The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious pro...
The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside.
The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.
The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there...
The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities...
The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained—as the beliefs, ritua...
The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not 'cowards,' as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men o...
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religiou...
The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of ou...
The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.
There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.
This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put...
This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now...
To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. Of course, this insight does not make social and political freedom an...
Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist.
We live in a world of unimaginable surprises - from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light’s dancing for eons upon the earth - and yet paradis...
We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain—and thinking, interminably, about...
We might also wonder, in passing, which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think the creator of the universe will reward you for it?
Showing 201 to 220 of 317 results