Talk:Benjamin Fish Austin

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On Religion and Spiritualism

• By disclosing the true nature of death as a transition to a higher-state, a change as natural and as blessed as birth, by showing that it is not a penalty, a judgement, an arbitrary sentence, but a resurrection and an ascension, in every sense a gain, Spiritualism has removed forever the sorrow and gloom and torment that humanity suffered through the false church teachings concerning death
  • (1902)

• The first great act that Spiritualism will do for Society will be a practical recognition of the claims of human brotherhood…it will recognise the equal rights and claims of all men on nature's bounty. They (the bounties) are not for the few but for the many and society must be reconstituted, reorganised, and regenerated

• Man is a child of God and there are no limits to man's power any more than there are to God's. Man's life is an ascending scale of eternal progression

• Religion is the soul's cry for the divine, the ever-longing, ever-seeking, ever-aspiring and perpetual quest after its eternal source divine. The best expression of religion is love- not some vague emotion toward a personal god- but love felt, cultivated and exemplified towards one's fellowman

• Look after yourself and your brother men, the gods will look after themselves

• We are all of us, as well as all things animate and inanimate, enveloped surrounded by a very complex yet subtle emanation which, to the clairvoyant eye indicate(s) our constitution, our passions, our ideas

• Out of the bondage of man-made creeds
  Into the practice of loving deeds

• We know as well as history can teach us that all religions are one and the same- all the outgrowth of man's moral nature, differing only according to the intelligence and advancement of the people among whom they originated

On Education

• French in the schools is a barrier to the advance of Anglo-Saxon civilization
  • (1890)

• The school is the hope of the future…those schools which encourage free enquiry, emphasise the teachings of science, and blaze out new pathways of progress for the enquiring mind are among the world's greatest treasures.

• The most valuable lesson a public school teacher can give a scholar is to teach him intellectual independence, to think for himself and not to rely on another's opinions.