Whereas cognitive constraints on negative emotions can reduce distress, freeing positive emotions from such constraints can enhance religious experience.
It is true that the Chinese are not so religious as the Hindus, or even as the Japanese; and they are certainly not so religious as the Christian missionaries desire them to be.
It makes me upset, if not angry, when people assume that there can be no morality without a religious framework. If there's a moral framework without all that religious stuff, it's more valuable.
The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.
While few religious leaders and scholars would doubt the commonalities that exist among the various religious groups, the followers of these religions unfortunately struggle in their effort to peacefully coexist.
Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.
They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. —written for the Pennsylvania Assembly in its , 11 November 1755
But I will tell you what I say to my children: 'Go where you will; commit what crime you may; fall to what depth of degradation you may; .
We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelp...
If you like small government you need to work hard at having a strong national defense that is not so militant. Personal liberty is the purpose of government, to protect liberty - not to run your personal life, not to run the economy, and not to pret...
Do we exert our own liberties without injury to others - we exert them justly; do we exert them at the expense of others - unjustly. And, in thus doing, we step from the sure platform of liberty upon the uncertain threshold of tyranny.
Our liberty will not be secured at the sword's point... We must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it. And when the people reaches that height, God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, tyranny will crumble like a house of cards, a...
Link Appleyard: As long as he behaves himself in this town, I ain't got no, ah... Ransom Stoddard: Jurisdiction. Link Appleyard: What he said is right. I ain't got none of it.
The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try...
The recasting of the Origin Myth as a story about the perils of disobedience precipitated a kind of decoupling of scripture from religious experience: when religious authorities began to insist on the literal truth of scripture, they were effectively...
how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as ...
In the decades following the Revolution, America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change, but came to expected and prize it.
Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy.
Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity.
All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not plac...
If legislation is truly necessary, one would expect the government to be able to provide proof of this beyond anecdote and speculation. Such proof is the least we can expect before we accept a government restriction of liberty as legitimate.
