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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.
certain beliefs are intrinsically dangerous.
This is one of the most important thoughts and its confirmation I got from the book.
While behavioral and linguistic necessity demands that we seek coherence among our beliefs wherever we can, we know that total coherence, even in a maximally integrated brain, would be impossible to achieve.
And yet, given the demands of language and behavior, it remains true that we must strive for coherence wherever it is in doubt, because failure here is synonymous with a failure either of linguistic sense or of behavioral possibility.14
There is a distinction to be made, therefore, between beliefs that are causally active20—i.e., those that we already have in our heads—and those that can be constructed on demand.
Amazing observation of actual factual knowledge and what we can yield on-demand.
But the fact that religious beliefs have a great influence on human life says nothing at all about their validity.
faith is simply unjustified belief
Whenever you hear that people have begun killing noncombatants intentionally and indiscriminately, ask yourself what dogma stands at their backs. What do these freshly minted killers believe? You will find that it is always—always—preposterous.
In light of what devout Muslims believe—about jihad, about martyrdom, about paradise, and about infidels—suicide bombing hardly appears to be an aberration of their faith.
As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on earth to live, we will continue to murder one another on account of our myths.
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.
Think of all the good things human beings will not do in this world tomorrow because they believe that their most pressing task is to build another church or mosque, or to enforce some ancient dietary practice, or to print volumes upon volumes of exegesis on the disordered thinking of ignorant men.
If oil were to become worthless, the dysfunction of the most prominent Muslim societies would suddenly grow as conspicuous as the sun. Muslims might then come to see the wisdom of moderating their thinking on a wide variety of subjects.
It is time we realized that crimes without victims are like debts without creditors. They do not even exist.3 Any person who lies awake at night worrying about the private pleasures of other consenting adults has more than just too much time on his hands; he has some unjustifiable beliefs about the nature of right and wrong.
Even monkeys will undergo extraordinary privations to avoid causing harm to another member of their species.4 Concern for others was not the invention of any prophet. The fact that our ethical intuitions have their roots in biology reveals that our efforts to ground ethics in religious conceptions of “moral duty” are misguided.
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.
Bertrand Russell got here first: “Apart from logical cogency, there is to me something a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after preparing the ground by many millions of years of lifeless nebulae, would consider Himself adequately rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H bomb.”
There is every reason to believe that sustained inquiry in the moral sphere will force convergence of our various belief systems in the way that it has in every other science—that is, among those who are adequate to the task.
“what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
The notion of a moral community resolves many paradoxes of human behavior. How is it, after all, that a Nazi guard could return each day from his labors at the crematoria and be a loving father to his children? The answer is surprisingly straightforward: the Jews he spent the day torturing and killing were not objects of his moral concern. Not only were they outside his moral community; they were antithetical to it. His beliefs about Jews inured him to the natural human sympathies that might have otherwise prevented such behavior.
Once a person accepts the premises upon which most religious identities are built, the withdrawal of his moral concern from those who do not share these premises follows quite naturally.
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.
To say that we will never agree on every question of ethics is the same as saying that we will never agree on every question of physics. In neither case does the open-endedness of our inquiry suggest that there are no real facts to be known, or that some of the answers we have in hand are not really better than some others. Respect for diversity in our ethical views is, at best, an intellectual holding pattern until more of the facts are in.
There is no doubt that certain beliefs are incompatible with love, and this notion of “honor” is among them.
Three million souls can be starved and murdered in the Congo, and our Argus-eyed media scarcely blink. When a princess dies in a car accident, however, a quarter of the earth’s population falls prostrate with grief. Perhaps we are unable to feel what we must feel in order to change our world.
Investigating the nature of consciousness directly, through sustained introspection, is simply another name for spiritual practice.
Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world.
If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us.
No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.
