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Quote by Robert Neelly Bellah

“"Nothing is ever lost" means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are.”

Quote by Robert Neelly Bellah

Author

Robert Neelly Bellah

Robert Neelly Bellah was an American sociologist known for his research on modern religion and social structures. His work, 'The American Civil Religion,' had a profound impact on understanding American society and culture. more

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“We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can't adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn't a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.”

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“I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.”

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“Human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic - that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing.”

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“The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand.”

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“Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren't monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism - either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture - and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing.”

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“It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.”

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“Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it's not a universal religion I don't know what a universal religion is. There's also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It's not so simple.”

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“If you fight for a living you can't give a damn about the opponent because they're trying to take food out of your mouth and your kids' mouths. You're in competition with everybody. The trick is, just don't let them know you're competing against them.”

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“One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate - obviously you couldn't be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it's not always there in the foreground. If you don't understand that, you're missing a lot.”

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