Heathens are unredeemed outcasts from heaven who roam the planet without hope of surviving the deaths of their bodies. They may have values, but they are not secured by any divine source. Yet we embrace this because we think it represents the truth. Julian Baggini Read Quote
Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all. Julian Baggini Read Quote
I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible. Julian Baggini Read Quote
No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can’t decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you’ve made in your life to date. Julian Baggini Read Quote
You don’t choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe. Julian Baggini Read Quote
Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test. Julian Baggini Read Quote
Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice. Julian Baggini Read Quote
We can take suffering to be an opportunity to learn and to grow. But if we are honest, we should remember that this is making the best of a bad job, and that minimising suffering takes priority over optimising its outcome. Julian Baggini Read Quote
If you believe you are right, then you should believe that you can make the case that you’re right. This requires you to deal with serious objections properly. Julian Baggini Read Quote
Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too. Julian Baggini Read Quote
