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
Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
Interpretation
Religion involves social systems where participants believe in supernatural beings and seek their approval.
Daniel Dennett's quote defines religion as a societal construct where individuals acknowledge and engage with supernatural entities. It emphasizes the communal aspect of religious belief, highlighting that religion is not just a personal experience but a collective one, where group dynamics and social expectations play significant roles in how people perceive and seek approval from these higher powers.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of religion in society during a community meeting.
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.
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.
Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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.
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.
If the wine drinker has a deep gentleness in him, he will show that when drunk. But if he has hidden anger and arrogance, those appear.
How often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies.
That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
I don''t know if I like communism, and I don''t know if I like socialism. But I know that the Breakfast for Children Program feeds my kids. And if you put your hands on that Breakfast for Children Program . . .
Benevolence is one of the distinguishing characters of man.
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
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