgments. Teaching a child, by your ...example, that there's never any room for negotiating or making choices in life may suggest that you expect blind obedience--but it won't help him in the long run to be discriminating in choices and thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest.... It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas ...destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Compliant children are very easily led when they are young, because they thrive on approval and pleasing adults. They are just as ...easily led in their teen years, because they still seek the same two things: approval and the pleasing their peers. Strong-willed children are never easily led by anybody--not by you, but also not by their peers. So celebrate your child's strength of will throughout the early years...and know that the independent thinking you are fostering will serve him well in the critical years to come.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reincarnation and resurrection have some things in common as ways of thinking. Both are affirmations that death is not decisive. B...oth presuppose a life, a Godward life-energy which, as the Bhagavad Gita puts it, "does not die when the body dies." Both address the mystery of that ongoing, irrepressible life that cannot be done in by death. But there are critical differences as well. Reincarnation is not what I as a Christian mean by resur rection. Reincarnation has to do with a wide understanding of life, one that includes both birth and death. Resurrection has to do with the meaning of life itself, no matter how long its trajectory might be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most young black females learn to be suspicious and critical of feminist thinking long before they have any clear understanding of... its theory and politics.... Without rigorously engaging feminist thought, they insist that racial separatism works best. This attitude is dangerous. It not only erases the reality of common female experience as a basis for academic study; it also constructs a framework in which differences cannot be examined comparatively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescents' immature thinking makes it difficult for them to process the divorce. They tend to see things in black-and-white term...s and have trouble putting events into perspective. They are absolute in their judgments and expect perfection in parents. They are likely to be self-conscious about their parent's failures and critical of their every move. They have the expectations that parents will keep them safe and happy and are shocked by the broken covenant. Adolescents are unforgiving.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Theology starts with dogmas, philosophy begins with problems. Philosophy sees the problem first, theology has the answer in advanc...e. We must not, however, disregard another important difference. Not only are the problems of philosophy not identical with the problems of religion; their status is not the same. Philosophy is, in a sense, a kind of thinking that has a beginning but no end. In it, the awareness of the problem outlives all solutions. Its answers are questions in disguise; every new answer giving rise to new questions. In religion, on the other hand, the mystery of the answer hovers over all questions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover,... serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »