All who benefit from the inherent violence of the state are implicated in its cruelty.
What do you think Socrates meant when he said, The unexamined life is not worth living? Third,
The God who may have inspired the first successful peasants’ uprising in history is a God of revolution. In all three faiths, he has inspired an ideal of social justice, even though it has to be said...
Surely, argued the British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73), it was better for a Breton to accept French citizenship than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage remnant of past times, revolvi...
Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.
My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I
Muhammad’s numerous wives have occasioned a good deal of prurient interest in the West, but it would be a mistake to imagine the Prophet basking decadently in sensual delight, like some of the later I...
Muhammad preached his farewell sermon to the Muslim community. He reminded them to deal justly with one another, to treat women kindly, and to abandon the blood feuds and vendettas inspired by the spi...
For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ‘misfiring of something useful’, it is a kind if virus, para...
Even our contemporary cult of celebrity can be understood as an expression of our reverence for and yearning to emulate models of superhumanity. Feeling ourselves connected to such extraordinary
Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western people at least, to be morally superior,’ says British psychologist Jacqueline Rose. 'Why dying with yo...
Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensel...
There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.
It is neither helpful nor accurate to assume that other people are always responsible for our pain.
It is important to assume that the speaker shares the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your belief systems may differ, you both have the same idea of what constitutes truth.
Even the presidents of Harvard and Yale saw the War of Independence as part of God’s design for the overthrow of Catholicism.
Tiamat, Mot and Leviathan are not evil, but are simply fulfilling their cosmic role. They have to die and endure dismemberment before an ordered cosmos can emerge from chaos.
The Quraysh collected the totems of the tribes that belonged to their confederacy and installed them in the Haram so that the tribesmen could only worship their patronal deities when they visited Mecc...
People still dreamed of going on Crusade and liberating Jerusalem, but in an important development, holy warfare was beginning to merge with the patriotism of national war.
Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions... Qur'anic reciters chant long phrases for meditation. It is natural for the audience to adjust their breathing too and find that thi...