The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and , whic...
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...
Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature—to say nothing of killing and dying for them—would be impossi...
Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will...
Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and th...
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. [...] By failing to live by the letter of the texts [scripture], while tolerating the irrationality of those who do,...
Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love
People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other peopl...
One of the problems with religion is that it creates in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, even when members of one’s own group are behaving like psychopaths.
Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on [E]arth. According to the United Na...
Mentir es, casi por definición, negarse a cooperar con los demás. Mentir combina en un único acto la falta de confianza y de honradez. Es al mismo tiempo un fallo de comprensión y una falta de volunta...
It is time we realize that belief is not a private matter. As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are a member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that i...
Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish...
In a now famous thought experiment, the philosopher Derek Parfit asks us to imagine a teleportation device that can beam a person from Earth to Mars. Rather than travel for many months on a spaceship,...
How is it that, in this one area of our lives [religion], we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?
Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does.
Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
Believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world, and this fact yields some immediate insights into the standards by which our beliefs shoul...
A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoided by following a single precept in life: Do not lie.