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Nowhere in this book do I put the case for eating lots of meat, because there isn’t one. Meat is an extravagance.
“Once again, the point of this discussion is not to accuse Christians of endorsing torture and persecution. Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don’t, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift”
― The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
― The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
“Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”
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“The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window.”
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Morten’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Morten’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
2 books
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42 friends
2 books
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7 friends
4 books
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13 friends
1 book
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8 friends
140 books
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42 friends
1 book
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15 friends
0 books
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35 friends
11 books
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12 friends
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