Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self.
I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.
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.
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.
An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse – and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.
The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.
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?
What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.
Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.
The fact that one can lose one’s sense of self in an ocean of tranquility does not mean that one’s consciousness is immaterial or that it presided over the birth of the universe.
The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.
The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.
There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can compete successfully with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to.
Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.
You are using your own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible – and then, in the next moment, you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in the world.
Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I’m simply worried.
The second commandment is “Thou shall not construct any graven images.” Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity?
Words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal’ or they will unmake our world.