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but apparently ape leaders developed the tendency to help the poor, needy and fatherless millions of years before the Bible instructed ancient Israelites that they should not ‘mistreat any widow or fatherless child’
Many religions praise the value of humility – but then imagine themselves to be the most important thing in the universe.
There is something deeply troubling and dangerous about people who avoid killing just because ‘God says so’. Such people are motivated by obedience rather than compassion,
Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
Our reliance on groupthink has made us masters of the world, and the knowledge illusion enables us to go through life without being caught in an impossible effort to understand everything ourselves.
Thus scientists who believe that facts can change public opinion may themselves be the victims of scientific groupthink.
Yet if you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, to explore dead ends, to make space for doubts and boredom, and to allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom.
Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the centre, because the centre is built on existing knowledge.
point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month – that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years – that’s a religion,
If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth.
Scholars throughout history faced this dilemma: do they serve power or truth?
Silence isn’t neutrality; it is supporting the status quo.
It is a movie about the male fear of intelligent women, and in particular the fear that female liberation might lead to female domination.
It’s not that somewhere in your mind there is an iron chest with a big red warning sign, ‘Open only in Fiji!’ and when you finally travel to the South Pacific you get to open the chest, and out come all kinds of special emotions and feelings that you can have only in Fiji. And if you never visit Fiji in your
The harder you’ve worked on building something, the more difficult it is to let go of it
As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans
Due to the growing pace of change you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.
Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life.
Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them.
Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons.
First, by lengthening my personal story I don’t really make it more meaningful. I just make it longer.
Since they left nothing behind it is all too easy to posthumously recruit them to this or that cause, and they cannot even protest.
‘Well,’ he answered, ‘I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven’t figured out is why the other people are here.’
If you ask for the true meaning of life and get a story in reply, know that this is the wrong answer.
Most stories are held together by the weight of their roof rather than by the strength of their foundations.
priest held high a piece of bread and exclaimed ‘Hoc est corpus!’ – ‘This is the body!’ – and the bread supposedly became the flesh of Christ. In the minds of the illiterate peasants, who did not speak Latin, ‘Hoc est corpus!’ got garbled into ‘Hocus-pocus!’
Napoleon famously observed that he could make men sacrifice their lives for a colourful ribbon.
So by waving a colourful flag and singing an anthem you transform the nation from an abstract story into a tangible reality.
Of all rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because, of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real.
The sacrifice is not just a way to convince your lover that you are serious – it is also a way to convince yourself that you are really in love. Why
Apparently, though the crusaders fervently believed in salvation and paradise, at the moment of truth they opted to hedge their bets.
Many religions have also made extensive use of books, yet that doesn’t mean using books is a religious practice.
