We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
Daniel DennettRead
I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the dangers of religious fanaticism and suggests that its threats were already known before the 9/11 attacks.
Daniel Dennett's quote emphasizes that the violent consequences of religious fanaticism were already apparent prior to the 9/11 attacks. He suggests that this kind of extremism can distort the nature of good people, driving them to commit irrational and harmful acts. By framing this issue as one of long-standing awareness, Dennett calls attention to the importance of addressing the roots of such fanaticism rather than treating it as a new development.
Themes
ReligionFanaticismDangerViolenceSaneGoodhearted
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on the consequences of fanaticism, this quote could be used to illustrate the historical context of religious extremism.
More from Daniel Dennett
All quotes →Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
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Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.
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As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
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