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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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Wendy Kaminer
Age: 74
Born: 1949
Born: December 28
Journalist
Lawyer
Writer
People
Atheist
Atheists
Absolutes
Rapture
Absolute
Thin
Atheism
Protected
Religious
Surprising
Religion
Compared
Often
Truths
Gruel
Better
Tolerance
Agnostics

More quotes by Wendy Kaminer

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What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression.
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Faith is not a function of stupidity but a frequent cause of it.
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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.
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One of the reasons I'm drawn to civil libertarianism as opposed to communitarianism is that I don't worry so much about the rights of the majority a majority is quite capable of enforcing and protecting its own rights.
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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.
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When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven.
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Under the rubric of religious freedom, we respect the right to worship differently much more than the right to worship not at all.
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There are only two states of being in the world of codependency - recovery and denial.
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Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship.
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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.
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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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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
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In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity, but a frequent cause of it.
Wendy Kaminer
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For the most part, executions happen in obscurity. If people did hear about executions, if they were publicized, even televised, I fear more would enjoy them than be repelled by them.
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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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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As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.
Wendy Kaminer
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I don't think of myself as having a particular role. I'm lucky enough to be able to make my living essentially by expressing my opinions. But, you know, I think the world would manage quite well if I weren't doing it.
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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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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