Utilizador:ValJor/The end of faith

Em abril de 2010 eu li um ótimo livro chamado The end of faith do pensador americano Sam Harris.

Esta página é uma lista de algumas das frases mais interessantes ou controversas do livro. Deixei-as em inglês mesmo, pois não queria perder a força das mesmas numa tradução possivelmente mal feita.

Em negrito estão o meu "Top Ten", as minhas frases preferidas.

Página	Frase
12	A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life.
13	Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.
13	Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences antithetical to our survival.
14	Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal", or they will unmake our world.
15	The very ideal of religious tolerance is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.
16	The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained.
23	We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
24	If we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature would be impossible to justify.
29	The concessions we have made to religious faith have rendered us unable to name, much less address, one of the most pervasive causes of conflict in our world.
46	The fact that we are no longer killing people for heresy in the West suggests that bad ideas, however sacred, cannot survive the company of good ones forever.
46	Many Muslims are convinced that God takes an active interest in women's clothing.
46	Should Muslims really be free to believe that the Creator of the universe is concerned about hemlines?
48	Our descendants will look upon many of our beliefs as both impossibly quaint and suicidally stupid.
64	Millions among us are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them.
65	Every child is instructed that it is a sacred duty to disregard the facts of this world out of deference to the God who lurks in his mother's and father's imagination.
67	If having half of your people systematically delivered to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking for your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could.
67	The fact that unjustified beliefs can have a consoling influence on the human mind is no argument in their favor.
71	Is a person really free to believe a proposition for which he has no evidence? No.
72	We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them "religious"; otherwise, they are likely to be called "mad", "psychotic" or "delusional".
72	Most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truth.
107	In our opposition to the worldview of Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and fourteenth-century hordes are pouring into our world. Unfortunately, they are now armed with twenty-first-century weapons.
108	By any measure of normativity we might wish to adopt, there are good beliefs and there are bad ones - and it should now be obvious to everyone that Muslims have more than their fair share of the latter.
109	We are at war with Islam.
110	Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest.
111	Moderate Islam - really moderate, really critical of Muslim irrationality - scarcely seems to exist. If it does, it is doing as good a job at hiding as moderate Christianity did in the fourteenth century (and for similar reasons).
111	The duty of jihad is an unambiguous call to world conquest.
123	On almost every page the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise non-believers.
143	It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development.
146	Any honest witness to current events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim governments.
150	We have arrived at a period in our history where civil society, in a global scale, is not merely a nice idea; it is essential for the maintenance of civilization.
152	If a stable peace is ever to be achieved between Islam and the West, Islam must undergo a radical transformation.
154	Millions of Christians and Muslims now organize their lives around prophetic traditions that will only find fulfillment once rivers of blood begin flowing from Jerusalem.
170	Is the difference between good and evil just a matter of what any particular group of human beings says it is?
171	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.
171	The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd.
172	It is worth remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox, plague and filariasis.
172	The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago is no one to consult on questions of ethics.
173	A close study of our holy books reveals that the God of Abraham is a ridiculous fellow - capricious, petulant and cruel.
173	Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.
195	Three million souls can be starved and murdered in the Congo, and our media scarcely blink. When a princess dies in a car accident, however, a quarter of the earth's population falls prostrate with grief.
199	Pacifism is ultimately nothing more than a willingness to die, and to let others die, at the pleasure of the world's thugs.
202	When your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.
215	Advanced civilization did not arise in sub-Saharan Africa, because one can't saddle a rhinoceros and ride it into battle.