It's not what we don't know that hurts us, people say. It's what we believe is true that isn't that does the damage.
The Tea Baggers, they're not a movement, they're a cult.... Cults tend to populate from within, encouraging members to have huge broods of children and to give them strange names, like Moonbeam, and Trig.
To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.
My family, they cannot have anything to do with us. They believe that, you know, their duty is to deliver me to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.
The sad part about our past is that religions, ironically enough, are responsible for creating the most destructive idea that has ever been visited upon the human race: the idea that there is such a thing as 'better.'
The belief that society benefits from destruction is lunacy.
The Way teaches that people outside the cult are evil - of the Devil. In line with that belief, the members tried to alienate me from my family, to whom I am very close, and from my friends. So I just drifted away. In seeing my three-month involvement as 'just a phase,' my parents were lucky rather than wise.
There are, and always have been, destructive pseudo-scientific notions linked to race and religion; these are the most widespread and damaging. Hopefully, educated people can succeed in shedding light into these areas of prejudice and ignorance, for as Voltaire once said: "Men will commit atrocities as long as they believe absurdities."
What I'm talking about is both political and then also extra-political. Because what Donald Trump is doing is not simply to be measured in terms of its political effect. It's the very spiritual uplift of the nation. It's the very tenor and tone, morally speaking, of what this country is about. And so the unleashing of these fierce and ferocious beliefs have a potential impact that is quite deleterious, quite negative, quite destructive. And I think we have to say something.
