Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon Quotes
"If 'survival of the fittest' has any validity as a slogan, then the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the fittest of texts." - Hugh Pyper
"Our ability to devote our lives to something we deem more important than our own personal welfare is one of the things that set us aside from the rest of the animal world."
"Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense; by calling 'God' some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves, they pose as deists, as believers." - Sigmund Freud
"Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends." - Ned Flanders
"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned." - Anonymous
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - Jesus of Nazareth, in John 8:32
"Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect." - William Wordsworth
"Why then must science and scientists continue to be governed by fear—fear of public opinion, fear of social consequence, fear of religious intolerance, fear of political pressure, and, above all, fear of bigotry and prejudice—as much within as without the professional world?" - William Masters and Virginia Johnson
"What we dimly imagine in dreaded anticipation often turns out to be much worse than reality."
"The Santa Claus disillusionment does no harm. More to the point, it is likely that part of the enduring appeal of the Santa Claus myth is that adults, who can no longer directly experience the innocent joys of Santa-anticipation, settle for the vicarious thrill of enjoying their children’s excitement."
"People do go to a great deal of effort and expense to perpetuate the Santa Claus mythology. Why? Are they trying to recapture the lost innocence of childhood?"
"I appreciate that many readers will be profoundly distrustful of the tack I am taking here."
"There is risk and even pain involved, but it would be irresponsible to use that as an excuse for ignorance."
"If we want to know why we value the things we love, we need to delve into the evolutionary history of the planet."
"Religion can certainly bring out the best in a person, but it is not the only phenomenon with that property."
"The only way to take the hypothesis of miracles seriously is to eliminate the nonmiraculous alternatives."
Good things don’t just happen by chance. There are "strokes of luck," but sustaining a good thing isn’t just luck.
"The stinginess of Nature can be seen wherever we look, if we know what to look for."
"People generally say that we like some things because they are sweet, but this really puts it backward: it is more accurate to say that some things are sweet (to us) because we like them!"
"The dream of every cell is to become two cells."
"Religions might turn out to be species of cultural symbionts that manage to thrive by leaping from human host to human host."
"Whatever else religion is as a human phenomenon, it is a hugely costly endeavor, and evolutionary biology shows that nothing so costly just happens."
"Everything we value—from sugar and sex and money to music and love and religion—we value for reasons."
"Like all animal brains, human brains have evolved to deal with the specific problems of the environments in which they must operate."
"Everything is what it is because it got that way."
"Writing is more than five thousand years old, agriculture is more than ten thousand years old, and language is—maybe 'only' forty thousand years old."
"Language is much older than any existing religion."
"Each innovative step had to 'pay for itself' somehow, in the existing environment in which it first occurred."
"The three favorite purposes or raisons d'être for religion are to comfort us in our suffering and allay our fear of death, to explain things we can’t otherwise explain, and to encourage group cooperation in the face of trials and enemies."
"It is usually easier to fix something that has flaws than to build something from scratch."
"The earliest impressive archeological evidence of religion is the elaborate Cro-Magnon burial sites in the Czech Republic, and they are about twenty-five thousand years old."
"We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, ascribe malice and good-will to everything that hurts or pleases us."
"The body has many resources to cure its own ailments: pain to discourage activity that can further damage an injury, fevers to combat infection, vomiting to rid the digestive system of toxins, and immune responses."
"Rituals are not by any means restricted to literate cultures."
"A public ritual is a great way of preserving content with high fidelity."
"Public rehearsal is a key process of memory enhancement."
"Digitization allows tiny fluctuations or variations in execution to be absorbed or wiped out in the next round."
"No two people may do their curtsy or salute or kowtow in exactly the same way, but each will be clearly recognizable as a curtsy or salute or kowtow."
"To speak of an ‘alphabet’ as composed of a ‘canonical’ set of things to remember is to be doubly anachronistic."
"Rhythm and rhyme and musical pitch all provided additional bolstering, turning unmemorable strings of words into sound bites."
"A somewhat less obvious design feature was the inclusion of incomprehensible elements!"
"‘Don’t try to understand these formulas! Just memorize them!’"
"Nobody had to understand these rationales, or even want to improve the copying fidelity of the rituals in which they participated."
"These were further enhanced by the use of rhythm and rhyme—to commit a further anachronism, since these 'technical' terms were surely invented long after the effectiveness of the properties was 'recognized' by the blind watchmaker of cultural selection."
"The obvious expensiveness of folk religion, a challenge to biology, can be accounted for by hypotheses that are not yet confirmed but testable."
"The human proclivity for groupishness is less calculated and prudential than it appears in some economic models, but also more complicated than the evolved herding instinct of some animals."
"Belief in belief radically transforms the content of the underlying beliefs, making rational investigation of them difficult if not impossible."
"Once our ancestors became reflective about their own beliefs, believing in belief became a salient social force in its own right."
"In a democracy it really matters what the people believe."
"Nihilism—the belief in nothing—has been seen by many to be a deeply dangerous virus."
"Belief in the belief that something matters is understandably strong and widespread."
"This idea that there are myths we live by, myths that must not be disturbed at any cost, is always in conflict with our ideal of truth-seeking and truth-telling."
"The phenomenon of religious ideas creates a powerful phenomenon: belief in belief."
"God is a Something that is Wonderful. He is an appropriate recipient of prayers, and that’s about all we can say about Him."
"The belief that belief in God is so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of disconfirmation or serious criticism has led the devout to 'save' their beliefs by making them incomprehensible even to themselves."
"That’s not how we see it at all. It isn’t that belief in the belief in God is our settled conviction... It’s like falling in love."
"It is surely no accident that the language of romantic love and the language of religious devotion are all but indistinguishable."
"The daily actions of religious people have accomplished uncounted good deeds throughout history, alleviating suffering, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick."
"I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love."
"We have been given a lot to love, and not just spectacularly beautiful art and stories and ceremonies."
"Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy."
"A world in which baseball fans’ love of their teams led them so to hate the other teams and their fans that murderous war accompanied the playoffs would be a world in which a particular love, pure and blameless in itself, led to immoral and intolerable consequences."
"Murmuring that your lover’s looks, earning power, and IQ meet your minimal standards would probably kill the romantic mood."
"Because search is costly, it is rational to settle on a partner before having examined all potential candidates."
"Has our evolved capacity for romantic love been exploited by religious memes?"
"Their beloved deserves nothing less than this, they think: a total commitment to eradicating the blasphemer."
"An important task for religious people of all faiths in the twenty-first century will be spreading the conviction that there are no acts more dishonorable than harming 'infidels' of one stripe or another for 'disrespecting' a flag, a cross, a holy text."
"It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil."
"It is time for the reasonable adherents of all faiths to find the courage and stamina to reverse the tradition that honors helpless love of God—in any t"