Prothero V Quotes & Sayings

When historian of science Naomi Oreskes surveyed all peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 in the world's leading scientific journal, Science, she found that there were 980 supporting the idea of human-induced global warming and none opposing it. — Donald R. Prothero

But even if religion makes no sense to you, you need to make sense of religion to to make sense of the world. — Stephen R. Prothero

When I write I pretend I'm telling a story to someone in the room and I don't want them to get up until I'm finished. — James Patterson

At least in popular parlance, what makes religious folks religious today is not so much that they believe in Jesus' divinity or Buddhism's Four Noble Truths but that they hold certain moral positions on bedroom issues such as premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion. — Stephen Prothero

I love seeing original cartoons. You get to see the artist's corrections, like erasures or Wite-Out or patches, and you get to see the artist's line in better detail, and what kind of ink they use - whether they like a cold black or a warm black, and what kind of paper they like, how big or small they like to draw - art nerd stuff like that. — Roz Chast

Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity's own traditions of holy war and 'texts of terror.' Like Hinduism's Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war. — Stephen R. Prothero

True, (Jefferson's) rational religion ran in rivulets outside the American mainstream, but heterodoxy is faith of a different form and, like orthodoxy, should be recognized for what it is: a way of being religious. — Stephen R. Prothero

When someone shows you their heart, their past, their wounds, they have entrusted you with the deepest part of themselves. It is the part of themselves that makes them uniquely beautiful. To be trusted in this way is a great honor. Guard that trust with your life. — Yasmin Mogahed

As far as I'm concerned you can fuck whomever you please, though my general observation has been that, as far as the reputations of young women are concerned, the less fucking the better. The reverse is true for young men of course. Hardly fair, but then life is unfair in so many ways, this one hardly seems worth commenting on. — Joe Abercrombie

I was like a clock that had exploded- my springs were hanging out, my hands were cockeyed, and my numbers were falling off. — Anthony Kiedis

Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times. — Stephen R. Prothero

On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says nothing about how to wage war. The Quran, by contrast, is filled with just-war precepts. Here war is allowed in self-defense (2:190; 22:39), but hell is the punishment for killing other Muslims (4:93), and the execution of prisoners of war is explicitly condemned (47:4). Whether in the abstract is is better to rely on a scripture that regulates war or a scripture that hopes war away is an open question, but no Muslim-majority country has yet dropped an atomic bomb in war. — Stephen R. Prothero

One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out. — Stephen R. Prothero

Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God. — Stephen R. Prothero

Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side. — Stephen R. Prothero

There are many more traits that the climate deniers share with the creationists and Holocaust deniers and others who distort the truth. — Donald R. Prothero

This weekend on The History Channel, someone digs through old plastic junk ("It's a Dukes of Hazzard wastebasket!"), someone else tries to sell a doll head ("I used to take the heads off the bodies, and I kept the heads") . . . and Larry the Cable Guy taste-tests Tabasco sauce ("I can't feel my dadgum tongue!"). The History Channel. What the hell happened to us? Jimmy Kimmel Live4 — Donald R. Prothero

I think the idea that death is not the end, that your dog's just gone to live on the farm, is limiting. Thoughts like that prevent you from making the most of the time that you have. — Jimmy Carr

So before everyone begins the big party for 'Brontosaurus' and celebrates this huge diversity of sauropod names, let's hold our horses. — Donald R. Prothero

If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do. — Stephen R. Prothero

Both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting. — Stephen R. Prothero

Mikolay took his wand out, touched the cage's lock and said: "Eis Izras" three times.
The door opened at once, unfortunately making lots of noise and waking the humans up.
Mikolay knew a few powerful hexes and he was able to create small flying dragons.
He hoped that he could stop the people, animals, and block the shadows to buy some time. — Magda M. Olchawska

So I bandaged the cut, packed up my Gillette blades and caught the eleven-thirty bus to Boston. — Sylvia Plath

Pretending that the world's religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate. — Stephen R. Prothero

And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, Would you like anything to read? — Dylan Thomas

[N]early every creationist debater will mention the second law of thermodynamics and argue that complex systems like the earth and life cannot evolve, because the second law seems to say that everything in nature is running down and losing energy, not getting more complex. But that's NOT what the second law says; every creationist has heard this but refuses to acknowledge it. The second law only applies to closed systems, like a sealed jar of heated gases that gradually cools down and loses energy. But the earth is not a closed system
it constantly gets new energy from the sun, and this (through photosynthesis) is what powers life and makes it possible for life to become more complex and evolve. It seems odd that the creationists continue to misuse the second law of thermodynamics when they have been corrected over and over again, but the reason is simple: it sounds impressive to their audience with limited science education, and if a snow job works, you stay with it. — Donald R. Prothero

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true ... This is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue. — Stephen Prothero

Is there anything you want to do before we put our heads in plastic boxes for two days?'
I thought about this for a second, then held the side of her face and kissed her.
We both zipped up our suits just in time to see the reactor blow: a column of green radioactive fire, belching black smoke. Di squeezed my hand, our big boxy heads knocked clumsily together, and I tried to think of something romantic to say.
'Well, I guess that's why they all die of cancer. — Tom Francis