Stephen Prothero famous quotes

Pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate.
-- Stephen Prothero

#Religious #Ignorance #Our World

Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.
-- Stephen Prothero

#Atheist #War #Opportunity

Both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.
-- Stephen Prothero

#Tolerance #Virtue #Empty

At least in popular parlance, what makes religious folks religious today is not so much that they believe in Jesus' divinity or Buddhism's Four Noble Truths but that they hold certain moral positions on bedroom issues such as premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion.
-- Stephen Prothero

#Religious #Jesus #Sex

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true...This is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue.
-- Stephen Prothero

#Beautiful #Europe #Lovely

Pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate.
-- Stephen Prothero

#Religious #Ignorance #Our World

Good religious poetry... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.

Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn't argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we're doing is, we're presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain.

And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.

Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance.

His ignorance is encyclopedic.

It is strictly and philosophically true in Nature and reason that there is no such thing as chance or accident; it being evident that these words do not signify anything really existing, anything that is truly an agent or the cause of any event; but they signify merely men's ignorance of the real an immediate cause.

On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.

I don't go in for being sorry for people. For one thing it's insulting. One is only sorry for people if they are sorry for themselves. Self-pity is the biggest stumbling block in our world today. ~Jessop

If we don't know that there is such a person as God, we don't know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other and our world. This is because the most important truths about us and them, is that we have been created by the Lord, and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence.