If you're really going to try to figure out how to be happy in this world where everybody dies eventually, that entails, that project entails, at bottom, self-transcendence; it entails waking up from the dream of narcissism and self-concern and finding a world in which you really want other people to be happy, too. It's not all about you. It's not even mostly about you in the end.

Belief without evidence—and certainly certainty without evidence—is intrinsically dangerous. And there really is only one area of human culture where that kind of certainty is celebrated as opposed to derided or criticized, and that is organized religion.

What I would argue is that, yes, while people are occasionally motivated to do wonderful things on the basis of their faith, faith, generally speaking, provides bad reasons to do good things when good reasons are actually available.

When you're going to talk about the personal level—what is the difference between happiness and suffering, personally, in any moment—so much of that is a matter of this difference between being lost in thought and not. And until you learn how to meditate, until you learn how to actually pay attention to the flow of your own thoughts, that's not even a difference you can notice; you are just going to, by default, be lost in thought. You're going to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking.

I think our inability to talk about anything important without getting plunged into conspiracy thinking and just obvious delusion... All the incentives are wrong, and the mainstream media can't seem to course-correct in light of a failing business model that still relies on clicks.

I love Jesus and half his moods, and if you're going to say, 'What about the golden rule?' or 'What about the Sermon on the Mount?', I'm going to love those passages, but at no point is it required to believe that he's going to be coming back to judge the living and the dead or rapture the good people. That's where, I think, we need to get off the ride.

I would challenge your assertion that love is irrational. Love is one of our most valuable experiences, arguably the most valuable experience. And it is totally rational to want more of it in your life and to want to see more of it effective in the world.

When we see somebody like Trump come on the scene and lie about everything and pay no price for it among his own tribe, that is so galling because it's such a violation, not only of what should be possible, but it's a violation of the mechanisms we recognize that guarantee cooperation and collaboration.

Dogmatism is always an intellectual sin in science ... When you say, 'Well, listen, this is just the dogma I'm going to not evaluate,' you sound like a maniac, except in a religious context where you're saying 'This part of my belief system, the most important part, is off the table.'