Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.
To speak specifically of our problem with the Muslim world, we are meandering into a genuine clash of civilizations, and we're deluding ourselves with euphemisms. We're talking about Islam being a religion of peace that's been hijacked by extremists. If ever there were a religion that's not a religion of peace, it is Islam.
The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity?
Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble . It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.
All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.
This is how you play tennis without the net
If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science . That will be the science of Christianity.
You cannot take death for apostasy seriously and be working for peace.
While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.
Ten years have now passed since many of us first felt the jolt of history-when the second plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. We knew from that moment that things can go terribly wrong in our world-not because life is unfair, or moral progress impossible, but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions of our ignorant ancestors.
We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).
Advance warning of Katrina's path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of His plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of God, they wouldn't have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, as will come as no surprise to you, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80 percent of Katrina's survivors claim that the event only strengthened their faith in God.
Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument.
Countries with high levels of atheism are . . . the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world.
Missionaries in the developing world waste a lot of time and money (not to mention the goodwill of non-Christians) proselytizing to the needy. . . . While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death. By contrast, volunteers for secular organizations . . . do not waste . . . time telling people about the virgin birth of Jesus. Nor do they tell people in sub-Saharan Africa - where nearly four million people die from AIDS every year - that condom use is sinful.
The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.
I consistently encounter people in academic settings and scientists and journalists who feel that you can't say that anyone is wrong in any deep sense about morality, or with regard to what they value in life. I think this doubt about the application of science and reason to questions of value is really quite dangerous.
I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.
It seems to me patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes.
Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It's just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die; but I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we're left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them.
Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.
Meditation puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness - a more refined version of the problem you already have.
Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.
Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem - because millions of people have had experiences for which 'spiritual' and 'mystical' seem the only terms available.
Human experience depends on everything that can influence states of the human brain, ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy.
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