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 DENNETTThere 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.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
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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.
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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 chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
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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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A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
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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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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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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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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
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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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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.
DANIEL DENNETT