#cs

It's not about whether or not someone is a bigot, but whether or not the argument which that someone is arguing is worth being a bigot about. ↗

— Criss Jami

#arguments #bigot #bigotry #bigots #certainty

The law is so complex and voluminous that no one, not even the most knowledgeable lawyer, can understand it all. Moreover, lawyers and legal scholars have not gone out of their way to make the law accessible to the ordinary person. Just the opposite: Legal professionals, like the priests of some obscure religion, too often try to keep the law mysterious and inaccessible. ↗

— Jay Feinman

#law #lawyers #order #politics #society

Having kids — the responsibility of rearing good, kind, ethical, responsible human beings — is the biggest job anyone can embark on ↗

— Maria Shriver

#ethics

In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding. ↗

— Roger D. Woodard

#history #humanity #humanity-and-society #mythology #religion

Admittedly, I do have several bones, whole war fields full of bones, in fact to pick with organised religion of whatever stripe. This should be seen as a critique of purely temporal agencies who have, to my mind, erected more obstacles between whatever notion of spirituality and Godhead one subscribes to than they have opened doors. To me, the difference between Godhead and the Church is the difference between Elvis and Colonel Parker... although that conjures images of God dying on the toilet, which is not what I meant at all. ↗

— Alan Moore

#godhead #modernity-is-a-sickness #religion #secular-ethics #secularism

The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too. ↗

— Freeman John Dyson

#science #systems #science

It is the definition of the word 'object' which destroys all religions. ↗

— Bill Gaede

#gaede #general-relativity #mathematics #quantum-mechanics #religion

A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them. ↗

— Frank O'Connor

#religion #schism #religion

وضمن هذا السعي إلي الإمساك بالدولة, فإن دعاة الإسلام السياسي لا يختلفون- من جهتهم- عن غيرهم من الذين عملوا, من جهة أخري, تحت رايات الأيديولوجيات التحديثية( الليبرالية والقومية والاشتراكية وغيرها). وأعني من حيث إنهم جميعا يراوحون تحت مظلة ذات الأطروحة التي لا تري للتغيير سبيلا إلا بتسكين الجوانب التقنية الإجرائية من الحداثة فوق ذات البنيات التقليدية المتوارثة للوعي التي تحتفظ للجمهور بوداعته وهدوئه وطاعته. وفقط فإن الاختلاف بينهما يأتي من نوع المفردات التي يستخدمها كل فريق في سعيه إلي الهيمنة علي المجال العام. إذ فيما ظل دعاة الأيديولوجيات الحداثوية يستخدمون المفردات المتداولة في إطار الأيديولوجيات التي يبشرون بها( من قبيل الحرية والديمقراطية والدستور والاشتراكية والطبقة العاملة والقومية وغيرها); والتي لم يقدروا علي السيطرة بها علي المجال العام لعدم امتلاك الجمهور- المقصود التأثير عليه بها- للتراث المعرفي والتاريخي الذي تقف عليه هذه المفردات, فإن دعاة الإسلام السياسي يستخدمون مفردات تنتمي للرأسمال الرمزي الديني للجمهور للسيطرة علي المجال العام( من قبيل الشريعة والحكم بما أنزل الله وتطبيق الحدود وغيرها); وبما سيجعل من دولة الإسلام السياسي, الدولة التنين فعلا ↗

— علي مبروك

#political #politics #religion #religion

Those who think that modern times are wickeder than previous times are apt to identify the cause as the weakening of a sense of moral law, associated with the departure of religious traditions of morality as a social influence... Such views give comfort to apologists for religion, who fasten on the implication that to revive a culture of moral concern people must be encouraged back into churches. But this reprises the usual muddle that getting people to accept as true... such propositions as that at a certain historical point a virgin gave birth, that the laws of nature were arbitrarily suspended so that, for example, water turned into wine, that several corpses came to life (and so forth), will somehow give them a logical reason for living morally (according to the attached view of what is moral - e.g. not marrying if you can help it, not divorcing if you do, and so forth again). It is scarcely needful to repeat that the morality and the metaphysics here separately at stake do not justify or even need one another, and that the moral questions require to be grounded and justified on their own merits in application to what they concern, namely, the life of human beings in the social setting. ↗

— A.C. Grayling

#religion #nature