Quotes About Belief

Orthodoxies of all sorts are maintained by partly the intolerance I have been documenting and partly by — simple lack of curiosity. Heresy is not-tuned-in, if one already has certitude.

Every reality-tunnel is real to those who experience it, and none are real in the old sense of existing apart from us in a platonic Absoluteness.

People think that only the banks can create money. That's a hallucination. Aleister Crowley tells in his autobiography of a part of Mexico during the Revolution where there was no money available, so the people in the town just wrote on pieces of paper, "I owe you five pesos," or whatever. And they were using these pieces of paper while the town went right along and got more prosperous because they weren't paying interest every time they created money.

The only escape from this trap, as far as I can see, is to be skeptical about one's own skepticism: which is what I mean by the New Agnosticism.

Where scientists are legally or otherwise coerced away from certain areas of investigation, people do not all uniformly stop having experiences that such investigation might scientifically explain; people merely resort, by default, to pre-scientific models to explain the experiences.

All appearances seem to be facts, at first, to those to whom they appear.

If they are bizarre, if they don't fit our reality-tunnel, and if they go away quickly, we are happy to dismiss them as only appearances, or as misperceptions.

Some call this Liberal Copenhagenism model agnosticism. Dr. Marcello Truzzi calls it zeteticism.

Language structures demark our reality-tunnels. I mentioned that earlier, but it needs repeating.

The human mind is ingenious enough to prove or disprove any proposition, to its own satisfaction

This One True Philosophy is the modern form of the One True Church of the dark ages. The fundamentalist materialist is the modern Idolator; he has made an image of the world, and now he kneels and worships it.

None of the reality-models discussed in this chapter, however bizarre they may seem to some readers, are any more arbitrary than the official reality-model known as consensus-reality, which is a statistical average and not nearly consensual as it seems. Travel 100 miles in any direction, and the consensus begins to crumble. Travel 1000 miles and very little consensus is left . . .

EMIC realities are the realities created by people communicating with each other. It's one of the major discoveries of the social sciences in the last 80 years that a very large percentage (nobody has found a way of mathematically estimating it, but a very large percentage) of what we experience is EMIC reality. A large percentage of what we experience just exists because our society has talked it into existence.

Wilson believes that these are good guesses based on scientific probabilities, but he does not think there are any hard economic or karmic laws guaranteeing them. He recognizes that this reality-tunnel was generated by his own brain, that he is the artist who created it, and that it expresses his own hopes and desires, as well as scientific probabilities. It is, he knows, the reality-tunnel that keeps him happy, creative, busy and full of zest for life.

So EMIC realities are very powerful. Six million Jews died because of an EMIC realtiy. That reality was as real as the guns and bombs of the war because that reality was believed in.

It seems that when any model becomes an Idol its advocates begin to act like priests and inquisitors.

He doesn't think it is any crazier than anybody else's reality-tunnel, and he claims it is a lot more fun than any other.

I try to be honorable. I know that's embarrassing to hear. It's embarrassing to say. But I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching. And I have spent a long time working on getting myself to where I could do it. Where I could live life largely on my own terms.

Can you analyze our relationship in the light of Silvermanian pragmatism?" I said. "I love you because I find it compelling to be loved so entirely. You love me because as long as you do you can believe in romantic love.

The ways of the Lord," I said, "are often dark, but never pleasant." "Adler?" "Theodor Reik, I think.

Afterlife is no less implausible than anything else,' I said. 'All explanations of existence are equally incredible.' 'So you might as well believe something that makes you feel good as not

The ways of the Lord," I said, "are often dark, but never pleasant.

See, being a person is kind of random and arbitrary business. You may have noticed that. And you need to believe in something to keep it from being too random and arbitrary to handle. Some people take religion, or success, or patriotism, or family, but for a lot of guys those things don't work. A guy like me. I don't have religion or family that sort of thing. So you accept some system of order, and you stick to it.

once you admitted to yourself that you didn't really know how another person's mind operated, then you came up against the ultimate admission—anything was possible.