This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Reminds me of the doctrine that some Christians have, where anybody who dies before a certain age automatically goes to heaven, while people above that age can go to hell. The question then becomes: why don't parents kill their children, thus saving them from the all-too-likely possibility of eternal torture?
(Fun fact: most people who believe in hell can be made very uncomfortable if you look at the unfortunate implications of what they believe.)
I once read about a radical Christian sect in the early modern era that would kidnap newborn children, baptise them, and immediately kill them. I'm quite annoyed that I can't seem to remember the source, and particularly whether it was a real or fictional sect.