Quotes About Belief

God is dead – it's just taking a while to get rid of the body.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.

Would the book of Genesis have declared that Neanderthals descend from Adam and Eve, would Jesus have died for the sins of the Denisovans, and would the Qur'an have reserved seats in heaven for all righteous humans, whatever their species?

Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.

Few gods, nations, or revolutions can sustain themselves without martyrs.

Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow

As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting. However once he actually kills someone, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because only they give meaning to his tragic misdeed. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to those sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.

It isn't a coincidence that skepticism about climate change tends to be the preserve of the nationalist right. You rarely see left-wing socialists tweet that "climate change is a Chinese hoax." Since there is no national answer to the problem of global warming, some nationalist politicians prefer to believe the problem does not exist.15

People who do not believe in the same god or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same money.

Voltaire said about God that 'there is no God, but don't tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night'.

Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination.

People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons.

though gods can inspire us to act compassionately, religious faith is not a necessary condition for moral behavior.

The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens'.

The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing.

there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe.

Morality doesn't mean "following divine commands." It means "reducing suffering." Therefore in order to act morally, you don't need to believe in any myth or story.

For thousands of years priests, rabbis and muftis explained that humans cannot overcome famine, plague and war by their own efforts. Then along came the bankers, investors and industrialists, and within 200 years managed to do exactly that.

If you believe in an absolute truth revealed by a transcendent power, you cannot allow yourself to admit any error, for that would nullify your whole story. But if you believe in a quest for truth by fallible humans, admitting blunders is part of the game.

History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods…

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google. Bypassing

So perhaps happiness is synchronising one's personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions.

Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.

So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief. Dualistic