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"I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things."
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"Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony."
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Personal Development
"Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows."
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Personal Development
"You cannot force someone to believe something they do not believe, you can only manage to force them to speak or act as if they do."
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Personal Development
"Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What's worse is that he is now running amok."
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Personal Development
"We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble."
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Personal Development
"Religion is a non-alcoholic man's alcohol. Alcohol is a non-religious man's religion."
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Personal Development
"The doubter doesn't sure which one is right,but it tends to demean other people's beliefs."
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Personal Development
"The commendable efforts of preachers to Europe is that Superstition regarding work and wealth was broken. Everybody now knows that wealth comes only from hard work, not from some superstitious beliefs."
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Personal Development
"Fanaticism is the only way to put an end to the doubts that constantly trouble the human soul."
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Personal Development
"Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way."
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Personal Development
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"There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."
Wonder
"One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all."
Religion
"When we look at a solid lump of iron or rock, we are 'really' looking at what is almost entirely empty space. It looks and feels solid and opaque because our sensory systems and brains find it convenient to treat it as solid and opaque. It is convenient for the brain to represent a rock as solid because we can't walk through it. 'Solid' is our way of experiencing things that we can't walk through or fall throug, because of the electromagnetic forces between atoms. 'Opaque' is the experience we have when light bounces off the surface of an object, and none of it goes through."
Science
“Evil doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to ‘the Christian majority’s private liking.’”
Ethics
"Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past."
Life
"How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old."
Education
"It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."
Science
"Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works."
Science
"I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right."
Communication
"It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history."
Science
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