Not in God's Name Quotes

“Broadcasting is being replaced by narrowcasting. The difference is that broadcasting speaks to a mixed public, exposing them to a range of views. Narrowcasting speaks to a targeted public and exposes them only to facts and opinions that support their prejudices. It fragments a public into a set of sects of the like-minded.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“One who is not in my image is nonetheless in God’s image”
― jonathan sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Now is the time for Jews, Christians and Muslims to say what they failed to say in the past: We are all children of Abraham. And whether we are Isaac or Ishmael, Jacob or Esau, Leah or Rachel, Joseph or his brothers, we are precious in the sight of God. We are blessed. And to be blessed, no one has to be cursed. God’s love does not work that way. Today God is calling us, Jew, Christian and Muslim, to let go of hate and the preaching of hate, and live at last as brothers and sisters, true to our faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith, honouring God’s name by honouring his image, humankind.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Only in fiction are the great evils committed by caricatures of malevolence: Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Sauron or the Joker. In real history the great evils are committed by people seeking to restore a romanticised golden age, willing to sacrifice their lives and the lives of others in what they regard as a great and even holy cause. In some cases they see themselves as ‘doing God’s work’. They ‘seem happy’. That is how dreams of utopia turn into nightmares of hell.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Theology creates an anthropology. Discovering God, singular and alone, the first monotheists discovered the human person singular and alone. Monotheism internalises what dualism externalises. It takes the good and bad in the human situation, the faith and the fear, the retribution and the forgiving, and locates them within each of us, turning what would otherwise be war on the battlefield into a struggle within the soul. ‘Who is a hero?’ asked the rabbis, and replied, ‘One who conquers himself.’ This is the moral drama that has been monotheism’s contribution to the civilisation of the West: not the clash of titans on the field of battle, but the quiet inner drama of choice and will, restraint and responsibility.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“The contemporary West is the most individualistic era of all time. Its central values are in ethics, autonomy; in politics, individual rights; in culture, postmodernism; and in religion, ‘spirituality’. Its idol is the self, its icon the ‘selfie’, and its operating systems the free market and the post-ideological, managerial liberal democratic state. In place of national identities we have global cosmopolitanism. In place of communities we have flash-mobs. We are no longer pilgrims but tourists. We no longer know who we are or why.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries three substitutes for religion emerged as the basis for new identities. One was the nation state. A second was the ideological system. The third was race. The first led to two world wars, the second to Stalin’s Russia, the Gulag and the KGB, and the third to the Holocaust. The cost of these three substitutes for religion was in excess of a hundred million lives.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Much has been said and written in recent years about the connection between religion and violence. Three answers have emerged. The first: Religion is the major source of violence. Therefore if we seek a more peaceful world we should abolish religion. The second: Religion is not a source of violence. People are made violent, as Hobbes said, by fear, glory and the ‘perpetual and restless desire for power after power that ceaseth only in death’.8 Religion has nothing to do with it. It may be used by manipulative leaders to motivate people to wage wars precisely because it inspires people to heroic acts of self-sacrifice, but religion itself teaches us to love and forgive, not to hate and fight. The third answer is: Their religion, yes; our religion, no. We are for peace. They are for war.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“A humanitarian as opposed to a group ethic requires the most difficult of all imaginative exercises: role reversal – putting yourself in the place of those you despise, or pity, or simply do not understand”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“It was a great sage of Islam, ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who saw that as a society becomes affluent it becomes more individualistic. It loses what he called its asabiyah, its social cohesion. It then becomes prey to the ‘desert dwellers’, those who shun the luxuries of the city and are prepared for self-sacrifice in war.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism. Other ancient civilisations recorded their victories. The Israelites recorded their failures. It is what the Mosaic and prophetic books are about.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Recall that even the liberal-minded John Locke in the seventeenth century argued against granting civil rights to atheists: ‘Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold on an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.’6 This is not to endorse these sentiments, merely to note that they exist.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Weapons win wars, but it takes ideas to win the peace.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamour of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is: Not in My Name.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Peace comes when we see our reflection in the face of God and let go of the desire to be someone else.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“the Internet has a disinhibition effect: you can be ruder to someone electronically than you would be in a face-to-face encounter, since the exchange has been depersonalised. Read any Comments section on the Web, and you will see what this means: the replacement of reason by anger, and argument by vilification. Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“What the secularists forgot is that Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal. If there is one thing the great institutions of the modern world do not do, it is to provide meaning. Science tells us how but not why. Technology gives us power but cannot guide us as to how to use that power. The market gives us choices but leaves us uninstructed as to how to make those choices. The liberal democratic state gives us freedom to live as we choose but on principle refuses to guide us as to how to choose.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“As part of the logic of human sociality, the internal cohesion of a group is in direct proportion to the degree of threat it perceives from the outside. It follows that anyone who wants to unite a nation, especially one that has been deeply fractured, must demonise an adversary or, if necessary, invent an enemy. For the Turks it was the Armenians. For the Serbs it was the Muslims. For Stalin it was the bourgeoisie or the counter-revolutionaries. For Pol Pot it was the capitalists and intellectuals. For Hitler it was Christian Europe’s eternal Other, the Jews.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“As Shakespeare said, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’4”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Our inclination to act well towards others, whatever its source, tends to be confined to those with whom we share a common identity. The Greeks, the world’s first philosophers and scientists, regarded anyone who was not Greek as a barbarian – a word derived from the sound of a sheep bleating. Our radius of moral concern has limits. The group may be small or large, but in practice as opposed to theory, we tend to see those not like us as less than fully human.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Until our global institutions take a stand against the teaching and preaching of hate, all their efforts of diplomacy and military intervention will fail. Ultimately the responsibility is ours. Tomorrow’s world is born in what we teach our children today.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“The seventeenth century was the dawn of an age of secularisation. The twenty-first century will be the start of an age of desecularisation.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“violence”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“The anti-modern radicals have learned that you can use the products of modernity without going through the process that produced them, namely Westernisation.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Read any Comments section on the Web, and you will see what this means: the replacement of reason by anger, and argument by vilification. Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Diversity is what gives colour and texture to our life on earth. Art, architecture, music, stories, celebrations, food, drink, dance: all of these are particular. None of them is an abstract universal.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“We should not tell lies because if everyone else did, no one would trust us and the practice of communication on which lying depends would be undermined. Immorality is a kind of self-contradiction. Reason allows us to think our way through to virtue.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence