Scientism Religion Quotes & Sayings

I started the day with a potato. I washed it down with some Martian coffee. That's my name for "hot water with a caffeine pill dissolved in it." I ran out of real coffee months ago. — Andy Weir

I like poems where you don't really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them. — X.J. Kennedy

You have no idea how much I want you. — Rachel Harris

There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa . Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important. — George Orwell

I attempt from love's sickness to fly. — Henry Purcell

We weren't put here to be miserable. We were put here to do the best we can, and we should take our energy and improve our state of being. — Lenny Kravitz

To those seniors, and especially elderly veterans like myself, I want to tell you this: You are not alone, and you having nothing to be ashamed of. If elder abuse happened to me, it can happen to anyone. I want you to know that you deserve better. — Mickey Rooney

Given its diverse meanings and lack of specificity, the word "scientism" should be dropped. But if it's to be kept, I suggest we level the playing field by introducing the term religionism, which I'll define as "the tendency of religion to overstep its boundaries by making unwarranted statements about the universe, or by demanding unearned authority." Religionism would include clerics claiming to be moral authorities, arguments that scientific phenomena give evidence for God, and unsupported statements about the nature of a god and how he interacts with the world. And here we find no lack of examples, including believers who blame natural disasters on homosexuality, tell us that God doesn't want us to use condoms, argue that the acceptance of evolution by scientists is a conspiracy, and insist that human morality and the universe's "fine-tuning" are evidence for God. — Jerry A. Coyne

The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated whether it be self-educated or merely state-educated. Education ought to be a searchlight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centered entirely on himself. Some improvement may be made by turning equally vivid and perhaps vulgar spotlights upon a large number of other people as well. But the only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realize the stars. — G.K. Chesterton

Many scientific disciplines begin by not observing any sort of vital spark or consciousness in material events and proceed to deny that these things exist in living things, including themselves. Because consciousness does not fit into their mechanistic schemes they declare it illusory. Magicians make exactly the reverse argument. Observing consciousness in themselves and animals, they are magnanimous enough to extend it to all things to some degree - trees, amulets, planetary bodies, and all. This is a far more respectful and generous attitude than that of religions, most of whom won't even give animals a soul. — Peter J. Carroll

I'd rather be a big fish in a specialized pond than a little, little fish in a more generalized big pond. — Leonard Lauder

[O]nly the sea is like a human being ... always moving, always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests; it is always wanting, wanting, wanting. It hurries on; and then it creeps back slowly without having reached, moaning. It is always asking a question and it never gets the answer. — Olive Schreiner

And then she poked him again. Not because he wasn't paying attention but because when she did it the first time she found she liked it. Mrs. Bunny might think she was getting away with this, but Mr. Bunny was silently counting the pokes to pay her back later. — Polly Horvath

If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. — Martin Luther King Jr.

It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning, rather than any special scientific doctrine, that makes science and religion look like competitors today. Scientism emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview - a vision that attracted people by its contrast with what went before - which is, of course, how people very often do make such decisions, even ones that they afterwards call scientific. — Mary Midgley

As Indigenous peoples, we know there is more to the world. We know spirits exist. We know as women, because we're especially attuned to this kind of knowledge, that spirits exist and have a presence in our lives. Some of us are gifted and can communicate with the spirit world. Not everyone has that gift and can perceive the borders between the living and the dead and our society actively discourages us of exploring the knowledge of what many of us have already always known in our cultures. — Sandra Cisneros

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values. — A.R. Ammons

The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth. — Jacques Barzun

When, upon the closed system of normal preoccupations, a story of a sea serpent appears, it is inhospitably treated. To us of the wider cordialities, it has recommendations for kinder reception. I think that we shall be noted in recognitions of good works for our bizarre charities. — Charles Fort

If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion - the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought - for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education. — Sigmund Freud