It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.
Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them.
Each increment of knowledge imparted in this way is so satisfying-and one’s ignorance at every stage so consequential-that the process of learning BJJ can become remarkably addictive. I have never experienced anything quite like it.
Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.
One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.
This is how you play tennis without the net.
That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.
The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally.
Unreason is now ascendant in the United States – in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.
There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.
It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.
Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.
The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.
The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life – you won’t enjoy any of it.
You don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.
The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.
Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem.