Steven Pinker Quotes About Religion

Quotes about: Religion

• The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason

  Steven Pinker

  Uplifting, People, Soul

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.170, Penguin

• It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.

  Steven Pinker

  Science, Thinking, Humanity

• In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not only on the books as a crime, but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.

  Steven Pinker

  Country, Book, Character

  "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". Book by Steven Pinker, October 4, 2011.

• Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.

  Steven Pinker

  Character, Biblical, Editing

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.28, Penguin

• After their return from Babylon, the practice of human sacrifice died out among the Jews, but survived as an ideal in one of its break-away sects, which believed that God accepted the torture-sacrifice of an innocent man in exchange for not visiting a worse fate on the rest of humanity. The sect is called Christianity.

  Steven Pinker

  Fate, Sacrifice, Men

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes”, p.205, Penguin UK

• All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent powers.

  Steven Pinker

  Sacrifice, People, Religion

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.717, Penguin

• People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.

  Steven Pinker

  People, Suffering, Religion

• The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.

  Steven Pinker

  Mind, Religion, Atrocities

  Alan Page Fiske, Tage Shakti Rai, Steven Pinker (2014). “Virtuous Violence”, p.16, Cambridge University Press

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