Quotes on Religion and Philosophy

José Bergamín:

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

El cohete y la estrella (The Rocket and the Star), (1923)

Richard Dawkins:

I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion. And who, looking at Northern Ireland or the Middle East, can be confident that the brain virus of faith is not exceedingly dangerous?

"Is Science a Religion?," Humanist, January/February 1997

Adam Ferguson:

Confidence in the effect of superstitious observances is not peculiar to any age or nation. Few, even of the accomplished Greeks and Romans, were able to shake off this weakness.

An Essay on the History of Civil Society

William James:

Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. The whole defense of religious faith hinges upon action.

The Will To Believe (1897)

William James:

To preach skepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law.

The Will To Believe (1897)

William James:

Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder our 'intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else?

The Will To Believe (1897)

William James:

The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of view, simply silly. From another point of view it is worse than silly, it is vile. When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness...

The Will To Believe (1897)

John Locke:

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, "It is a matter of faith, and above reason."

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

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Jon Krakauer:

Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God.

Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

Ben MacIntyre:

Superstition and magic are a technique, albeit an illusory one, for controlling the world. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski discovered in the 1920s that fishermen in the Trobriand islands, off Papua New Guinea, used their own skill and experience close to land, but out at sea deployed magic charms. The more threatening the environment, the greater the reliance on magic; and the upsurge in fantasy, myth and the supernatural in our culture may be a direct consequence of human doubt and stress.

Writing in The Times (2003)

John Stuart Mill:

People are accustomed to believe and have been encouraged in the belief by some who aspire to the character of philosophers, that their feelings, on subjects of this nature, are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary.

On Liberty and Utilitarianism

Montaigne:

Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from the essence of nature. Habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgment.

Of Custom

Friedrich Nietzsche:

Doubt as sin. -- Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature - is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak , s. 89.

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Baruch Spinoza:

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).

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