Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans, we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.
Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward.
Barbarism,” wrote Alain Finkielkraut not long ago, “is not the inheritance of our prehistory. It is the companion that dogs our every step.” In.
If you don’t state a clear preference, then your drink is like a bad game of poker or a hasty drug transaction: It is whatever the dealer says it is. Please do try to bear this in mind.
From a plurality of prime movers, the monotheists have bargained it down to a single one. They are getting ever nearer to the true, round figure.
The argument about ethics and morality will have to go on in a post-religious society, just as it had to go on when religion was regnant and was often ordering good people to agree to evil things such as torture, slavery, or cruelty to children.
Imponderable Sir, I presume from some if not all of your many reputations that you might prefer honest and convinced unbelief to the hypocritical and self-interested affectation of faith or the smoking tributes of bloody altars.
In our world, surely the worst thing anyone can say is; ‘No further inquiry is needed. You’ve already got all you need to know.’ It is the most sinister and dangerous thing.
The pluralism of religion is attributable to the fact that man created God and not the other way around. If you accept the posture that man makes gods, there is no mystery in the proliferation of gods and religions that has always existed in human society. If.
As Edward Gibbon observed about the modes of worship prevalent in the Roman world, they were “considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful.
The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident, and vain.
And in these four things, opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion; which by reason of the different fancies, judgments, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.
Inthe first half of the century, British intelligence was principally a machine for involving the United States in war on the British side.
I’m reminded of the lady governor of Texas who, during a controversy about bilingualism in the State House in Austin, said if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it was plenty good enough for her.
You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.
Society and government may be quite distinct concepts but the study of history makes it very difficult to determine that there ever was a society without a government, let alone vice versa.
One feels almost laughably heavy-footed in pointing out that Mrs. Clinton’s prim little book, It Takes a Village, proposes sexual abstinence for the young, and that the president was earnestly seconding this very proposal while using an impressionable intern as the physical rather than moral equivalent of a blow-up doll.
Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the religious impulse, in The Future of an Illusion, as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish-thinking.
For some reason, many religions force themselves to think of the birth canal as a one-way street, and even the Koran treats the Virgin Mary with reverence.