The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant – inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.
Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.
I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they’re so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.
It’s a no win situation. It’s a mug’s game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.
The mind is the effect, not the cause.
Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn’t kept pace.
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it’s art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I’d like to add a little to that goodness.
Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, when you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully forget them and go on to the next big opportunity.