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Stephen R. Prothero QUOTES

Stephen R. Prothero QUOTES

1 " One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

2 " On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says nothing about how to wage war. The Quran, by contrast, is filled with just-war precepts. Here war is allowed in self-defense (2:190; 22:39), but hell is the punishment for killing other Muslims (4:93), and the execution of prisoners of war is explicitly condemned (47:4). Whether in the abstract is is better to rely on a scripture that regulates war or a scripture that hopes war away is an open question, but no Muslim-majority country has yet dropped an atomic bomb in war. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

3 " Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

4 " Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity's own traditions of holy war and 'texts of terror.' Like Hinduism's Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

5 " Pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

6 " Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

7 " If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

8 " Both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting. "

― Stephen R. Prothero

9 " But even if religion makes no sense to you, you need to make sense of religion to to make sense of the world. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

10 " A few years ago I was standing around the photocopier in Boston University’s Department of Religion when a visiting professor from Austria offered a passing observation about American undergraduates. They are very religious, he told me, but they know next to nothing about religion. Thanks to compulsory religious education (which in Austria begins in elementary schools), European students can name the twelve apostles and the Seven Deadly Sins, but they wouldn’t be caught dead going to church or synagogue themselves. American students are just the opposite. Here faith without understanding is the standard; here religious ignorance is bliss. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't

11 " the disparity between Americans’ veneration of the Bible and their understanding of it, painting a picture of a nation that believes God has spoken in scripture but can’t be bothered to listen to what God has to say. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't

12 " what makes religious folks religious today is not so much that they believe in Jesus’ divinity or Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths but that they hold certain moral positions on bedroom issues such as premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't

13 " Religious illiteracy is more dangerous because religion is the most volatile constituent of culture, because religion has been, in addition to one of the greatest forces for good in world history, one of the greatest forces for evil. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't

14 " Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation

15 " True, (Jefferson's) rational religion ran in rivulets outside the American mainstream, but heterodoxy is faith of a different form and, like orthodoxy, should be recognized for what it is: a way of being religious. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon

16 " you cannot really respect a religion that you do not understand "

― Stephen R. Prothero , Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't

17 " Why allow John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi to dominate your book group when Jefferson, Lincoln, and King are in the room? "

― Stephen R. Prothero , The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation

18 " The Second Noble Truth is more hopeful: suffering has an origin. Everything in this world is interdependent, linked in a great chain of cause and effect, so suffering must come from somewhere. Buddhists identify twelve links in this chain of “dependent origination” (pratitya-samutpada) but the key links are ignorance, thirst, and grasping. We suffer because we close our eyes to the way the world really is. We pretend we are independent when we are really interdependent. We pretend that changing things are unchanging. And we desperately desire the world and the people who populate it to be as we imagine it (and them) to be. And so we suffer when our spouses take up new interests, or when our favorite (and perfect just as it was) old-fashioned ice cream store puts up a ridiculous Web site with a stupid new logo, or when the brand new T-bird we are proudly driving home from the Ford dealership is hit by a rock thrown by a six-year-old kid who would go on to write this book (true story). We suffer because we desperately grasp after people, places, and things, as if they can redeem us from our suffering. We suffer because we cling to beliefs and judgments, not least beliefs in gods, and judgments that this friend or that enemy is morally bankrupt. Today “you have changed” is an explanation one lover gives to another as she is walking out the door. In Buddhism, “you have changed” is a description of what is happening every moment of every day. The "

― Stephen R. Prothero , God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

19 " The most controversial part of the controversial legislation now derided by Republicans as “Obamacare”—the mandate that individuals buy health insurance—was originally proposed by Republican economists, championed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, introduced in Congress by Republican politicians, and enacted in Massachusetts under Republican governor Mitt Romney.16 Planned Parenthood, now anathema to Republicans because of its pro-choice policies, enjoyed the support of two of the biggest dynasties of Republican politics, the Goldwater and Bush families, until the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s made the pro-life position a litmus test for the GOP. And Republican platforms from 1940 to 1976 endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment for women. "

― Stephen R. Prothero , The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation

20 " religion is now emerging alongside race, gender, and ethnicity as one of the key identity markers of the twenty-first century.7 "

― Stephen R. Prothero , Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't