Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences.
Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form of in-group/out-group thinking that casts the differences between people i...
Recently , crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world - burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people - in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the...
Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.
Our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts *as thoughts,* as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the ill...
Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us unwilling to criticize ideas that are increasingly maladaptive and patently ridiculous.
My choices matter—and there are paths towards making wiser ones—but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do—for instance, after going back between two options—I do not to choo...
Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. [...] The first thing to observe about the moderate’s...
Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here...
Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of e...
Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn’t, or...
Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self—the sense that there is a thinker behind one’s thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of exp...
Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.
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 absol...
Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.
I’m not denying the importance of achieving one’s goals, maintaining one’s health, or keeping one’s children clothed and fed—but most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknow...
Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent hu...
In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our action...
If being prepared for death entails knowing when and where it will happen, the odds are you will not be prepared. Not only are you bound to die and leave this world; you are bound to leave it in such...
I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea—sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I w...