Book detail: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book delves into the complex relationship between religion and terrorism, exploring how religious beliefs can contribute to acts of violence and the future of rational thought in the face of such challenges.
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“The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal' or they will unmake our world.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Although many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“As a man believes, so he will act.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have . . . a recipe for the fall of civilization.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“The perpetrators of the Inquisition - the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions - were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God - popes, bishops, friars, and priests.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“And while Protestant reformers broke with Rome on a variety of counts, their treatment of their fellow human beings was no less disgraceful. Public executions were more popular than ever: heretics were still reduced to ash, scholars were tortured and killed for impertinent displays of reason, and fornicators were murdered without a qualm.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to become mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon-because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“About 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standard of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“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 of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers?”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“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 it. It is in such cases that the true genius lurking behind many of our laws stands revealed. The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual.' No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Three million souls can be starved and murdered in the
Congo, and our Argus-eyed media scarcely blink. When a princess
dies in a car accident, however, a quarter of the earth's population
falls prostrate with grief. Perhaps we are unable to feel what we
must feel in order to change our world.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad...To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“It is also worth noting that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of tbe Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this; some have even obtained their degrees from reputable universities. No doubt, others will follow in their footsteps. While such people are technically "scientists," they are not behaving like scientists. They simply are not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature of the universe. And their proclamations about God and the failures of Darwinism do not in the least signify that there is a legitimate scientific controversy about evolution.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason