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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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Wendy Kaminer
Age: 74
Born: 1949
Born: December 28
Journalist
Lawyer
Writer
Hard
Atheism
Intellectualism
Line
Skepticism
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Authors
Views
Refuge
Lines
Contempt
Human
Forgiving
Humans
Generally
Unenlightened
Take
Spirituality
Foibles

More quotes by 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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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.
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.
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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There are only two states of being in the world of codependency - recovery and denial.
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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Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality.
Wendy Kaminer
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Faith is not a function of stupidity but a frequent cause of it.
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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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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Under the rubric of religious freedom, we respect the right to worship differently much more than the right to worship not at all.
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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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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We don't cut off the hands of thieves or castrate rapists. Why must we murder murderers?
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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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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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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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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Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice - a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.
Wendy Kaminer
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When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven.
Wendy Kaminer