The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Interpretation
Blind faith can prevent critical thinking and questioning.
Richard Dawkins highlights the dangers of blind faith, suggesting that it perpetuates itself by discouraging rational thought and inquiry. This stance points to the importance of questioning beliefs, advocating for a mindset that values evidence and reasoning over unexamined faith.
In practice
In a discussion about religious beliefs, this quote can be used to emphasize the need for critical evaluation of faith.
No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the historic homeland of the Jews.
Possession, it is true, crowns exertion with rest; but it is only in the illusions of fancy that it has power to charm us.
A true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.
Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.
It is not a question of sitting silently, it is not a question of chanting a mantra. It is a question of understanding the subtle workings of the mind. As you understand those workings of the mind a great awareness arises in you, which is not of the mind. That awareness arises in your being, in your soul, in your consciousness.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.
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