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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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Susan Jacoby
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: June 4
Author
Journalist
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New York City
New York
Facts
Rituals
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Atheism
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More quotes by Susan Jacoby

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I don't deny that religion is very healthful to a lot of people. And as long as they don't try to convert me, I have, you know, nothing - and to interfere with the rights of people to believe other religions or to not believe in any religion at all - as long as they mind their own religion - perfectly all right with me...
Susan Jacoby
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one of the great weaknesses of the women's rights movement over the past two hundred years has been the tendency of its history to disappear, so that it must be resurrected for each new generation.
Susan Jacoby
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The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.
Susan Jacoby
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Feminists who want to censor what they regard as harmful pornography have essentially the same motivation as other would-be censors: They want to use the power of the state to accomplish what they have been unable to achieve in the marketplace of ideas and images. The impulse to censor places no faith in the possibilities of democratic persuasion.
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.
Susan Jacoby
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hope is not a plan of action.
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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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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I can't imagine falling in love with a devoutly religious person.
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.
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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Every brand of religion maintains, and is, a permanent mechanism for transmitting ideas and values - whether one regards those values as admirable or ridiculous. Secularist organizations, with their generally looser, nonhierarchical structures, lack the power to hand down and disseminate their heritage in such a systematic way.
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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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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The more intelligent and competent a woman is in her adult life, the less likely she is to have received an adequate amount of romantic attention in adolescence.
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 don't see why any president has to talk about his belief in God.
Susan Jacoby
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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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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'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.
Susan Jacoby