Steven Pinker Quotes About Religion
-
After their return from Babylon, the practice of human sacrifice died out among the Jews, but survived as an ideal in one of its break-away sects, which believed that God accepted the torture-sacrifice of an innocent man in exchange for not visiting a worse fate on the rest of humanity. The sect is called Christianity.
→ -
Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.
→ -
The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason
→ -
In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not only on the books as a crime, but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.
→ -
The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.
→ -
All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent powers.
→ -
People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.
→ -
It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.
→
Related Authors
-
Alain de Botton Writer -
Daniel Kahneman Psychologist -
Nancy Etcoff Psychologist -
Richard Dawkins Ethologist -
Judith Rich Harris Researcher -
Malcolm Gladwell Journalist -
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Author -
Michael Shermer Writer -
Jonathan Haidt Psychologist -
Matt Ridley Journalist -
Sam Harris Author -
Noam Chomsky Linguist -
Thomas Sowell Economist -
E. O. Wilson Biologist -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Paul Bloom Professor -
Rebecca Goldstein Novelist -
Elizabeth Spelke Psychologist -
Lawrence M. Krauss Physicist -
Jared Diamond Scientist