There’s no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) ‘Do you realize you’ve wasted your life?
DANIEL DENNETTSometimes 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.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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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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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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You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
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The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.
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Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
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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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Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
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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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There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
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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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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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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 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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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