There’s no Hell mentioned in the Old Testament. The punishment of the dead is not specified there. It’s only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that the idea of eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced.
There is an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ.
Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.
I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language – always the language – was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.
Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.
You can’t have occupation and human rights.
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.
There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn’t be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.
The reading public isn’t born that doesn’t think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister.
It’s a big mistake to think that your own cause, or your own country, or your own side has God in its corner. For one thing, it commits the sin of pride.
I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.
Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth.
One can’t indefinitely do for somebody what he is reluctant to do for himself.
Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form.
The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.
As is so often the case with pieces that appear in the Onion, I honestly could not decide whether this was a clever hoax or not – the arguments were almost exactly as stupid as the real thing.
Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.
Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil.
In particular, it is absurd to hope to banish envy of other people’s possessions or fortunes, if only because the spirit of envy can lead to emulation and ambition and have positive consequences.
As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist.