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
The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote critiques the selective gratitude people express towards God for life's blessings while ignoring blame for tragedies.
Daniel Dennett emphasizes the inconsistency in how people view divinity; they often appreciate God for good fortune but shy away from holding God responsible for misfortunes. This perspective suggests a failure to take a holistic view of spiritual accountability, indicating that one cannot selectively attribute outcomes to God without facing the implications of both positive and negative experiences in life.
Themes
GratitudeTheologyAccountabilityDivinityBlessingsDisasters
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the nature of God in philosophical or theological debates.
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.
Daniel DennettRead
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.
Daniel DennettRead
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