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.
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.
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.
Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.
Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.
You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.
According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.
Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.
Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.
Perhaps one day we will do “everything that we can to protect our people and the timeless values that we stand for.” But today, we won’t even honestly describe the motivations of our enemies. And in the act of lying to ourselves, we continue to pay lip service to the very delusions that empower them.
Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.
There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.
It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas).
The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.
What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.
It is time we admitted that we are not at war with “terrorism.” We are at war with Islam.
You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps.
Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble . It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.
Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.
To speak specifically of our problem with the Muslim world, we are meandering into a genuine clash of civilizations, and we're deluding ourselves with euphemisms. We're talking about Islam being a religion of peace that's been hijacked by extremists. If ever there were a religion that's not a religion of peace, it is Islam.
If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science . That will be the science of Christianity.
Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.
You cannot take death for apostasy seriously and be working for peace.
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.
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