All Quotes By Tag: Religious-extremism

“أخطر أعداء البشر هم الأصولية والتعصب والانفصالية والتطرف والعدائية والخوف المسبق المتحيز، سواءً كان دينيًّا أو إلحاديًّا أو سياسيًّا”

“I agree with Abhijit Naskar that the path of tolerance is the only way—but it must be accompanied by continued pressure to break down barriers to access to information, so that our tolerance isn’t exploited to further the ends of totalitarian religious groups.”

“The most sensitive period of their developmental age, when the kids are supposed to be taught to question everything and nourish their reasoning skills, they are taught that God created the world in seven days – that the human race did not evolve from apes through millions of years, rather it came from the amorous congress between two God-made humans, named Adam and Eve. And if you ask why? The answers of the uneducated primordial teachers would be that the scriptures say so. And now if you ask, can’t the scriptures be wrong – do I have to take these stories literally? They would lash out with rage and shout at you – how dare you question the scriptures! Every single word in it is true. There is no greater truth than the truth of these sacred texts.”

“Violence cannot be religion. And true religion cannot be violent.”

“Real religion can only be realized by lion-hearts who have the guts to go against all predominant prejudices of the society, not by sheep of books.”

“Fuel for religious violence comes from the creeds of the religious organizations that fundamentally depict that there is only one absolute and undeniable truth, and all others even mildly different truths are expendable.”

“The so-called holy warriors are driven by a cause, no matter how disgustingly barbarian that cause be. If only we the conscientious humans were as driven as them, by our urge for real peace and real harmony, then we could, for real, not in theory, live in a world of pure compassion and hatelessness.”

“Any religion that has to do with dogmas and doctrines, and does not evolve with time is only the most immature form of religion – it’s only the most barbarian form of religion.”

“Religion and politics together is the most dangerous of all combinations, when that religion, is not the true religion of kindness and love, but the religion of books, doctrines and priests.”

“Where there is fear and terms conditions there is no love …”

“Ah well, I suppose that’s the problem with trying to make others follow your own beliefs: what starts out as spiritual ardor too often becomes arrogance and bigotry.”

“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.”

“Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: ‘Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It’s not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything—it’s just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.’ At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward’s pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention.”

“The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don’t mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.”

“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.”