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 an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience, . Rebecca Goldstein
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More Quotes By Rebecca Goldstein
  1. No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire...

  2. (As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.

  3. Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.

  4. Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.

  5. Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.

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