“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing,...” — Steven Pinker Quote

“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.”

“Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.”

“Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.”

“The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.”

“Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.”

“Our aspirations are too often tainted by our greed, tarnished by the foolishness of our trifling agendas, leveraged by the rot of our biases, infected by adherence to the toxicity of politically-correct propaganda, and misappropriated by our desire for acclaim and acceptance. And the subsequent rot that gorges itself on such aberrant behaviors is veneered thick with lies that incessantly deny that any such rot exists or that it is being liberally fed. Prayer is the single force that has both the potency and capacity to transform our greed into grace, make sacrifice our agenda, bring bias to heel at the feet of a passion to bless, transform the corrosive constraints of politics into an unquenchable thirst to serve, and rest in the fact that if God accepts us no other acceptance is necessary. Prayer is the game-changer. The culture-changer. The life-changer. Make no mistake about it. It is the answer to the desperation of our times and the hope of a future.”

“I think this is what we all want to hear: that we are not alone in hitting the bottom, and that it is possible to come out of that place courageous, beautiful, and strong.”

“Secular materialism dismisses belief in spiritual reality and the use of imagination as false; it sees beauty as dispensable and subjective, emotion as chemical, imagination (and with it, religion) as fantasy. Ironically, this view increasingly influences the way we live out our faith and speak about God, as apologists seek to argue God's existence on materialism's own terms, using scientific proof–style reasoning, and analytical debate to "prove" the reality of the spiritual world. It filters down to us in a thousand ordinary ways, shaping our models of spiritual growth, lines of productivity or casting faith as an assent to a list of doctrinal statements rather than the renewal of ourselves and stories. It makes us doubt the "usefulness" of beauty or the spiritual purpose of imagination, but this is a profoundly un-Christian view of faith and personhood. To reject image, emotion, and story as peripheral to faith is to ignore the way God created us – as being made in his image to create in our turn, as souls capable of both reason and analysis, but also equally capable of imagination, creativity, and emotion.”