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The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.

Susan Jacoby

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Susan Jacoby
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: June 4
Author
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Absolute
Persecutions
Biggest
Claiming
Conflict
Persecution
Religious
Occur
War
Religions
History
Truths
Come
Wars
Absolutes

More quotes by Susan Jacoby

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Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck.
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People think that, that conversion to Judaism is just a modern phenomenon. But there was an era in the late Roman Empire Judaism was not a proselytizing religion. It didn't go out looking for converts, but it accepted converts.
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I'd be the last person in the world to deny that there are many people for whom faith is - can be a great sustaining force.
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I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed that than I can imagine falling in love with someone who believes that blacks shouldn't be able to vote and are inferior to whites.
Susan Jacoby
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If during the Reformation you were a Catholic who lived in a part of Germany in which Lutheranism was the ascendant religion and the ruler of the province or the region was Lutheran, to stay a Catholic, you either had to be a dissenter or you had to leave.
Susan Jacoby
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I think people who love each other and live together and have children together need to agree on the things that are most important in life.
Susan Jacoby
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hope is not a plan of action.
Susan Jacoby
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Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
Susan Jacoby
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I'm not saying that I think atheists are better than other people. God, no. What I am saying is I do feel that this an integral part of who I am. And it's not something that I could comfortably think of not sharing with the person I loved most in the world.
Susan Jacoby
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I wanted to know how much of conversion was forced - that is, forced in the sense that the Inquisition forced people to choose - forced Jews, let's say, and Muslims to choose conversion to Christianity or death. I wanted to see how much of conversion historically was forced in that way and how much of it was really a kind of persuasion.
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The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization
Susan Jacoby
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Atheism is not a religion. One of the things, in fact, that atheism lacks are the kinds of rituals that religion does provide and I would be the first to say that.
Susan Jacoby
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I completely can't understand people of different faiths who say that their children will choose when they grow up. I think that if you believe in a religion, most people believe that it's right.
Susan Jacoby
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Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.
Susan Jacoby
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I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.
Susan Jacoby
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I feel culturally Jewish because of the way that I have lived my adult life.
Susan Jacoby
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That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.
Susan Jacoby
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This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
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More than half of Americans have changed religions at least once in their adult lifetime. This is - the rate of religious conversion here is much, much higher than it is anywhere in Europe, for example.
Susan Jacoby
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It's something fundamental to me, human rights that people are equal under law simply because they are human beings. And I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed, for instance, as Orthodox Jews do, that women are unclean during their menstrual periods.
Susan Jacoby