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Faith is not a function of stupidity but a frequent cause of it.

Wendy Kaminer

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Wendy Kaminer
Age: 74
Born: 1949
Born: December 28
Journalist
Lawyer
Writer
Frequent
Insult
Stupidity
Function
Cause
Causes
Faith
Empiricism

More quotes by Wendy Kaminer

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The dissemination of pseudoscience, including such things as the fascination with near-death experiences and the growing belief by Americans -- 34 percent of them -- in reincarnation are dangerous. They help to break down the standards of reason.
Wendy Kaminer
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Spirituality authors, who are generally forgiving of most human foibles ... take a hard line on intellectualism.... Skepticism they view with contempt, as the refuge of the unenlightened.
Wendy Kaminer
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The magical thinking encouraged by any belief in the supernatural, combined with the vilification of rationality and skepticism, is more conducive to conspiracy theories than it is to productive political debate.
Wendy Kaminer
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Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality.
Wendy Kaminer
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In this climate - with belief in guardian angels and creationism becoming commonplace - making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion hall.
Wendy Kaminer
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When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven.
Wendy Kaminer
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I don't see a direct conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of communities, because I don't perceive of communities as having rights in a way that individuals do. Communities certainly have interests, but they don't exactly have rights.
Wendy Kaminer
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We don't cut off the hands of thieves or castrate rapists. Why must we murder murderers?
Wendy Kaminer
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I don't care if religious people consider me amoral because I lack their beliefs in God. I do however care deeply about efforts to turn religious beliefs into law and those efforts benefit greatly from the conviction that individually and collectively we cannot be good without God.
Wendy Kaminer
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The press and the public like certainty and affirmation of popular biases. But real science thrives on the capacity for doubt.
Wendy Kaminer
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Jargon seems to be the place where the right brain and the left brain meet.
Wendy Kaminer
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It is the inevitable effect of religion on public policy that makes it a matter of public concern. Advocates of religiosity extol the virtues or moral habits that religion is supposed to instill in us. But we should be equally concerned with the intellectual habits it discourages.
Wendy Kaminer
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Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack (on the World Trade Center and Pentagon), we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative.
Wendy Kaminer
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The phenomenal success of the recovery movement reflects two simple truths that emerge in adolescence: all people love to talk about themselves, and most people are mad at their parents. You don't have to be in denial to doubt that truths like these will set us free.
Wendy Kaminer
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I don't spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don't consider that a relevant question. It's unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can't worry about.
Wendy Kaminer
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Give the FBI unchecked domestic spying powers and instead of focusing on preventing terrorism, it will revert to doing what it does best - monitoring, harassing, and intimidating political dissidents and thousands of harmless immigrants.
Wendy Kaminer
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Tolerance is thin gruel compared to the rapture of absolute truths. It's not surprising that religious people are often better protected by atheists and agnostics than each other.
Wendy Kaminer
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Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.
Wendy Kaminer
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As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.
Wendy Kaminer
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If all issues are personalized, we lose our capacity to entertain ideas, to generalize from our own or someone else's experiences, to think abstractly. We substitute sentimentality for thought.
Wendy Kaminer