“Religion is not just about flying mountains, talking trees and biological monsters but also about agents whose mental states matter a lot, about connections with predation and death, about links with morality and misfortune.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“...the fact that early humans did decorate corpses, lay out the bodies in particular postures or bury people with flowers, aligned horns or tools would support the notion that some ritualization of death is a very ancient human activity.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“That we have evolved capacities for social interaction means that we tend to represent morality and misfortune in a very special way, which makes the connection with supernatural agents extremely easy and apparently obvious.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“A common explanation is that we imagine person-like agents who rule our destinies because this produces a reassuring view of our existence and the world around us. We project human features onto nonhuman aspects of our world because that makes these aspects more familiar and therefore less frightening.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“Consequently, for us light-minded and unstable human beings there is sheer fear and trembling in this thought of God's changelessness”
Source: The Essential Kierkegaard
“Only in much fear and trembling is a human being able to speak with God, in much fear and trembling”
Source: The Essential Kierkegaard
“Apparently the most permanent of the dispositions of the human psyche are those that derive from the fact that, of all animals, we remain the longest at the mother breast.”
Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
“Human beings are born too soon; they are unfinished, unready as yet to meet the world. Consequently their whole defense from a universe of dangers is the mother, under whose protection the intra-uterine period is prolonged.”
Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
“Concerns about technology and fairness go back a long way, even from a legal perspective. For example, as early as the 1970s it was illegal under French law to make any decisions affecting human beings in a purely algorithmic manner—that is, without any human supervision.”
Source: Practical Fairness: Achieving Fair and Secure Data Models
“The idea that society can be made more consistent, more accurate, and more fair by replacing idiosyncratic human judgment with numerical models is hardly a new one. In fact, their use even in criminal justice is nearly a century old.”
Source: Practical Time Series Analysis: Prediction with Statistics and Machine Learning
