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Book: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Quotes of Book: Breaking the Spell: Religion
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  1. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias.
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  2. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide. -Napoleon Bonaparte
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  3. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. -David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral
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  4. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    Words exist. What are they made of? Air under pressure? Ink? Some instances of the word "cat" are made of ink, and some are made of bursts of acoustic energy in the atmosphere, and some are made of patterns of glowing dots on computer screens, and some occur silently in thoughts, and what they have in common is just that they count as "the same" {tokens of the same type, as philosophers say} say in a system of symbols known as a language. Words are such familiar items in our language-drenched world that we tend to think of them as if they were unproblematically tangible things - as real as teacups and raindrops - but they are in fact quite abstract, even more abstract than voices or songs or haircuts or opportunities {and what are they made off?}. What are words? Words are basically information packets of some sort, recipes for using one's vocal apparatus and ears {or hands or eyes} - and brains - in quite specific ways. A world is more than a sound or a spelling. For instance, fast sounds the same and is spelled the same in English and German, but has completely different meanings and roles in the two languages. Two different worlds, sharing only some of their surface properties. Words exist. Do memes exist? Yes, because words exist, and words are memes that can be pronounced.
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  5. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    Those who are religious and believe religion to be the best hope of humankind cannot reasonably expect those of us who are skeptical to refrain from expressing our doubts if they themselves are unwilling to put their convictions under the microscope.
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  6. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. You are normally oblivious of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we don't see colors in our peripheral vision. It seems as if we do, but we don't, as you can prove to yourself by wiggling colored cards at the edge of your vision-you'll see motion just fine but not be able to identify the color of the moving thing.
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  7. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    We have a better product than soap or automobiles. We have eternal life. -Reverend Jim Bakker8
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  8. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    atheists and agnostics can have sacred values, values that are simply not up for re-evaluation at all. I have sacred
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  9. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things-that takes religion. -Steven Weinberg, 1999
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  10. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. -Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
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  11. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    It is worth recalling that it took brave pioneers many years to overcome the powerful taboo against the dissection of human cadavers during the early years of modern medicine. And we should note that, notwithstanding the outrage and revulsion with which the idea of dissection was then received, overcoming that tradition has not led to the feared collapse of morality and decency. We live in an era in which human corpses are still treated with due respect-indeed, with rather more respect and decorum than they were treated with at the time dissection was still disreputable.
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  12. Daniel C. Dennett _ Breaking the Spell: Religion

    I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound-if I can remember any of the damn things. -Dorothy Parker
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