I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
DANIEL DENNETTTrue, 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.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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AI makes philosophy honest.
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Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about – about what the issues really are – and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
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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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You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
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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.
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YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
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Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
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Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
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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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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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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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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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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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Go ahead and believe in God , if you like, but don’t imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.
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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.
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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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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
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Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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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.
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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 only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
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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.
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
DANIEL DENNETT