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 DENNETTLife itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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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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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
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As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
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AI makes philosophy honest.
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Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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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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Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
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The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.
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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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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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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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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.
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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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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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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.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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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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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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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
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There are no good reasons to believe in god.
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Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
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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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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
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To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant — inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.
DANIEL DENNETT