Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.
In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.
Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers?
Habitual identification with discursive thought is the source of human suffering
Our habitual failure to recognise thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought, is the primary source of human suffering.
I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.
Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.
The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.
[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.
Faith is like a pickpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.
Faith is like a pockpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I’m simply worried.
The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.
We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.
When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don’t believe as you do.
Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.
120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.
You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
Becoming a part of a movement doesn’t help anybody think clearly.
Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.
It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can’t make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.
To point out nonepistemic motives in another’s view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person’s connection to the world as it is.
Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.
That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I’m as confused as anyone else.
The only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society.
If there is any kernel of truth in the religions we so deplore,and they are just a carnival of errors,the truth is that it’s possible to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to cease to have a problem.
Ideas matter—and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.
We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.
As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?
People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis.
Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.
By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.
Christians…..expend more “moral” energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide.
There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
In Islam, it is the “moderate” who is left to split hairs,because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, sub-jugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.
You don’t choose to choose what you choose in life!
How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.
What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?
The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross.
Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.
False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
Muslim moderates, wherever they are, must be given every tool necessary to win a war of ideas with their co-religionists. Otherwise, we will have to win some very terrible wars in the future.
Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.
I don’t think there’s an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there’s no way to get around that.
Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable).
My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That’s not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It’s anything but that.
The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.
Religion has convinced us that there’s something else entirely other than concerns about suffering. There’s concerns about what God wants, there’s concerns about what’s going to happen in the afterlife.
It’s simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.
We’re right to say that a culture that can’t tolerate free speech is… there are a wide range of positive human experiences that are not available in that culture. And we’re right to want those experiences.
Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.
One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.