I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
Interpretation
The quote expresses a critique of superficial religiosity in public life, suggesting a weariness over its prevalence.
In this quote, Steven Weinberg articulates his discomfort with the pervasive, insincere expressions of religiosity that often mark public celebrations, particularly in America. He argues that such displays, while not inherently harmful, can become tiresome and question if society has outgrown the need for these ceremonial invocations, reflecting a desire for a more secular approach to public life and celebrations.
In practice
During a public debate about the role of religion in schools.
It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on and it's not really that fundamental.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like?
I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.
This life is not real. I conquered the world and it did not bring me satisfaction.
Live near to God, and so all things will appear to you little In comparison to eternal realities.
'But I don't want to go among mad people,' said Alice. 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the cat. 'We're all mad here.'
Superhero science has taught me this: Entire universes fit comfortably inside our skulls. Not just one or two but endless universes can be packed into that dark, wet, and bony hollow without breaking it open from the inside. The space in our heads will stretch to accommodate them all. The real doorway to the fifth dimension was always right here. Inside. That infinite interior space contains all the divine, the alien, and the unworldly we’ll ever need.
What peace can they have who are not at peace with God?
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