Massimo Introvigne Quotes

While predicting the future is a rare gift, testifying for the truth is a duty for every woman and man of conscience. …A prophet, Romero added, is one who has an “undisturbed conscience.” This is an interesting statement.
Only those who are firmly rooted in conscience as their moral compass may calmly tell the truth about injustice and corruption, no matter the risks.
And risks there are since prophets easily make enemies.

Wilson himself argued that it would be in the best interest of humanity if organized religions as we know them would disappear.
There is, however, a misunderstanding. Wilson was not an atheist, nor was he against asking religious questions.
Since his main interest were ants, it is to his interesting we should turn to understand more about his ideas on religion.

The lesson of [the story about the Kalaupapa peninsula lepers’ colony of Molokaʻi, Hawaiʻi, and Belgian Catholic priest Father Damien De Veuster] is that living together in peace cannot be taken for granted.
Even those who share a misfortune can ultimately not be able to live in peace together unless they discover again the role of the conscience. …order can be restored by returning to conscience.

Dr. Hong Tao-Tze, the Shifu (Grand Master) of Tai Ji Men, played a key role in reaffirming that conscience is the basis of [natural and civil] rights and of global peace, inter alia through the Declaration of . Since conscience is universal, so are [natural and civil] rights.

The victims of [pedosexual] priests and other religious ministers deserve our sympathy and respect—but so do those who have been slandered and vilified by the media based on accusations courts have later recognized as false.

You cannot “rejoice in the truth” without rejecting and exposing iniquity. The lack of conscience, charity, and love leads to bad governance, unjust administration, and an unstable society inimical to its own citizens.

It is one of the most difficult exercises for democracy to tolerate those who think differently, think independently from the powers that be, and sometimes behave differently or do not actively support the parties in power.

By excluding the intolerants from the scope of tolerance, Voltaire reduced tolerance to an empty box. Worse, he prepared the atrocities of the Terror of the French Revolution, which was in turn the model of Communist terror. Millions were killed by proclaiming they had no right to tolerance because they were themselves intolerant. …The dramatic mistake of Voltaire should be corrected by proclaiming that religions and philosophies have [the] right to be in different ways intolerant, and should still be tolerated.

When a national or local government calls a religious group “antisocial” [or “cultic” or “dangerous” or the like], it jeopardizes [that religious group's] right to honor and reputation, incites [unreasonable] discrimination, and interferes with the citizens’ right of deciding which religion they want to join free from governmental pressures—who would want to bear the stigma connected with joining a religion officially declared “antisocial”?

China seems to have been very much similar to the West, both in the production of new religious movements and in attracting to them figures from the political left who were officially promoting the struggle against “superstition.”
Reconstructions of “Chinese traditional culture” as “non-religious,” and of the rich Chinese religious pluralism as mere “folk religion” should be viewed as propaganda rather than history.

[The Supreme Court of California’s 1931 decision “People v. Blackburn”] demonstrates that religious liberty is truly protected only if donations even to the most marginal and “strange” religions are protected.

For the [ Chinese Communist Party ] it is better to have a bureaucrat who is not very bright but is fanatically loyal to the Party than a very intelligent bureaucrat who thinks independently.

Social justice without [civil or natural] rights is [maliciously] ideological and false.

Everywhere in the world, young men and women like what is forbidden.

A world with no place for God is dark, empty without hope.