More thinking is required, and we should all exercise our God-given right to think and be unafraid to express our opinions, with proper respect for those to whom we talk and proper acknowledgment of our own shortcomings. We must preserve freedom of the mind in the church and resist all efforts to suppress it. The church is not so much concerned with whether the thoughts of its members are orthodox or heterodox as it is that they shall have thoughts.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of free thought and respectful expression of opinions within the church.
Hugh B. Brown advocates for the exercise of one's right to think independently and express opinions openly, stressing the importance of respecting others and acknowledging one's own limitations. He argues that the church should prioritize allowing its members to have diverse thoughts instead of enforcing strict orthodoxy, thereby championing the freedom of thought as fundamental to spiritual and intellectual growth.
In practice
During a church meeting discussing community values.
Sometimes during solitude I hear truth spoken with clarity and freshness; uncolored and untranslated it speaks from within myself in a language original but inarticulate, heard only with the soul, and I realize I brought it with me, was never taught it nor can I efficiently teach it to another.
Seek the truth in all fields, and in that search you will need at least three virtues: courage, zest and modesty. The ancients put that thought in the form of a prayer. They said, “From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, from the laziness that is content with half truth, from the arrogance that thinks it has all truth – O God of truth, deliver us.
Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.
Suffering can make saints of people as they learn patience, long-suffering and self-mastery.
As you travel through the Middle East what keeps on striking home to me is how similar everyone is, and yet the degree to which we can find differences to fight wars over. It requires a great deal of empathy, I think, between various sides to overcome this history and live in peace.
Man as Atman is really free; as man he is bound, changed by every physical condition.
The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.
The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.
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