Quotes About Belief

Of all rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real. You can never ignore it or doubt it. If you want to make people really believe in some fiction, entice them to make a sacrifice on its behalf.

Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving. We

When you take into account our belief in the sanctity of human life, add the dynamics of the scientific establishment, and top it all with the needs of the capitalist economy, a relentless war against death seems to be inevitable. Our ideological commitment to human life will never allow us simply to accept human death.

How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution.

solo Homo sapiens puede hablar sobre cosas que no existen realmente, y creerse seis cosas imposibles antes del desayuno.

want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth.

because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.

The world of thought, belief and feeling is by definition far more difficult to decipher.

Followers of every religion are convinced that theirs alone is true. Perhaps the followers of one religion are correct.

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.

nationalism and religion still divide our human civilization into different and often hostile camps.

Most Westerners today believe in individualism. They believe that every human is an individual, whose worth does not depend on what other people think of him or her.

believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

However, most people don't like to admit that they are fools. Consequently, the more they sacrifice for a particular belief, the stronger their faith becomes.

It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be it God, honour, motherland, manhood or money.

zipper's operation. Most people had no idea.2 This is what Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have termed "the knowledge illusion." We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.

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.

none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. 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.

At first, humans kept on believing in God, and argued that humans are sacred because they were created by God for some divine purpose. Only much later did some people dare say that humans are sacred in their own right, and that God doesn't exist at all. Similarly, today most Dataists say that the Internet-of-All-Things is sacred because humans are creating it to serve human needs. But eventually, the Internet-of-All-Things may become sacred in its own right.

During the last five centuries, humans increasingly came to believe that they could increase their capabilities by investing in scientific research. This wasn't just blind faith – it was repeatedly proven empirically.

When you inflict suffering on yourself in the name of some story, it gives you a choice: "Either the story is true or I am a gullible fool." When you inflict suffering on others, you are also given a choice: "Either the story is true or I am a cruel villain." And just as we don't want to admit we are fools, we also don't want to admit we are villains. We prefer to believe that the story is true.

one of the most important obligations for spiritual wanderers is to challenge the beliefs and conventions of dominant religions. In Zen Buddhism it is said that 'If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.' Which means that if while walking on the spiritual path you encounter the rigid ideas and fixed laws of institutionalised Buddhism,

El humanismo es la creencia de que Homo sapiens tiene una naturaleza única y sagrada, que es fundamentalmente diferente de la naturaleza de todos los demás animales y de todos los otros fenómenos.