A Quote by Michael Gerson
Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.
Related Quotes
I affirm my faith when I'm asked about it. But I always try to do so in a way that communicates absolute respect, not only for people who worship in a different way, but just as much respect for those who do not believe in God and who are atheists.
I don't think there is prejudice against atheists the same way there is prejudice against fat people. I don't think people hate or contemn atheists; I think people feel sorry for atheists.
When did atheists become so evangelical? I mean, if you don't believe something to be true, wouldn't you just ignore it? That's certainly what I do. Whether it's leprechauns or a congressional debt reduction plan - if I'm convinced it's fiction, I simply put it out of my mind. Not the atheists. They are obsessed with faith and religious practice. Their identities and their works are one big reaction to that which they hate. No longer content to simply dismiss God and those who follow in Him, the New Atheists have created a cult of unbelief.
It should make people nervous when non-transparent regimes, that have announced that they've got nuclear warheads, fire missiles. This is not the way you conduct business in the world. This is not the way that peaceful nations conduct their affairs.
You want a judge who makes objective decisions, and that's why temperament is such an important component of being a judge. You have to earn people's respect, because they know that you are deciding the case based on the facts and the law, not because they're trying to be your friend.
The way one behaves and feels as a Dutchman and Dutchwoman is the result of a long development. It is by no means 'the natural way' or 'the human way' of behaving, it is a particular code of behavior which has developed over the years. And these people, the immigrant people, come from a group where different standards of conduct and behavior have developed. What clashes are these two standards of conduct and behavior.
The good guys in my movies mind their own business and they don't judge other people. And the bad guys are jealous, they judge other people without knowing the whole story, they want all the attention and they're mean spirited. So I think my films are politically correct in a weird way.
Wars are fought to gain a certain objective. War itself is not the objective; victory is not the objective; you fight to remove the obstruction that comes in the way of your objective. If you let victory become the end in itself then you've gone astray and forgotten what you were originally fighting about.
Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.
For libertarians, freedom entails the right of people to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful. For conservatives, freedom entails the right of government to do just about anything it wants, even if its conduct is violent.
I am a lover of the cause of Christ and of virtue, chastity, and an upright, steady course of conduct and a holy walk. I despise a hypocrite or a covenant breaker. I judge them not; God shall judge them according to their works. I am a lover even of mine enemies, for an enemy seeketh to destroy openly. I can pray for those who despitefully use and persecute me, but for all I cannot hope.
We haven't yet found a speck of evidence for biology on another world, so we have no objective way to judge whether life is a onetime fluke or a near-inevitable phenomenon.
I don't believe we need a good conservative judge, and I don't believe we need a good liberal judge. I subscribe to the Justice Potter Stewart standard. He was a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. And he said the mark of a good judge, good justice, is that when you're reading their decision, their opinion, you can't tell if it's written by a man or woman, a liberal or a conservative, a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian. You just know you're reading a good judicial decision.
I can't gather around and talk about how much everybody in the room doesn't believe in God. I just don't - I don't have the energy for that, and so I... Agnostic separates me from the conduct of atheists whether or not there is strong overlap between the two categories, and at the end of the day I'd rather not be any category at all.
If five years from now we solve the access problem, but what we're hearing is all encrypted, I'll probably, if I'm still here, be talking about that in a very different way: the objective is the same. The objective is for us to get those conversations whether they're by an alligator clip or ones and zeros. Whoever they are, whatever they are, I need them.
You ask people, do you pray to [a person or] God. If you say yes to that, you're religious by, presumably, anybody's standards of your conduct. And it's the yes to that question that applies to 40% of scientists. So, there're plenty of atheists who are scientists or not scientists. There maybe a conflict but many people in this country coexist in both worlds.
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