Religious Belief and Public Morality (1984)
Context: Almost all Americans accept some religious values as a part of our public life. We are a religious people, many of us descended from ancestors who came here expressly to live their religious faith free from coercion or repression. But we are also a people of many religions, with no established church, who hold different beliefs on many matters.
Our public morality, then — the moral standards we maintain for everyone, not just the ones we insist on in our private lives — depends on a consensus view of right and wrong. The values derived from religious belief will not — and should not — be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large, by consensus.
That those values happen to be religious values does not deny them acceptability as a part of this consensus. But it does not require their acceptability, either.
“Nietzsche was an inveterately religious thinker, whose incessant attacks on Christian beliefs and values attest to the fact that he could never shake them off.”
The Deception: Nietzsche's Optimism (p.45)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)
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John Gray 164
British philosopher 1948Related quotes
Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 41 (p. 419)
GM I 2 p. 26
Source: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), p. 2
The Credo of Empowerment, as quoted in David M. Mandell Atheist Acrimonious (Vervante, 2008), p. 176.
The Point of View for My Work as An Author, Soren Kierkegaard, translated by Walter Lowrie 1939, 1962 P. 77
1840s, The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1848)
“No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.”
Source: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Sir Adolphus William Ward and Alfred Rayney Waller (eds.) The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-21), vol. 3, ch. 17, sect. 16. http://www.bartleby.com/213/1716.html
Criticism