Quotes About Rationality

Intellectual questions and doubts naturally arise when we read Bible stories because to our rational minds they often seem so utterly unbelievable. Perhaps we need a new frame of reference. When we open the Bible we should enter its pages with an attitude of Bring it on! Only then will we see the power of this incredible book.

man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. What if someone says, Well, that's not how I choose to think about water.? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn't share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standard of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world.

There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

No atrocity was ever committed because people were being too reasonable, too skeptical, or too independently minded.

Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity ? a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures—and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.

We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.

In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence.

People who hold strong convictions without evidence, belong at the margins of our society, not in our halls of power.

Remaining open to the powers of conversation—to new evidence and better arguments—is not only essential for rationality. It is essential for love.

Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft.

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist.

Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.

To see how much our culture currently partakes of the irrationality of our enemies, just substitute the name of your favorite Olympian for "God" wherever this word appears in public discourse.

The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason.

Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.

Love wasn't rational; there was no proof that it even existed outside of people's imaginings.

It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality

The purely rational economic man is, indeed, close to being a social moron.

Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.