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States find it difficult to withstand these
provocations because the legitimacy of the modern state is based on its promise to keep the public sphere free of political violence.
A small coin in a big empty jar makes a lot of noise. This is what makes the theatre of terrorism so successful.
Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence makes them particularly vulnerable to terrorism.
In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas.
Like the USA, China, Germany, Japan and Iran, Israel seems to understand that in the twenty-first century the most successful strategy is to sit on the fence and let others do the fighting for you.
At the Battle of Hastings in 1066 William the Conqueror gained the whole of England in a single day for the cost of a few thousand dead.
Why, then, did they go to war in the first place? Why did they inflict unnecessary death and destruction on countless millions? It was all just a stupid miscalculation.
Morality, art, spirituality and creativity are universal human abilities embedded in our DNA.
pygmy chimpanzee male called Kidogo, who lived in the Milwaukee County Zoo,
If biblical Judaism gave these laws any unique twist, it was by turning them from universal rulings applicable to all humans, into tribal codes aimed primarily at the Jewish people.
This is one of the first recorded instances in human history when genocide was presented as a binding religious duty.
It therefore makes absolutely no sense to credit Judaism and its Christian and Muslim offspring with the creation of human morality.
Theodosius,
In addition to such well-known names as Einstein and Freud, about 20 per cent of all Nobel Prize laureates in science have been Jews, though Jews constitute less than 0.2 per cent of the world’s population.16 But it should be stressed that this has been a contribution of individual Jews rather than of Judaism as a religion or a culture.
Whenever they talk of God, humans all too often profess abject self-effacement, but then use the name of God to lord it over their brethren.
‘We do not understand the Big Bang – therefore you must cover your hair in public and vote against gay marriage.’
The third of the biblical Ten Commandments instructs humans never to make wrongful use of the name of God.
Muslims value honesty despite rejecting the divinity of Christ, and secular countries such as Denmark and the Czech Republic aren’t more violent than devout countries such as Iran and Pakistan.
Morality doesn’t mean ‘following divine commands’. It means ‘reducing suffering’.
Secularism is sometimes defined as the negation of religion, and secular people are therefore characterised by what they don’t believe and do.
secularism is a very positive and active world view, which is defined by a coherent code of values rather than by opposition to this or that religion.
The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith.
Healthy relationships require emotional, intellectual and even spiritual depth.
compassion result also in a commitment to equality
No matter what awful consequences occasionally result from modernisation, industrialisation or privatisation, capitalist true-believers dismiss them as mere ‘growing pains’, and promise that everything will be made good through a bit more growth.
As long as you define yourself as ‘an individual possessing inalienable natural rights’, you will not know who you really are, and you will not understand the historical forces that shaped your society and your own mind (including your belief in ‘natural rights’).
If you believe in an absolute truth revealed by a transcendent power, you cannot allow yourself to admit any error – for that would nullify your whole story. But if you believe in a quest for truth by fallible humans, admitting blunders is an inherent part of the game.
If you want your religion, ideology or world view to lead the world, my first question to you is: ‘What was the biggest mistake your religion, ideology or world view committed? What did it get wrong?’ If you cannot come up with something serious, I for one would not trust you.
Democracy is founded on the idea that the voter knows best, free-market capitalism believes that the customer is always right, and liberal education teaches students to think for themselves.
‘the knowledge illusion’.
People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.
If you cannot afford to waste time – you will never find the truth.
Power is all about changing reality rather than seeing it for what it is.
If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power, and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery.
The system is structured in such a way that those who make no effort to know can remain in blissful ignorance, and those who do make an effort will find it very difficult to discover the truth.
One can try to evade the problem by adopting a ‘morality of intentions’.
The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference.
British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (‘nobody’s land’), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history.
Golda Meir
I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news,
but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up
On 29 August 1255 the body of a nine-year-old English boy called Hugh was found in a well in the town of Lincoln.
In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.’
‘Happy Soviet Child’ in the ubiquitous image was identified as Mamlakat Nakhangova
if you sit down and have a deep philosophical discussion about it, almost everybody would agree that corporations are fictional stories created by human beings.
Nations and religions are football clubs on steroids.
Humans have this remarkable ability to know and not to know at the same time.
If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.
If you think that the scientific community is wrong about something, that’s certainly possible, but at least know the scientific theories you are rejecting, and provide some empirical evidence to support your claim. Scientists,
