All Quotes By Tag: Extremism

“In the world of so-called civilized and intelligent humans, there are only two accepted ways to see religion – one is the way of the believer, and the other is the one of the non-believer. But there is a third way – the way of the real religious person – the way of the real scientist – the way of the real yogi. It is the way where you see religion as it is, that is, an organized structure which helps people go through their daily life with as little hitch as possible. And as such, every organized structure has its pros and cons.”

“She was such a poster child for the twisted result of clinging to a joyless, punitive religion, a religion that sapped all the joy from life and led, in its final stages, to the extremism that poisoned the well of sane discourse.”

“Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin’s photograph, I think to myself: You’ve finally done it. It took four generations, but you’ve finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America’s oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream–not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I’ll toast you from hell.”

“You know,” said Jehangir, breaking the silence, “it’s only Muslims who use the term ‘innovation’ to mean something bad.”

“During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other’s candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town’s few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?’ It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.”

“It is very difficult to convince a person to come out of his conservative shell, unless he feels discomfort there.”

“Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.”[My Uncle Sosthenes]”

“The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism – as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”

“What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he’s certain he’ll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?”

“There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.”

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”