Quotes About Belief

What is the greatest mistake a parent can make?' she asked. 'To believe that your children will be just like you.

There ought to be more than just that metallic end, and then silence, then the worms, and sometimes he believed, but just this moment he did not believe at all...there was nothing beyond the sound of the guns...not even silence, just an end.

When you look at all the miracles attributed to Jesus, they're all about change.

stories people tell about climate change don't have much to do with science.

Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. —ISAAC ASIMOV, THE RELATIVITY OF WRONG, 1989

In science, however, "God did it" is not a testable hypothesis. Inquiring minds want to know how God did it and what forces or mechanisms were at work. "God works in mysterious ways" will not pass peer review. Even such explanations as "belief in God" or "religiosity" must be broken down into their component parts to find possible causal mechanisms for the links between belief and behavior that lead to health, well-being, and longevity.

In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement.

I mean if those moral principles are out there and God is just telling us what it is, then why do we need the middleman? Just tell us the reasons why it's wrong and okay. And if it's just because God said it what if he didn't say murder was wrong, would that make it right? No, it would still be wrong.

Our greater capacity for learning is often offset by our greater capacity for magical thinking.

Belief change comes from a combination of personal psychological readiness and a deeper social and cultural shift in the underlying zeitgeist, which is affected in part by education but is more the product of larger and harder-to-define political, economic, religious, and social changes.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with percepts. Memory, in this flawed model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the theater of the mind. This is not at all what happens. The perceptual system, and the brain that analyzes its data, are deeply influenced by the beliefs it already holds. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain focused on something else.

The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies, and in the end isn't that the real truth? The answer is no." No squared. The postmodernist belief in the

And it wasn't just astrology. "Religion, astrology and magic all purported to help men with their daily problems by teaching them how to avoid misfortune and how to account for it when it struck." With such sweeping power over people, Thomas concludes, "If magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognize that no society will ever be free from it.

It makes people believe if we just get back to those principles, like police brutalising and jailing homosexuals, we can be good once again.

The belief that all knowledge is culturally determined and therefore lacks certainty is largely the product of an uncertain cultural milieu.

Burden of Proof, or, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

In a 2009 Harris Poll of 2,303 adult Americans, people were asked to "indicate for each [category below] if you believe in it, or not." The results were revealing.1 God 82 % Miracles 76 % Heaven 75 % Jesus is God or the Son of God 73 % Angels 72 % Survival of the soul after death 71 %

Lacking a good explanation, the mind defaults to whatever explanation is on the table, regardless of how improbable it may be.

These were all tragic misconceptions—factual errors that, had they been checked against reality, would have come up short. Nevertheless, they were sincerely believed; thus extermination had a kind of inescapable internal logic to it, however grotesque.

This is not to minimize the emotional undercurrent of mindless bigotry, but merely to suggest that if you sincerely (however wrongly) believe that X is responsible for the ruination of all and everything that you hold dear, stamping out X follows like night follows day.

highly secularised countries like Sweden and Denmark, where rates of religiosity are among the lowest in the world, seem not to have much death anxiety at all

Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.