Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.
Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in...
People worship different things; there must be 'no coercion in matters of faith!
People who have been taught to despise themselves cannot easily respect others.
Pascal's scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff:'When I see the blind and...
Our neocortex has made us meaning-seeking creatures, acutely aware of the perplexity and tragedy of our predicament, and if we do not discover some ultimate significance in our lives, we fall easily i...
Our experience tells us that the world has objective reality and a perfect God, who must, be truthful, could not deceive us. Instead of using the world to prove the existence of God, therefore, Descar...
One of the many great sources of happiness is to get a glimpse, here and there, of a new aspect of the incredible world we live in and of our incredible role in it.17
Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments and either assassinated or threatened the enemies of Islam with the death penalty. Similarly, Jewish fundamentalists have settled in the Occupied Territ...
Most of the Israelites chose to stay in Babylon, where they would make an important contribution to the Hebrew scriptures. The returning exiles brought home nine scrolls that traced the history of the...
Moses explained, the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.1 In his classic study of religion and violence, René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries am...
Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is 'nothing' out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality o...
Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains...
Iubirea înseamnă, în esenţă, a fi însetat de ceva ce rămâne absent. De aceea iubirea omenească este atât de dezamăgitoare.
It is simply not true that religion is always aggressive. Sometimes it has actually put a brake on violence. In the ninth century BCE, Indian ritualists extracted all violence from the liturgy and cre...
It did seem unjust that Jane, who was by far the abler of the two, should sacrifice her career for Mark’s.
In other words, when making an effort to understand something strange and alien to you, it is important to assume that the speaker share the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your be...
In fact Hell seemed a more potent reality than God, because it was something that I could grasp imaginatively.
In any previous empire the religion of the ruling class had always been distinct from the faith of the subjugated masses, so the Christian emperors’ attempt to impose their theology on their subjects...