The first step to being a good thinker is to understand what the hell you are saying when you start the thread. The people of Texas are against Critical (marxist) Theory... not thinking.
ironically this has been a thread about Free Thinker misunderstanding Critical Thinking.
"Critical Theory"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
Critical theory is a school of thought that stresses the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism. This has led to the very literal use of 'critical theory' as an umbrella term to describe any theory founded upon critique. According to critical theorist Max Horkheimer a theory is critical in so far as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them" (Horkheimer 1982, 244).
In a narrow sense, critical theory refers to a style of neo-Marxist philosophy of the "Frankfurt School", developed in Europe in the 1930s with a tendency to engage with the work of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.[1] Modern critical theory arose from a trajectory extending from the antipositivist sociology of Max Weber and Georg Simmel, the Marxist theory of Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, toward the milieu associated with Frankfurt Institute of Social Research.
Five "Frankfurt School" theorists were chiefly responsible for establishing critical theory as a specific strand of thought: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and, slightly later, Jürgen Habermas. With the latter, critical theory shed its roots in German idealism and moved closer to American pragmatism. The concern for a social "base and superstructure" is one of the few remaining Marxist concepts in much contemporary critical theory.[2]
Whilst the critical theorists are usually defined as Marxist intellectuals[who?], their tendency to denounce so many Marxian elements has been attacked as 'revisionism' by stricter Marxists. Martin Jay suggests that the first generation of critical theory is best understood not as promoting any specific philosophical agenda or ideology, but rather as "a gadfly of other systems."[3]
Quote from Free Thinker:
well, this is a thread about critical thinking. the stuff you pointed out should come into the analysis of a critical thinker trying to decide if the bible is god inspired.
Critical thinking is thinking that questions assumptions. It is a way of deciding whether a claim is always true, sometimes true, partly true, or false.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking