Aging & Wisdom Quote by Morris Raphael Cohen

Cohen goes for the jugular: the problem isn’t that religion sometimes gets hijacked by bad actors, but that certain kinds of harm are structurally baked in. “Not accidents” is the pivot. He’s preempting the comforting liberal defense that persecutions are deviations from true faith. For Cohen, they’re not glitches; they’re outputs. The culprit is “absolute claims,” the insistence that ultimate truth has been settled once and for all, and therefore dissent isn’t merely mistaken but illegitimate.

The line works because it recasts intolerance as a logical consequence rather than a moral failure. If a community believes it possesses non-negotiable truth grounded in divine authority, compromise starts to look like betrayal, and pluralism becomes, at best, a temporary truce. “Essence” is doing heavy lifting here: Cohen isn’t critiquing particular doctrines; he’s critiquing the epistemic posture religion often adopts. The subtext is a warning about what happens when any institution treats its worldview as beyond revision: policing boundaries becomes a sacred duty, and coercion can be reframed as care for souls, social order, or cosmic justice.

Context matters. Cohen, a Jewish-American philosopher steeped in pragmatism and Enlightenment rationalism, lived through the aftershocks of European sectarian history and the rise of modern political absolutisms. Read in that light, the quote also doubles as an indictment of secular creeds that borrow religion’s certainty. He’s less interested in dunking on belief than in defending fallibilism: the idea that a livable modern society depends on claims that can be argued with, not commandments that end the argument.