Quotes About Belief

The problem is that most people, most of the time, are desperate to believe ridiculous and divisive ideas for patently emotional reasons,and while rarely explicit what they're really worried about is death

Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation. Believing strongly, without evidence, they have kicked themselves loose of the world. It is therefore in the very nature of faith to serve as an impediment to further inquiry.

What one believes happens after death dictates much of what one believes about life, and this is why faith-based religion, in presuming to fill in the blanks in our knowledge of the hereafter, does such heavy lifting for those who fall under its power. A single proposition – you will not die – once believed, determines a response to life that would be otherwise unthinkable.

Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene.

People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person's well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people's opinions—the more consequential the lie.

Given the right experimental manipulations, people can be led to believe that they consciously intended an action when they neither chose it nor had control over their movements.

One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral--that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings.

It should go without saying that these rival belief systems [Judaism, Islam, Christianity] are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.

Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.

Dogma in science really is humiliating when it is recognized as dogma.

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.

As we have seen, there is something that most Americans share with Osama bin Laden, the nineteen hijackers, and much of the Muslim world. We, too, cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence. Such heroic acts of credulity are thought not only acceptable but redeeming ? even necessary.

Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."15

Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath.

The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside.

Believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world, and this fact yields some immediate insights into the standards by which our beliefs should function. In particular, it reveals why we cannot help but value evidence and demand that propositions about the world logically cohere.

In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior.

To point out nonepistemic motives in another's view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person's connection to the world as it is.

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious.

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

What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.

If your denial of death is sufficiently explicit and persuasive that you believe death isn't real, then what you deny isn't death but the significance of life.