Optimistic Nihilism: A Psychologist's Personal Story & (Biased) Professional Appraisal of Shedding Religion
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The Wall, Jean-Paul Sartre’s
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Corinthians 14:34-35 tells us that women aren’t supposed to speak at church, but instead “if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home.”
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One way to treat fear of the unknown is to know it—even if you have to trick yourself into thinking you know it!
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The arrogance and entitlement are often defensive maneuvers to hide intense, deeply entrenched feelings of inadequacy and shame.
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By attributing the ill effects of our own mistakes to something orchestrated by God or the cosmos, we are less likely to see our own role and therefore change our behavior for the better.
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When having a panic attack, just let go and float down that river, let it take you away, and don’t clutch at the reeds, lest you create rapids that pummel your face.
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When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
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Culture and tradition is always used as a positive thing, but I think there’s many negatives to it, because it drives a wedge between people, because one of the things about culture is that my culture is better than yours. Who cares? . . . That’s why I’m not patriotic. I’m not a flag-waver, I couldn’t care less. Because to me, the most important thing in this life is being a human being . . . I have no shame, you know, in saying that I’m not patriotic, or anything, because it’s irrelevant to me.
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Religion is the one forum where we are not only allowed to ignore logic, but we are commended for admonishing it.
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They have only needed spirituality to help pretend that they were different from animals, that they have immortal souls.
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Whatever’s in charge, its approach to running the universe is wholly unacceptable, and our attempts to respect and defend it are insensitive and offensive.
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Let us live them with the sense that we, and not any God, are the masters of our fate, and let us live them in revolt against false answers to the problem of life
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happiness is not a chronic state: It’s a transient one.
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he reports that mild exercise alone—thirty minutes of brisk walking three times a week—has outperformed the antidepressant Zoloft all by itself in clinical trials.