You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
DANIEL DENNETTA child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.
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In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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There’s no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) ‘Do you realize you’ve wasted your life?
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The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.
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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them – if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
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There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
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It’s a no win situation. It’s a mug’s game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.
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We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love.
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What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.
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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don’t have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things.
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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
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Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
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I’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
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The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.
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Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
DANIEL DENNETT