Quotes About Belief

A Humanidade, provavelmente, dividir-se-á em duas grandes fações: a fação das pessoas a favor de se conceder à inteligência artificial uma autoridade significativa e a fação das que se opõem a isso. O mais certo é que haja muçulmanos e judeus em ambos os lados, justificando as suas posições através de interpretações criativas do Alcorão e do Talmude.

si sumamos todas las víctimas de todas estas persecuciones, resulta que en esos tres siglos los politeístas romanos mataron a no más que unos pocos miles de cristianos.1 Por el contrario, a lo largo de los siguientes 1.500 años, los cristianos masacraron a millones de correligionarios para defender interpretaciones ligeramente distintas de la religión del amor y la compasión.

they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.

We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.

El cristiano cree en el Dios monoteísta, pero también en el Diablo dualista, en santos politeístas y en espíritus animistas.

It is often said that God helps those who help themselves. This is a roundabout way of saying that God doesn't exist, but if our belief in Him inspires us to do something ourselves – it helps.

Religions, rites, and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions.

When everybody uses the same oracle, and everybody believes the oracle, the oracle turns into a sovereign.

the twenty-first century religions don't bring rain, they don't cure illnesses, they don't build bombs—but they do get to determine who are "us" and who are "them," whom we should cure and whom we should bomb.

monotheists practiced human sacrifice on a much larger scale than most polytheistic cults. Christianity and Islam have killed far more people in the name of God than did the followers of Ba'al or Huitzilopochtli.

Just as Christians and Muslims all believe in heaven, and disagree only about how to get there, so during the Cold War both capitalists and communists believed in creating heaven on earth through economic growth, and wrangled only about the exact method.

Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions.

Generation für Generation beteten die Menschen zu jedem Gott, jedem Engel, jedem Heiligen, und sie erfanden unzählige Instrumente, Institutionen und Gesellschaftssysteme – trotzdem starben sie weiter millionenfach an Hunger, Epidemien und Gewalt. Viele Denker und Propheten kamen zu dem Schluss, Hunger, Krankheit und Krieg seien eben fester Bestandteil von Gottes kosmischem Plan oder unserer unvollkommenen Natur, und erst am Ende aller Zeit würden wir davon befreit werden.

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism?

A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.

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

There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.

ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history.

True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don't count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses. Ten thousand years ago most people were hunter-gatherers and only a few pioneers in the Middle East were farmers.

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

For centuries humanism has been convincing us that we are the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will is therefore the highest authority of all.

We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning, and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our head. Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.

That's how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously.

Os seguidores de todas as religiões estão convencidos de que somente a sua é a verdadeira. Talvez os seguidores de uma única religião estejam certos.