Quotes from Michael Shermer

The gentleman has eaten no small quantity of flapdoodle in his lifetime." "What's that, O'Brien?" replied I … "Why, Peter," rejoined he, "it's the stuff they feed fools on." —P. Simple, Marryat

As the international relations scholar Hedley Bull noted, "mutual nuclear deterrence Ã¢â'¬Â¦ does not make nuclear war impossible, but simply renders it irrational," but then added that a rational strategist is one "who on further acquaintance reveals himself as a university professor of unusual intellectual subtlety."86

In other words, we can ground human values and morals not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle's virtue ethics, Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's utilitarianism, or Rawls's fairness ethics, but in science as well.

The Age of Reason, then, was the age when humanity was born again, not from original sin, but from original ignorance and dependence on authority and superstition. Never again should we allow ourselves to be the intellectual slaves of those who would bind our minds with the chains of dogma and authority. In its stead we use reason and science as the arbiters of truth and knowledge.

This fact provides a rebuttal to the argument "What if a young woman aborts a baby who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer?" A rejoinder is, "What if a young woman who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer dies in childbirth?

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with percepts. Memory, in this flawed model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the theater of the mind. This is not at all what happens. The perceptual system, and the brain that analyzes its data, are deeply influenced by the beliefs it already holds. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain focused on something else.

The Liberty Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else's loss of liberty through force or fraud. The Liberty Principle is an extrapolation from the fundamental principle of all liberty as practiced in Western society: The freedom to believe and act as we choose so long as our beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.

If I make $100,000 a year and Elon Musk makes $100,000,000 a year and we both see a doubling of our incomes, while I should be thrilled at my newfound fortune of $200,000, if I compare it to Musk's massive $200,000,000, that comparative difference may feel worse, even though I'm better off and no one is worse off for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO's fortune.

the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."3 It was one of the greatest speeches of Dr. King's career

The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies, and in the end isn't that the real truth? The answer is no." No squared. The postmodernist belief in the

For indignation is so easy and satisfying a mood that it is apt to prevent one from attending to any facts that oppose it. If the reader should object that I have abandoned ethics for the false doctrine that 'to understand all is to forgive all,' I can reply that it is only a temporary suspense of ethical judgment, made because 'to condemn much is to understand

And it wasn't just astrology. "Religion, astrology and magic all purported to help men with their daily problems by teaching them how to avoid misfortune and how to account for it when it struck." With such sweeping power over people, Thomas concludes, "If magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognize that no society will ever be free from it.

It makes people believe if we just get back to those principles, like police brutalising and jailing homosexuals, we can be good once again.

The ultimate problem of utopian logic begins with a utilitarian calculus in which everyone will live in perfect harmony once we get rid of any dissenters who don't see as clearly as the collective.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, astronomy replaced astrology, chemistry succeeded alchemy, probability theory displaced luck and fortune, insurance attenuated anxiety, banks replaced mattresses as the repository of people's savings, city planning reduced the risks from fires, social hygiene and the germ theory dislodged disease, and the vagaries of life became considerably less vague.

Once moral progress in a particular area is under way, most religions eventually get on board—as in the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, women's rights in the twentieth century, and gay rights in the twenty-first century—but this often happens after a shamefully protracted lag time.

as the Rutgers University legal scholar Gary Francione has done in his 2008 book Animals as Persons, where he outlined in logical detail why sentient nonhumans should legally be regarded as persons: "They are conscious; they are subjectively aware; they have interests; they can suffer. No characteristic other than sentience is required for personhood.

Putting teeth into the law, India listed all cetacean species in Schedule II, Part I of the Wild Life Protection Act of 1972, adding that dolphins should be considered as "nonhuman persons."63 This granting of legal personhood to a nonhuman animal is a monumental step toward justice and freedom for all sentient beings.

In other words, a gun is twenty-two times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt, or a homicide than it is for self-defense.67

It is indeed probable that more harm and misery has been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil. —Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960

And who could forget the sixteenth-century popular Parisian pastime of cat burning, in which a terrified feline was gradually lowered into a fire while "spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.

As the medieval historian Richard Kieckhefer notes, the people of medieval Europe thought of magic as rational for two reasons: "first of all, that it could actually work (that its efficacy was shown by evidence recognized within the culture as authentic) and, secondly, that its workings were governed by principles (of theology or of physics) that could be coherently articulated.

The belief that all knowledge is culturally determined and therefore lacks certainty is largely the product of an uncertain cultural milieu.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink? That is deep and sacred science.