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Quote by Daniel Dennett

“Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ... Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate.”

Quote by Daniel Dennett

Author

Daniel Dennett, born on March 28, 1942, is an American philosopher renowned for his work in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of the mind. His research spans various areas including consciousness, free will, and the philosophy of the mind. more

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“Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.”

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Book:Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

Source: Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“The plain message conveyed by the new administration is that George W Bush's America is a Christian nation, and that non-Christians are welcome into the tent so long as they agree to accept their status as a tolerated minority rather than as fully equal citizens. In effect, Bush is saying: "This is our home, and in our home we pray to Jesus as our savior. If you want to be a guest in our home, you must accept the way we pray."”

“But the United States is neither a Christian nation nor the exclusive home of any particular religious group. Non-Christians are not guests. We are as much hosts as any Mayflower-descendant Protestant. It is our home as well as theirs. And in a home with so many owners, there can be no official sectarian prayer. That is what the First Amendment is all about, and the first act by the new administration was in defiance of our Constitution.”

“I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.”

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Author:Rene Descartes

“There can be no doubt ... of our dependence upon forces beyond our control. Primitive man was so impotent in the face of these forces that g , especially in an unfavorable natural environment, fear became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fear created gods.”

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Author:John Dewey

“It has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, as intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.”

Has Beens Atheism Slavery Burden Positive Atheism Sentiments Superiority

Book:Human Nature and Conduct

Source: Human Nature and Conduct

“There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.”

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Book:A Common Faith

Source: A Common Faith

“Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import.”

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Book:James and Dewey on Belief and Experience

Source: James and Dewey on Belief and Experience

“Religions have been universal in the sense that all the people we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless.... The older apologists for Christianity seem to have been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor, as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment.”

Source: The Essential Dewey: Pragmatism, education, democracy

“The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified.”

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Book:James and Dewey on Belief and Experience

Source: James and Dewey on Belief and Experience