Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.
It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.
People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.
We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.
Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
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.