9 quotes
This is where they come into their own, for there's money in hope: the more desperate the hope, the richer the pickings.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
But it is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
[If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
The human mind is a wanton storyteller and even more, a profligate seeker after pattern. We see faces in clouds and tortillas, fortunes in tea leaves and planetary movements. It is quite difficult to prove a real pattern as distinct from a superficial illusion.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways'.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a 'they' as opposed to a 'we' can be identified at all.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously. A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)