“Unnatural, unorthodox, amoral: those pretensions crumble when confronted by true happiness. You shouldn t give another the authority to draw a line defining the boundaries of acceptable joy.”
“Not everyone can be bribed with meat, Oberon. They Can t? Oh! you mean they re vegetarian. No, they eat meat. It just doesn t sway their decision making process. Well that... that s just wrong, Atticus!Are they Monsters? It s like they have no moral center!”
“Thought he, it s a wicked world in all meridians; I ll die a pagan.”
“Racism negates two aspects of man s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.”
“Inquisitor Lorsen s thin lip curled. There is truly nothing in you of what separates man from animal, is there? You are bereft of conscience. An utter absence of morality. You have no principle beyond the selfish. Cosca s face hardened as he leaned forwards. Perhaps when you have faced as many disappointments and suffered as many betrayals as I, you will see it - there is no principle beyond the selfish, Inquisitor, and men are animals. Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier. There have been many times in my life when I have wished it was not so. But it is so.”
“The number one responsibility for each of us is to change ourselves with hope that others will follow.”
“In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that human beings cannot be truly good or moral without faith in God and without submis- sion to the will of Christ. Unfortunately, Lewis does not provide any actual data for his assertions. They are nothing more than the mild musings of a wealthy British man, pondering the state of humanity’s soul between his sips of tea. Had Lewis actually famil- iarized himself with real human beings of the secular sort, per- haps sat and talked with them, he would have had to reconsider this notion. As so many apostates explained to me, morality is most certainly possible beyond the confines of faith. Can people be good without God? Can a moral orientation be sustained and developed outside of a religious context? The answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes.”
“...perhaps great sins start as simple weakness, and the consistent placing of self before others.”
“No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.”
“A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger.”
“Even though Christ Himself would not deliver us from the power of the Totalitarian State, as He did not deliver Himself, we must see His purpose in it all. Maybe his children are being persecuted by the world in order that they might withdraw themselves from the world. Maybe His most violent enemies may be doing His work negatively, for it could be the mission of totalitarianism to preside over the liquidation of a modern world that became indifferent to God and His moral laws.”
“The Sun would have wasted its life but for the evolution of life on earth. The one who gives should be grateful to the one who receives.”
“There is no right or wrong, only what we believe is more right or more wrong”
“Our Blessed Lord left the world without leaving any written message. His doctrine was Himself. Ideal and History were identified in Him. The truth that all other ethical teachers proclaimed, and the light that they gave to the world, was not IN them, but OUTSIDE them. Our Divine Lord, however, identified Divine Wisdom with Himself. It was the first time in history that it was ever done, and it has never been done since.”
“Morality comes from religion? There are no Baptist babies or Catholic babies or Muslim babies. Religion is imposed on children by adults and society, and morality is an evolutionary adaptation. Period.”
“The supernatural worldview is causing a great number of otherwise intelligent people to cling to a collection of atavistic concepts that have not, and never will serve humanity in any ultimately beneficial way. Any benefits that spirituality ostensibly provides to its adherents, can be found equally in the worldview of philosophy and ethics, communities of other kinds, and so on. It s a myth that the only morality, hope, purpose and comfort to be found, resides only in the supernatural.”
“So how does God affect justice in this life/economy/reality? A lightening bolt, an angel of death, or by the hand of a human being? ~R. Alan Woods [2012]”