Sunday, March 3, 2013

Failing the Ones We Love Most




"We must decline to tell our children that human history began with magic and will end with bloody magic, perhaps soon, in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.  One must be religious to fail the young so abysmally—to derange them with fear, bigotry, and superstition even as their minds are forming—and one cannot be a serious Christian, Muslim, or Jew without doing so in some measure.

Such sins against reason and compassion do not represent the totality of religion, of course, but they lie at its core.  As for the rest—charity, community, ritual, and the contemplative life—we need not take anything on faith to embrace these goods.  And it is one of the most damaging canards of religion to insist that we must."
                                                                                 - Sam Harris



"We can be as honest as we are ignorant.  If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know."
                                                                                - Robert G. Ingersoll


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