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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.

Daniel Dennett

Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
DANIEL DENNETT

Architecture Greatness Harm Music Pay Treasure
Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn’t kept pace.
DANIEL DENNETT

Moral Ourselves Technology Understand
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Criticism Feeling Hurt Opportunity Religious Situation Win
Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.
DANIEL DENNETT

Evolution Internet Organization Phone Revolution Selection
I don’t think there is any religious revival. I think what we are hearing, the furor, is merely the hysterical response of the churches the handwriting on the wall that they are seeing.
DANIEL DENNETT

Myself Religious Respond Revive See Thinking Writing
I’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
DANIEL DENNETT

Color Criticism Deny Experience Myself Pain People Repeat
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 DENNETT

Advertisement Better Religion Subtract Yourself
Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
DANIEL DENNETT

Add Complication Easy Problem Science Time
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Crazy Medical Religious True Yourself
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Afraid Cure Fantasy Hope Information Myself
The mind is the effect, not the cause.
DANIEL DENNETT

Effect Mindset Science
There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.
DANIEL DENNETT

Care Complete Guide Knowledge Limitation Yourself
The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
DANIEL DENNETT

Discover Endorsement Evolution Reason
I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.
DANIEL DENNETT

Agency Animal Culture Moral See Thinking
AI makes philosophy honest.
DANIEL DENNETT

Artificial Honesty Intelligence Philosophy
Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
DANIEL DENNETT

Cost Law Object Science See

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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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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