Gopnik / Nixey / Moss

 [ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/31/miracles-and-wonder-elaine-pagels-book-review-heretic-catherine-nixey ]

Christianity, Catherine Nixey insists, largely invented religious intolerance and the persecution of dissenters. Hellenistic culture was imperfectly tolerant; the Christian one perfectly intolerant. Constantine, adopting the faith as an expansive gesture, was shocked by the vengeful fervor of his new adherents. Nor was Christian intolerance simply a response to persecution, the Notre Dame professor Candida Moss contends in The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (2013). Her book, as the title suggests, attempts to dismantle the idea of Christianity as a faith forged in suffering. She argues, instead, that it constructed a cult of victimhood while stamping out dissent and violently opposing any pluralism of thought. Christianity, often so powerful in causes of human equality—Martin Luther King, Jr., after all, led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference until the day he died—has a bad record when it comes to authoritarianism, too often being it. 

[Adam Gopnik in a book review in the New Yorker]

Basquiat

 [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7883067-art-is-how-we-decorate-space-music-is-how-we]

Art is how we decorate space;
Music is how we decorate time.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Brin

 [https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/03/and-yet-more-news-from-or-about.html]

Across human history, science - and its ancillary arts like equality before law - almost never happened. Instead, people in most societies preferred stories. Incantations about the world, told by their parents and then by priests and by kings.  

Spinoza

 [Snippets from Steven Nadler's A Book Forged In Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age]

Spinoza laid the groundwork for subsequent liberal, secular, and democratic thinking. 

"True religion" consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor.

Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam Jewry at age 23.

Religion as we know it is nothing more than organized superstition, grounded not in reason but in ignorance, hope, and fear.

Spinoza wants to see a politics of hope (for eternal reward) and fear (of eternal punishment) replaced by a politics of reason, virtue, freedom, and moral behavior.

God ≡ Nature

Imagination and Intellect: The improvement of one entails the weakening of the other.

Spinoza was the most prominent early modern model of the secular individual.

Philosophy, that is, the pursuit of knowledge, and religion have nothing to do with one another.

Faith requires only such beliefs that strengthen the will to love one's neighbor.

The ultimate purpose of the state is the cultivation of reason.

This scandalous work — a book that denied the divinity of the Bible, ruled out the possibility of miracles, identified God's providence with the laws of nature, deflated the revelations of the prophets, and reduced religion to a simple moral code.

After several years, the book was banned in the Dutch Republic. 

George Eliot

 [Evangelical Teaching, 1855]

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?  Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity. 

Voltaire

It is unquestionable that certain words and ceremonies will effectively destroy a flock of sheep, if administered with a sufficient portion of arsenic.

Voltaire

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Jorge Luis Borges

 [Quoted in Borges and Me (quote from 1971)]

This is one of the benefits of extreme age. Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all.

[Borges is 71 at the time]

Samuel Butler

 [The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)]

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.

Alison Bechdel

 [from The Secret to Superhuman Strength, 2021]

Like many gay people of my generation, I would not behave like a teenager until I was in my twenties.