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"Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one's savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later."
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"For Restoration Of Mankind To Be Fulfilled, A Terrible Sacrifice Was Necessary."
"Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body and if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death is unendurably as before it."
"Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature."
"Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety."
"Kingdom priority is understood by disciples only."
"Religion is the product of organizations called churches."
"God wants the church to become the initiator of the reformation and changes in the society."
Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker
"Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate."
"The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call "self-help."
"At first happiness might seem like just desserts for biological fitness (more accurately, the states that would have led to fitness in the environment in which we evolved). We are happier when we are healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved. Compared to their opposites, these objects of striving are conducive to reproduction. The function of happiness would be to mobilize the mind to seek the keys to Darwinian fitness. When we are unhappy, we work for the things that make us happy; when we are happy, we keep the status quo. The problem is, how much fitness is worth striving for?"
"Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business."
"The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men."
"My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries."
"The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth."
"Many criminologists believe that the source of the state's pacifying effect isn't just its brute coercive power but the trust it commands among the populace. After all, no state can post an informant in every pub and farmhouse to monitor breaches of the law, and those that try are totalitarian dictatorships that rule by fear, not civilized societies where people coexist through self-control and empathy. A Leviathan can civilize a society only when the citizens feel that its laws, law enforcement, and other social arrangements are legitimate, so that they don't fall back on their worst impulses as soon as Leviathan's back is turned."
"As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too."
"The [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning, learning is caused by complexity in the mind."
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