(11) 1 - Reason in Exile

"Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings."(12)

"There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion."(12)

"Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility.(...) Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not.(...) The central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed."(13)

"Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse.(...) Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated." [mijn nadruk] (14)

"I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss."(15)

"And yet, intellectuals as diverse as H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Max Planck, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Jay Gould have declared the war between reason and faith to be long over."(15)

[Dat zijn dus intellectuelen die menen dat religieus geloof en wetenschappelijke rationaliteit samengaan en 'heilige teksten' niet meer letterlijk nemen. Inderdaad naïef. Je kunt niet meer of minder religieus gelovig zijn.]

"There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions"(15)

"By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us—religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness." [mijn nadruk] (21)

"And so it is that every human being comes to desire genuine knowledge about the world. This has always posed a special problem for religion, because every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable."

"As we have seen, there is something that most Americans share with Osama bin Laden, the nineteen hijackers, and much of the Muslim world. We, too, cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence."(29)

"To be sure, hatred is an eminently human emotion, and it is obvious that many Muslim extremists feel it. But faith is still the mother of hatred here, as it is wherever people define their moral identities in religious terms."(30)

"How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world."(35)

[Immuun voor kritiek heet dat. ]

"You could die at any moment. You might not even live to see the end of this paragraph. Not only that, you will definitely die at some moment in the future. If being prepared for death entails knowing when and where it will happen, the odds are you will not be prepared. Not only are you bound to die and leave this world; you are bound to leave it in such a precipitate fashion that the present significance of anything—your relationships, your plans for the future, your hobbies, your possessions—will appear to have been totally illusory."(37)

"In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his Bible would almost certainly defeat a rocket scientist who does not. Could there be any clearer indication that we are allowing unreason and otherworldliness to govern our affairs?" [mijn nadruk] (39)

[Mijn idee. ]

"In the chapters that follow, I will try to reconcile the bewildering juxtaposition of two facts: (1) our religious traditions attest to a range of spiritual experiences that are real and significant and entirely worthy of our investigation, both personally and scientifically; (2) many of the beliefs that have grown up around these experiences now threaten to destroy us. We cannot live by reason alone.(...) On the contrary, I hope to show that spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational, even as it elucidates the limits of reason. Seeing this, we can begin to divest ourselves of many of the reasons we currently have to kill one another." [mijn nadruk] (43)

"It is time we recognized that 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. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. This spirit of mutual inquiry is the very antithesis of religious faith." [mijn nadruk] (48)

"It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs. I fear, however, that the time has not yet arrived."(48)

(50) 2 - The Nature of Belief

"As with all questions about familiar mental events, we must be careful that the familiarity of our terms does not lead us astray. The fact that we have one word for "belief" does not guarantee that believing is itself a unitary phenomenon." [mijn nadruk] (50)

"Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense." [mijn nadruk] (52-53)

"Our inevitable failures of rationality can take many forms, ranging from mere logical inconsistencies to radical discontinuities in subjectivity itself. Most of the literature on "self-deception," for instance, suggests that a person can tacitly believe one proposition, while successfully convincing himself of its antithesis (e.g., my wife is having an affair, my wife is faithful), though considerable controversy still surrounds the question of how (or whether) such cognitive contortions actually occur."(55)

"For even the most basic knowledge of the world to be possible, regularities in a nervous system must consistently mirror regularities in the environment."(58)

"At present, we have no understanding of what it means, at the level of the brain, to say that a person believes or disbelieves a given proposition—and yet it is upon this difference that all subsequent cognitive and behavioral commitments turn."(60)

"We can believe a proposition to be true only because something in our experience, or in our reasoning about the world, actually speaks to the truth of the proposition in question."(62)

"Let's say that I believe that God exists, and some impertinent person asks me why. This question invites—indeed, demands—an answer of the form "I believe that God exists because..." I cannot say, however, "I believe that God exists because it is prudent to do so" (as Pascal would have us do). (...) Nor can I say things like "I believe in God because it makes me feel good." The fact that I would feel good if there were a God does not give me the slightest reason to believe that one exists." [mijn nadruk] (62)

"There is simply no other logical space for our beliefs about the world to occupy. As long as religious propositions purport to be about the way the world is— God can actually hear your prayers, If you take his name in vain bad things will happen to you, etc.—they must stand in relation to the world, and to our other beliefs about it. And it is only by being so situated that propositions of this sort can influence our subsequent thinking or behavior. As long as a person maintains that his beliefs represent an actual state of the world (visible or invisible; spiritual or mundane), he must believe that his beliefs are a consequence of the way the world is. This, by definition, leaves him vulnerable to new evidence." [mijn nadruk] (63)

"But the fact that religious beliefs have a great influence on human life says nothing at all about their validity."(64)

"The faith that I am calling into question is precisely the gesture that Tillich himself decried as "an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence." My argument, after all, is aimed at the majority of the faithful in every religious tradition, not at Tillich's blameless parish of one.
Despite the considerable exertions of men like Tillich who have attempted to hide the serpent lurking at the foot of every altar, the truth is that religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern—specifically in propositions that promise some mechanism by which human life can be spared the ravages of time and death. Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse— constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. However far you feel you have fled the parish (even if you are just now adjusting the mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope), you are likely to be the product of a culture that has elevated belief, in the absence of evidence, to the highest place in the hierarchy of human virtues. Ignorance is the true coinage of this realm—"Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed" (John 20:29)—and every child is instructed that it is, at the very least, an option, if not a sacred duty, to disregard the facts of this world out of deference to the God who lurks in his mother's and father's imaginations." [mijn nadruk] (65)

[Prachtig geformuleerd.]

"This is the very same faith that will not stoop to reason when it has no good reasons to believe. If a little supportive evidence emerges, however, the faithful prove as attentive to data as the damned."(66)

"It appears that even the Holocaust did not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. If having half of your people systematically delivered to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could."(66-67)

[Inderdaad.]

"But the fact that unjustified beliefs can have a consoling influence on the human mind is no argument in their favor. If every physician told his terminally ill patients that they were destined for a complete recovery, this might also set many of their minds at ease, but at the expense of the truth." [mijn nadruk] (67-68)

"Where faith really pays its dividends, however, is in the conviction that the future will be better than the past, or at least not worse."(69)

"It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes. To be ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in conversation with other human beings) is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind. Clearly, there is sanity in numbers. And yet, 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. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are." [mijn nadruk] (72)

"It is true that there are millions of people whose faith moves them to perform extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. The help rendered to the poor by Christian missionaries in the developing world demonstrates that religious ideas can lead to actions that are both beautiful and necessary. But there are far better reasons for self-sacrifice than those that religion provides. The fact that faith has motivated many people to do good things does not suggest that faith is itself a necessary (or even a good) motivation for goodness. It can be quite possible, even reasonable, to risk one's life to save others without believing any incredible ideas about the nature of the universe." [mijn nadruk] (78)

(80) 3 - In the Shadow of God

Beschrijving van de praktijken van de Inquisitie.

"The problem with scripture, however, is that many of its possible interpretations (including most of the literal ones) can be used to justify atrocities in defense of the faith."(83)

"The practice for which the Inquisition is duly infamous, and the innovation that secured it a steady stream of both suspects and guilty verdicts, was its use of torture to extract confessions from the accused, to force witnesses to testify, and to persuade a confessing heretic to name those with whom he had collaborated in sin. The justification for this behavior came straight from Saint Augustine, who reasoned that if torture was appropriate for those who broke the laws of men, it was even more fitting for those who broke the laws of God."(85)

"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. The basic lesson to be drawn from all this was summed up nicely by Will Durant: "Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous."" [mijn nadruk] (86)

"The accounts of witch hunts resemble, in most respects, the more widespread persecution of heretics throughout the Inquisition: imprisonment on the basis of accusations alone, torture to extract confession, confessions deemed unacceptable until accomplices were named, death by slow fire, and the rounding up of the freshly accused. [mijn nadruk] " [mijn nadruk] (88)

"Antisemitism is as integral to church doctrine as the flying buttress is to a Gothic cathedral, and this terrible truth has been published in Jewish blood since the first centuries of the common era. Like that of the Inquisition, the history of anti-Semitism can scarcely be given sufficient treatment in the context of this book. I raise the subject, however briefly, because the irrational hatred of Jews has produced a spectrum of effects that have been most acutely felt in our own time."(92)

"The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages, culminating in the Holocaust, makes it almost impossible to entertain any suggestion that Jews might have brought their troubles upon themselves. This is, however, in a rather narrow sense, the truth."(93)

"Jews, insofar as they are religious, believe that they are bearers of a unique covenant with God. As a consequence, they have spent the last two thousand years collaborating with those who see them as different by seeing themselves as irretrievably so. Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion. Jewish settlers, by exercising their "freedom of belief" on contested land, are now one of the principal obstacles to peace in the Middle East." [mijn nadruk] (94)

[Goed gezien. ]

"Unfortunately for fanciers of Mary's virginity, the Hebrew word alma (for which parthenos is an erroneous translation) simply means "young woman," without any implication of virginity. It seems all but certain that the Christian dogma of the virgin birth, and much of the church's resulting anxiety about sex, was the result of a mistranslation from the Hebrew.(...) Mary's virginity has always been suggestive of God's attitude toward sex: it is intrinsically sinful, being the mechanism through which original sin was bequeathed to the generations after Adam. It would appear that Western civilization has endured two millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew."(95)

"It is out of this history of theologically mandated persecution that secular anti-Semitism emerged. Even explicitly anti-Christian movements, as in the cases of German Nazism and Russian socialism, managed to inherit and enact the doctrinal intolerance of the church."(100)

"The rise of Nazism in Germany required much in the way of "uncritical loyalty." Beyond the abject (and religious) loyalty to Hitler, the Holocaust emerged out of people's acceptance of some very implausible ideas."(100)

"At the heart of every totalitarian enterprise, one sees outlandish dogmas, poorly arranged, but working ineluctably like gears in some ludicrous instrument of death. Nazism evolved out of a variety of economic and political factors, of course, but it was held together by a belief in the racial purity and superiority of the German people. The obverse of this fascination with race was the certainty that all impure elements—homosexuals, invalids, Gypsies, and, above all, Jews—posed a threat to the fatherland. And while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, it was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity."(101)

"An analysis of prominent anti-Semitic writers and publications from 1861 to 1895 reveals just how murderous the German anti-Semites were inclined to be: fully two-thirds of those that purported to offer "solutions" to the "Jewish problem" openly advocated the physical extermination of the Jews—and this, as Goldhagen points out, was several decades before the rise of Hitler."(102)

"But the truly sinister complicity of the church came in its willingness to open its genealogical records to the Nazis and thereby enable them to trace the extent of a person's Jewish ancestry."(103)

"All of this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church was in very real opposition to much of the Nazi platform, which was bent upon curtailing its power. Goldhagen also reminds us that not a single German Catholic was excommunicated before, during, or after the war, "after committing crimes as great as any in human history." This is really an extraordinary fact." [mijn nadruk] (103-104)

"While the rise and fall of modernism in the church can hardly be considered a victory for the forces of rationality, it illustrates an important point: wanting to know how the world is leaves one vulnerable to new evidence. It is no accident that religious doctrine and honest inquiry are so rarely juxtaposed in our world."(105)

"When we consider that so few generations had passed since the church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the nature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to think anything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years. Indeed, it is also well known that certain Vatican officials (the most notorious of whom was Bishop Alois Hudal) helped members of the SS like Adolf Eichmann, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Mueller, Franz Stangl, and hundreds of others escape to South America and the Middle East in the aftermath of the war. In this context, one is often reminded that others in the Vatican helped Jews escape as well. This is true. It is also true, however, that Vatican aid was often contingent upon whether or not the Jews in question had been previously baptized." [mijn nadruk] (105)

"The fact that people are sometimes inspired to heroic acts of kindness by the teaching of Christ says nothing about the wisdom or necessity of believing that he, exclusively, was the Son of God. Indeed, we will find that we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to feel compassion for the suffering of others"(106)

"In the next chapter we will see that in our opposition to the worldview of Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and fourteenth- century hordes are pouring into our world. Unfortunately, they are now armed with twenty-first-century weapons."(107)

(108) 4 - The Problem with Islam

"By any measure of normativity we might wish to adopt (ethical, practical, epistemological, economic, etc.), there are good beliefs and there are bad ones—and it should now be obvious to everyone that Muslims have more than their fair share of the latter." [mijn nadruk] (108)

"The fact that religious faith has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument in its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its adherents made foundational contributions to human culture."(109)

"While there are undoubtedly some "moderate" Muslims who have decided to overlook the irrescindable militancy of their religion, Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The only future devout Muslims can envisage—as Muslims—is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, subjugated, or killed."(110)

"Moderate Islam—really moderate, really critical of Muslim irrationality—scarcely seems to exist. If it does, it is doing as good a job at hiding as moderate Christianity did in the fourteenth century (and for similar reasons)."(111)

De Koran wordt doorgenomen op intolerantie en agressie en zo meer.

"This is all desperately tedious, of course. But there is no substitute for confronting the text itself. I cannot judge the quality of the Arabic; perhaps it is sublime. But the book's contents are not. On almost every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise non- believers. On almost every page, it prepares the ground for religious conflict. Anyone who can read passages like those quoted above and still not see a link between Muslim faith and Muslim violence should probably consult a neurologist." [mijn nadruk] (123)

"In our dialogue with the Muslim world, we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot even be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us."(128)

"Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side."(129)

"the evil that has finally reached our shores is not merely the evil of terrorism. It is the evil of religious faith at the moment of its political ascendancy. Of course, Islam is not uniquely susceptible to undergoing such horrible transformations, though it is, at this moment in history, uniquely ascendant. Western leaders who insist that our conflict is not with Islam are mistaken; but, as I argue throughout this book, we have a problem with Christianity and Judaism as well. It is time we recognized that all reasonable men and women have a common enemy. It is an enemy so near to us, and so deceptive, that we keep its counsel even as it threatens to destroy the very possibility of human happiness. Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself." [mijn nadruk] (131)

"Berman points out that this sort of thinking has led the Israelis to be frequently likened to the Nazis in the European press. Needless to say, the comparison is grotesque. The truth is, as Dershowitz points out, that "no other nation in history faced with comparable challenges has ever adhered to a higher standard of human rights, been more sensitive to the safety of innocent civilians, tried harder to operate under the rule of law, or been willing to take more risks for peace." The Israelis have shown a degree of restraint in their use of violence that the Nazis never contemplated and that, more to the point, no Muslim society would contemplate today. Ask yourself, what are the chances that the Palestinians would show the same restraint in killing Jews if the Jews were a powerless minority living under their occupation and disposed to acts of suicidal terrorism? It would be no more likely than Muhammad's flying to heaven on a winged horse." [mijn nadruk] (135)

[Serieus? Dat was in 2005 toen dit boek geschreven werd al niet zo en vandaag de dag al helemaal niet. Ik vind dat Harris nogal doorslaat sinds hoofdstuk 4. En is er een soort van geloof in het liberalisme? ]

"And yet, thinkers far more sober than Baudrillard view the events of September 11 as a consequence of American foreign policy. Perhaps the foremost among them is Noam Chomsky. In addition to making foundational contributions to linguistics and the psychology of language, Chomsky has been a persistent critic of U.S. foreign policy for over three decades. He has also managed to demonstrate a principal failing of the liberal critique of power. He appears to be an exquisitely moral man whose political views prevent him from making the most basic moral distinctions—between types of violence, and the variety of human purposes that give rise to them." [mijn nadruk] (139)

"We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds over the years has undermined our credibility in the international community. We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky's acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness."(140-141)

"It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources. We might even conceive of our moral differences in just these terms: not all societies have the same degree of moral wealth. Many things contribute to such an endowment. Political and economic stability, literacy, a modicum of social equality—where such things are lacking, people tend to find many compelling reasons to treat one another rather badly. Our recent history offers much evidence of our own development on these fronts, and a corresponding change in our morality."(143)

[Ik vind heel die kritiek op Chomsky onterecht. Alsof het Westen in grote lijnen op een hoger niveau van morele ontwikkeling verkeert. Dat is nogal een stelling. Vooral omdat het Westen ideologisch ook gestuurd wordt door een religie die intolerant is. Het Westen is niet één ding en Chomsky laat dat juist goed zien. ]

"This [My-Lai] is about as bad as human beings are capable of behaving. But what distinguishes us from many of our enemies is that this indiscriminate violence appalls us. The massacre at My Lai is remembered as a signature moment of shame for the American military.(...) As a culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not." [mijn nadruk] (144)

[Ik geloof er geen bal van. Dat is alleen voor de Bühne. De VS is een militaristisch en erg geweldadig land. Vraag eens aan Republikeinen wat ze daarvan vinden. Ik denk niet dat er veel schaamte naar voren zal komen. Eerder trots. Harris is wel erg naïef. ]

"It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of "better" we might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very real differences in human happiness. Any systematic approach to ethics, or to understanding the necessary underpinnings of a civil society, will find many Muslims standing eye deep in the red barbarity of the fourteenth century." [mijn nadruk] (145)

[Dat geldt dus voor alle massa's van gelovigen, ook voor christenen in de VS. ]

"Any honest witness to current events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim governments. Chomsky seems to think that the disparity either does not exist or runs the other way."(146)

[Ik denk dat Chomsky net als ik denkt dat die morele tegenstellingen niet zo groot zijn als Harris gelooft.]

"What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence. If you live in a land where certain things cannot be said about the king, or about an imaginary being, or about certain books, because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or imprisonment, you do not live in a civil society. It appears that one of the most urgent tasks we now face in the developed world is to find some way of facilitating the emergence of civil societies everywhere else. Whether such societies have to be democratic is not at all clear." [mijn nadruk] (150)

[Dat geldt dus nu ook voor de VS onder Trump. ]

"If a stable peace is ever to be achieved between Islam and the West, Islam must undergo a radical transformation."(152)

[Nogal arrogant. Dat gIncididunt nisi non nisi incididunt velit cillum magna commodo proident officia enim.eldt net zo goed voor het christendom en jodendom. ]

(153) 5 - West of Eden

"Compared with the theocratic terrors of medieval Europe, or those that persist in much of the Muslim world, the influence of religion in the West now seems rather benign. We should not be misled by such comparisons, however. The degree to which religious ideas still determine government policies—especially those of the United States—presents a grave danger to everyone." [mijn nadruk] (153)

[Nou dan. ]

"Many members of the U.S. government currently view their professional responsibilities in religious terms."(154)

Harris geeft hier vele voorbeelden van.

"It is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others. This impulse has less to do with the history of religion and more to do with its logic, because the very idea of privacy is incompatible with the existence of God. If God sees and knows all things, and remains so provincial a creature as to be scandalized by certain sexual behaviors or states of the brain, then what people do in the privacy of their own homes, though it may not have the slightest implication for their behavior in public, will still be a matter of public concern for people of faith."(159)

"To see that our laws against "vice" have actually nothing to do with keeping people from coming to physical or psychological harm, and everything to do with not angering God, we need only consider that oral or anal sex between consenting adults remains a criminal offense in thirteen states. Four of the states (Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri) prohibit these acts between same-sex couples and, therefore, effectively prohibit homosexuality. The other nine ban consensual sodomy for everyone (these places of equity are Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia). One does not have to be a demographer to grasp that the impulse to prosecute consenting adults for nonprocreative sexual behavior will correlate rather strongly with religious faith."(160)

"What is not generally remembered is that Prohibition was an explicitly religious exercise, being the joint product of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the pious lobbying of certain Protestant missionary societies."(163)

"Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the stars will feel that punishing peaceful men and women for their private pleasure is perfectly reasonable. We are now in the twenty-first century. Perhaps we should have better reasons for depriving our neighbors of their liberty at gunpoint. Given the magnitude of the real problems that confront us-—terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the spread of infectious disease, failing infrastructure, lack of ade- quate funds for education and health care, etc.—our war on sin is so outrageously unwise as to almost defy rational comment. How have we grown so blind to our deeper interests ? And how have we managed to enact such policies with so little substantive debate?" [mijn nadruk] (164)

[Door de religie, is the answer... ]

"Only mainstream religious dogmatism receives the unqualified support of government. And yet, religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty manifestly exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the patently false to achieve primacy over the facts." [mijn nadruk] (165)

"We know that embryonic stem cells promise to be a renewable source of tissues and organs that might alleviate such suffering in the not too distant future. Enter faith: we now find ourselves living in a world in which college-educated politicians will hurl impediments in the way of such research because they are concerned about the fate of single cells. Their concern is not merely that a collection of 150 cells may suffer its destruction. Rather, they believe that even a human zygote (a fertilized egg) should be accorded all the protections of a fully developed human being." [mijn nadruk] (166)

"Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society. Our discourse on the subject should reflect this. In this area of public policy alone, the accommodations that we have made to faith will do nothing but enshrine a perfect immensity of human suffering for decades to come."(167)

"Under the influence of Christian notions of the sinfulness of sex outside of marriage, the U.S. government has required that one-third of its AIDS prevention funds allocated to Africa be squandered on teaching abstinence rather than condom use. It is no exaggeration to say that millions could die as a direct result of this single efflorescence of religious dogmatism." [mijn nadruk] (167-168)

(170) 6 - A Science of Good and Evil

"The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd.(...) We simply do not need religious ideas to motivate us to live ethical lives. Once we begin thinking seriously about happiness and suffering, we find that our religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally." [mijn nadruk] (171-172)

"The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals— intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on—will equally differentiate between human beings themselves. If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren't more articulate people more important still? And what about those poor men and woman with aphasia? It would seem that we have just excluded them from our moral com- munity."[mijn nadruk] (177-178)

"Convictions of this sort generally go by the name of "relativism," and they seem to offer a rationale for not saying anything too critical about the beliefs of others. But most forms of relativism—including moral relativism, which seems especially well subscribed—are nonsensical. And dangerously so." [mijn nadruk] (178)

"It seems to me, however, that the belief that some worldviews really are better than others taps a different set of intellectual and moral resources. These are resources we will desperately need if we are to oppose, and ultimately unseat, the regnant ignorance and tribalism of our world." [mijn nadruk] (179)

"I believe that relativism and pragmatism have already done much to muddle our thinking on a variety of subjects, many of which have more than a passing relevance to the survival of civilization. In philosophical terms, pragmatism can be directly opposed to realism." [mijn nadruk] (180)

"Relativists and pragmatists believe that truth is just a matter of consensus. I think it is clear, however, that while consensus among like minds may be the final arbiter of truth, it cannot constitute it. It is quite conceivable that everyone might agree and yet be wrong about the way the world is. It is also conceivable that a single person might be right in the face of unanimous opposition. From a realist point of view, it is possible (though unlikely) for a single person, or culture, to have a monopoly on the truth." [mijn nadruk] (181-182)

"One cannot walk far in the company of moral theorists without hearing our faculty of "moral intuition" either exalted or scorned."(182)

"Whatever its stigma, "intuition" is a term that we simply cannot do without, because it denotes the most basic constituent of our fac- ulty of understanding. While this is true in matters of ethics, it is no less true in science. When we can break our knowledge of a thing down no further, the irreducible leap that remains is intuitively taken. Thus, the traditional opposition between reason and intuition is a false one: reason is itself intuitive to the core, as any judgment that a proposition is "reasonable" or "logical" relies on intuition to find its feet."(183)

"The fact that we must rely on certain intuitions to answer ethical questions does not in the least suggest that there is anything insubstantial, ambiguous, or culturally contingent about ethical truth. As in any other field, there will be room for intelligent dissent on questions of right and wrong, but intelligent dissent has its limits."(184)

"To say that something is "natural," or that it has conferred an adaptive advantage upon our species, is not to say that it is "good" in the required sense of contributing to human happiness in the present."(185)

"How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to be 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."(190)

"in the general case there seems to be no doubt that love and compassion are good, in that they connect us more deeply to others."(191)

"The point is that the disposition to take the happiness of others into account—to be ethical—seems to be a rational way to augment one's own happiness."(192)

[Ook dit hoofdstuk loopt helemaal uit de hand. Een streven naar universalisme snap ik, maar dan gaat het over marteling en oorlog, en wordt op basis van een rare redenering 'het pacifisme' afgewezen zonder enige definitie te geven. Alsof persoonlijk pacifisme hetzelfde is als politiek pacifisme.]

"Fearing that the above reflections on torture may offer a potent argument for pacifism, I would like to briefly state why I believe we must accept the fact that violence (or its threat) is often an ethical necessity."(199)

(204) 7 - Experiments in Consciousness

"It is difficult to find a word for that human enterprise which aims at happiness directly—at happiness of a sort that can survive the frustration of all conventional desires. The term "spirituality" seems unavoidable here—and I have used it several times in this book already—but it has many connotations that are, frankly, embarrassing."(205)

"But the truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death. While there is much to be said against a naive conception of a soul that is independent of the brain, the place of consciousness in the natural world is very much an open question."(208)

"Investigating the nature of consciousness directly, through sustained introspection, is simply another name for spiritual practice."(209)

"Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion. The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts (this is mysticism). Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance." [mijn nadruk] (212)

(222) Epilogue

"This world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes—like blas- phemy—and where the totality of a child's education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry."(224)

(227) Afterword [van 2005]

"It has been nearly a year since The End of Faith was first published in the United States. In response, I have received a continuous correspondence from readers and nonreaders alike, expressing everything from ecstatic support to nearly homicidal condemnation."(227)

"Unreason is now ascendant in the United States— in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 72 percent believe in angels. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and the belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world."(228)

"Since The End of Faith was first published, current events have remained a running confirmation of its central thesis. There are days when almost every headline in the morning paper attests to the social costs of religious faith, and the nightly news seems miraculously broadcast from the fourteenth centu234ry. One spectacle of religious hysteria follows fast upon the next."(234)