Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Though humanism is the moral code that people will converge upon when they are rational, culturally diverse, and need to get along, it is by no means a vapid or saccharine lowest common denominator. The idea that morality consists in the maximization of human flourishing clashes with two perennially seductive alternatives. The first is theistic mor
... See moreSteven Pinker • Enlightenment Now
So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.
Yuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.
Jonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
“I nostri valori morali, le nostre emozioni, i nostri amori, non sono meno veri per il fatto di essere parte della natura, di essere condivisi con il mondo animale o per essere cresciuti ed essere stati determinati dai milioni di anni dell’evoluzione della nostra specie. Anzi, sono più veri per questo: sono reali. Sono la complessa realtà di cui si
... See more“We are hollowed, bit by bit, as all that made us human dies. Our kindness. Our empathy. Our capacity for fear, and love. One by one, they slough away, until all that’s left is the desire to hunt, to hurt, to feed, to kill. That is how we die. Made reckless by our hunger. Convinced we are unkillable until someone or something proves us wrong.”
Where did the Epicureans and the Stoics get their ideas? Like Keynes’ madmen, they too, heard voices: the Epicureans heard the voice of the body, as it screams out to us, in the language of pleasure and pain, and demands that we promote and protect and serve it. The Stoics heard the voice of the group, when it draws each individual’s attention to t
... See moreAgnes Callard • Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life
I find it striking that so many different religious traditions work to expose this sense that “I am the center of the universe” as a dangerous illusion.
Shai Held • Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life
As the naturalist Edward O. Wilson put it, we’ve got ‘Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology’.
Carolyn Steel • Sitopia
An evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate studies, he argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way. Carefully working throu
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