The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.
There’s no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.
Moderates want their faith respected. They don’t want faith itself criticized, and yet faith itself is what is bringing us all this – this lunacy.
Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.
The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
It’s not so much religion per se, it’s false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I’m really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.
It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska.
As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.
To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering.
The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.
Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.
The perpetrators of the Inquisition – the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions – were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God – popes, bishops, friars, and priests.
The habit of spending nearly every waking moment lost in thought leaves us at the mercy of whatever our thoughts happen to be. Meditation is a way of breaking this spell.
What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ or ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?
My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That’s not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It’s anything but that.
You cannot take death for apostasy seriously and be working for peace.
Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.
Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics.
The most transformative experiences people have – bliss, devotion, self transcendence – are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely amplify superstition, self-deception, and conflict.
The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you.