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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.

Daniel Dennett

Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
DANIEL DENNETT

Natural Religion Social System
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
It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
DANIEL DENNETT

Brain Ourselves
Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.
DANIEL DENNETT

Blind Love Resolution Suffering Tragedy
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
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
True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
DANIEL DENNETT

Crazy Help Religious Yourself
The mind is the effect, not the cause.
DANIEL DENNETT

Effect Mindset Science
I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
DANIEL DENNETT

Better Philosophy Question Science Way Yourself
There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
DANIEL DENNETT

Dangerous Force Fundamental Planet
No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
DANIEL DENNETT

Easy Smart Way Yourself
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
What you can imagine depends on what you know.
DANIEL DENNETT

Dreams Imagination Knowledge Yourself
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Clear Detail Mistake Risk Time Yourself
Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.
DANIEL DENNETT

Competition Consider Mindset Possible
Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species – us.
DANIEL DENNETT

Condition Freedom Human Mistake Objection Oneself

Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.

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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.

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