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.
Interpretation
Religion can inspire good or evil actions in people, but goodness and wickedness exist independently of religion.
This quote by Steven Weinberg highlights the distinction between inherent human morality and the influence of religion. It suggests that while good and evil can exist within people regardless of their religious beliefs, the capacity for good people to commit evil acts can be significantly swayed by religious doctrines or motivations, raising questions about the role of religion in shaping moral behavior.
In practice
During a debate on morality, one might use this quote to illustrate differing views on the role of religion.
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.
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?
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?
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because theyβre lazy, and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous.
What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.
You never know the palette of the one you kill until the mind disgorges its finest colours.
On the human imagination, events produce the effects of time. Thus, he who has travelled far and seen much, is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents, soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.
When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
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