Quotes About Belief

The Jesuit boast, 'Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man,' is no less accurate (or sinister) for being hackneyed.

James Dobson, founder of today's infamous 'Focus on the Family' movement,fn1 is equally acquainted with the principle: 'Those who control what young people are taught, and what they experience – what they see, hear, think, and believe – will determine the future course for the nation.'78

If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter.

If you are trying to explain something improbable, it can never suffice to invoke an entity that is, in itself, at least as improbable.

The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do.

There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.

But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What's so special about believing? Isn't it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn't the designer of the universe have to be a scientist?

labelling our ignorance God.

There are athletes who believe God helps them win—against opponents who would seem, on the face of it, no less worthy of his favouritism. There are motorists who believe God saves them a parking space—thereby presumably depriving somebody else.

superstitions and other non-factual beliefs will locally evolve – change over generations – either by random drift or by some sort of analogue of Darwinian selection, eventually showing a pattern of significant divergence from common ancestry.

As H. L. Mencken said: 'We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

People growing up in different countries copy their parents and believe in the god or gods of their own country. These beliefs contradict each other, so they can't all be right.

Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Something has shifted in the intervening decades. It has shifted in all of us, and the shift has no connection with religion. If anything, it happens in spite of religion, not because of it.

There are so many different faiths. How do you know the holy book you have been brought up with is the true one? And if all the others are wrong, what makes you think your holy book isn't wrong too?

But think about why it is impolite to ask such direct, factual questions of religious people today. It is because it is embarrassing! But it is the answer that is embarrassing, if it is yes.

It seems to me to require a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness.

Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one's intelligence and/or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold "beliefs" of any kind.

That you cannot prove God's non-existence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter.

And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?

Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book.

Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.

To adapt Alice's comment on her sister's book before she fell into Wonderland, what is the use of a God who does no miracles and answers no prayers? Remember Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'.