Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?
Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.
We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it.
Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.
When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don’t believe as you do.
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
It is still fashionable to believe that how you organize yourself religiously in this life may matter for eternity. Unless we can erode the prestige of that kind of thinking, we’re not going to be able to undermine these divisions in our world.
The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
Everyone who has eyes to see can see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath – and the God of Nature too. If you can’t see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eyes to the realities of our world.
Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
Jesus Christ – who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens – can now be eaten in the form of a cracker.
You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don’t like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private.
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle.
Human experience depends on everything that can influence states of the human brain, ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy.