I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.
Interpretation
People's self-reported religious beliefs may not reflect their true convictions or practices.
In this quote, Steven Pinker suggests that societal surveys on religion may paint an inaccurately pious picture of individuals. Many people may express religious beliefs or identify with a faith, yet their actual convictions or active practices may be more ambivalent or secular than the data indicates, highlighting the complexities of personal belief systems and the pressures of social conformity.
In practice
In a discussion on the influence of religion in modern society.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
But if the Vision was true and mighty, as I know, it is true and mighty yet;for such things are of Spirit, and it is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost.
Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.
What is right is not always the same as what is legal
I hear a drum in my soul's ear coming from the depth of the stars.
Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.
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