18 Quotes by Daniel Waterman

Believing in the possibility of resurrection and eternal life, Christians seek ‘redemption’ through moral behaviour. But moral behaviour does not, in itself, assuage fear of death, on the contrary, when people come to view themselves as marred by Sin, for instance because they are taught to believe that their most intimate feelings are sinful, this may increase significantly their anxiety about dying.

When interpreted as infallible, the truth claims of powerful institutions — whether religious or secular — tend to emphasise the fallibility of individuals and their subjective ethical intuitions; thus, undermining self-reliance, including people’s ability to make use of information they intuitively know is basically correct, based on their own experiences or simply common sense.

Being Jewish did not compromise the humanitarian and universalist ideals of my close relatives who, having experienced persecution close hand, were more concerned with bringing about peace, justice and equality in the world than in trying to cut out a niche where they could continue an insular — Jewish — fantasy.

Systems of retributive justice work well as long as they are proportional. However, in complex societies, where the State is the arbiter of justice, proportionality may break down: offences created by the elite few become offences against the entire community.

The so-called spiritual inquiry must necessarily address questions of authority and power since both individuals and the organizations that represent them generally seek legitimacy from hegemonic interpretations of truth and reality. The only way to maintain the integrity of spiritual inquiry is to encourage radical questioning of all precepts/percepts and their interpretations.

State sponsored medicine and science can function as ideology, inspiring blind commitment, fanatical defensiveness and denial, particularly of outcomes inconsistent with the preferred explanatory model. The social etiology of compromised health, insists on an understanding of these conditions and the way they impact the objectivity or neutrality of scientific and medical interpretation.

I am keenly aware that the security we enjoy is frail, and could easily be disrupted. Secretly, a nagging fear gnaws at me: what has really been learned from the lessons of Auschwitz and the Third Reich? Do we really understand what happened there and how we might prevent such events in future?

The lack of plausible alternatives to an explanatory model significantly increases the chances of its adoption.

Being Jewish did not compromise the humanitarian and universalist ideals of my close relatives who, having experienced persecution close hand, were more concerned with bringing about peace, justice and equality in the world than in trying to cut out a niche where they could continue an insular – Jewish – fantasy.