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Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Being deeply knowledgeable on one subject narrows one's focus and increases confidence, but it also blurs dissenting views until they are no longer visible, thereby transforming data collection into bias confirmation and morphing self-deception into self-assurance. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one's place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond oneself ... Does scientific explanation of the world diminish its spiritual beauty? I think not. Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades. (158-159) — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person. This is based on the philosopher John Rawls's concepts of the "veil of ignorance" and the "original position" in which moral actors are ignorant of their position in society when determining rules and laws that affect everyone, because of the self-serving bias in human decision making. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

This led Montesquieu to become one of the earliest proponents of the trade theory of peace when he observed that hunting and herding nations often found themselves in conflict and wars, whereas trading nations "became reciprocally dependent," making peace "the natural effect of trade." The psychology behind the effect, Montesquieu speculated, was exposure of different societies to customs and manners different from their own, which leads to "a cure for the most destructive prejudices." Thus, he concluded, "we see that in countries where the people move only by the spirit of commerce, they make a traffic of all the humane, all the moral virtues. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition - thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Having a Nobel Prize or being a famous scientist will get you a week to a week and a half, metaphorically speaking, of a hearing for your new idea, but after that, it's going to tank if you don't have the evidence and support for it. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The self-deception of slave owners and proponents of slavery is well documented by the historians Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in their book Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South. Slavery was not perceived by most slaveholders in the nineteenth century to be an exploitation of humans by other humans for economic gain; instead, slaveholders painted a portrait of slavery as a paternalistic and benign institution in which the slaves themselves were seen as not so different from all laborers - black and white - who toiled everywhere in both free and slave states; further, the South's "Christian slavery" was claimed to be superior. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer
a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer
a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

I'm a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

This fact provides a rebuttal to the argument "What if a young woman aborts a baby who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer?" A rejoinder is, "What if a young woman who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer dies in childbirth? — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

It was the Roman Catholic Church that first articulated the witch theory of causality in medieval Europe with the Papal Bull of Innocent VIII in 1484, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus (Desiring with Supreme Ardor), followed two years later with the Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witch). The latter was a how-to manual on finding and prosecuting witches, who, it alleged, were able to copulate with the devil, steal men's penises, wreck ships, ruin crops, eat babies, turn men into frogs, shed no tears, cast no shadow in the sun, have hair that could not be cut, and pretty much anything considered to be "devilish" and "wicked. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

We want to be open-minded enough to accept radial new ideas when they occasionally come along, but we don't want to be so open-minded that our brains fall out. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Cities, Barber notes, "collect garbage and collect art rather than collecting votes or collecting allies. They put up buildings and run buses rather than putting up flags and running political parties. They secure the flow of water rather than the flow of arms. They foster education and culture in place of national defense and patriotism. They promote collaboration, not exceptionalism."24 — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Any preference for my group's interests over yours must be justified by some unbiased, disinterested ethic. Which sounds simple but, given that we're dealing with Humans and not Vulcans, it's sometimes difficult for two parties to agree on basic principles, specially parties who are unable or unwilling to switch points of view. This is the power of ethical reasoning. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies, and in the end isn't that the real truth? The answer is no. No squared. The postmodernist belief in the — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Since humans are by nature tribal, the overall goal is to expand the concept of the tribe to include ALL members of the species, in a global free society. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Tenure in any department is serious business, because it means, essentially, employment for life. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

I am an atheist. There, I said it. Are you happy, all you atheists out there who have remonstrated with me for adopting the agnostic moniker? If "atheist" means someone who does not believe in God, then an atheist is what I am. But I detest all such labels. Call me what you like - humanist, secular humanist, agnostic, nonbeliever, nontheist, freethinker, heretic, or even bright. I prefer skeptic. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Many Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. It's chock-full of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

We want to be special. We want our place in the cosmos to be central. We want evolution-even godless evolution-to have been directed toward us so that we stand at the pinnacle of nature's ladder of progress. Rewind the tape of life and we want to believe that we (Homo Sapiens) would appear again and again. Would we? Probably not. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

I always accepted the libertarian position of minimum regulation in the sale and use of firearms because I placed guns under the beneficial rubric of minimal restrictions on individuals. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

So, of course, Gish's presentation was well received, which it would have been the case had he only gotten up and said "praise the Lord" and sat back down. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

A poignant example of what it often takes to bring about an end to a superstitious barbaric act may be seen in the Indian practice of suttee, or the burning of widows. The British government abolished suttee by outlawing it, and followed up by severely punishing transgressors. As the nineteenth-century British commander in chief in India, General Charles Napier, told his charges who complained that suttee was their cultural custom that the British should respect: Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

In other words, a gun is twenty-two times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt, or a homicide than it is for self-defense.67 — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The "hypocrite" is the critic who disguises his own failings by focusing attention on the failings of others. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Mind is just a word we use to describe neural activity in the brain. No brain, no mind. We know this because if a part of the brain is destroyed through stroke or cancer or injury or surgery, whatever that part of the brain was doing is now gone. If the damage occurs in early childhood when the brain is especially plastic, or in adulthood in certain parts of the brain that are conducive to rewiring, then that brain function - that "mind" part of the brain - may be rewired into another neural network in the brain. But this process just further reinforces the fact that without neural connections in the brain there is no mind. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The components of a philosophy must stand or fall on their own internal consistency or empirical support, regardless of the founder's or followers' personality quirks or moral inconsistencies. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

When religious believers invoke miracles and acts of creation ex nihilo, that is the end of the search for them, whereas for scientists, the identification of such mysteries is only the beginning. Science picks up where theology leaves off. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

I care what is actually true, even more than what I hope is true. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural; disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

What is the probability that Yahweh is the one true god, and Amon Ra, Aphrodite, Apollo, Baal, Brahma, Ganesha, Isis, Mithra, Osiris, Shiva, Thor, Vishnu, Wotan, Zeus, and the other 986 gods are false gods? As skeptics like to say, everyone is an atheist about these gods; some of us just go one god further. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. A reinforcement is, by definition, something that is rewarding to the organism; that is to say, it makes the brain direct the body to repeat the behavior in order to get another positive reward. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Finding witches not only explained evil, it also was tangible evidence of God's existence. As the sixteenth-century Cambridge theologian Roger Hutchinson argued, in a polished bit of circular reasoning, "If there be a God, as we most steadfastly must believe, verily there is a Devil also; and if there be a Devil, there is no surer argument, no stronger proof, no plainer evidence, that there is a God."13 And, conversely, as noted in a seventeenth-century witch trial, "Atheists abound in these days and witchcraft is called into question. If neither possession nor witchcraft [exists], why should we think that there are devils? If no devils, no God. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Thinking scientifically requires the ability to reason abstractly, which itself is at the foundation of all morality. Consider the mental rotation required to implement the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This necessitates one to change positions - to become the other - and then to extrapolate what action X would feel like as the receiver instead of the doer (or as the victim instead of the perpetrator). A case can be made that the type of conceptual ratiocination required for both scientific and moral reasoning not only is linked historically and psychologically, but also that it has been improving over time as we become better at nonconcrete, theoretical reflection. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The Realistic Vision recognizes the
need for strict moral education through parents, family, friends, and
community because people have a dual nature of being selfish and selfless,
competitive and cooperative, greedy and generous, and so we need rules
and guidelines and encouragement to do the right thing. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.22 — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Scientists are skeptics. It's unfortunate that the word 'skeptic' has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it's just thoughtful inquiry. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

If spirituality is the sense of awe and humility in the face of the creation, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

To many of my liberal and atheist friends and colleagues, an explanation for religious beliefs such as what I have presented in this book is tantamount to discounting both its internal validity and its external reality. Many of my conservative and theist friends and colleagues take it this way as well and therefore bristle at the thought that explaining a belief explains it away. This is not necessarily so. Explaining why someone believes in democracy does not explain away democracy; explaining why someone who holds liberal or conservative values within a democracy does not explain away those values. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Some religions, such as Catholicism, fully endorsed slavery, as Pope Nicholas V made clear when, in 1452, he issued the radically proslavery document Dum Diversas. This was a papal bull granting Catholic countries such as Spain and Portugal "full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property ... and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery."10 These last few words - to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery - sound not just sinister to us, but also psychotic. They make perfect sense, however, in a Christian context, given that the Bible is itself a heedlessly proslavery tome. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

People who espouse Intelligent Design believe nature is so complex as to require an intelligent designer-God. Similarly, liberals believe the economy is so complex as to require an intelligent designer-government. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us? — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God ... — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today - the age of science - science fiction is our mythology. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should simply check the box next to 'African-American.' My maternal grandmother was German and my maternal grandfather was Greek. The next time I fill out one of those forms I am going to check 'Other' and write in the truth about my racial and cultural heritage: 'African-Greek-German-American.' And proud of it. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism - the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

A witch is a causal theory of explanation. And it's fair to say that if your causal theory to explain why bad things happen is that your neighbor flies around on a broom and cavorts with the devil at night, inflicting people, crops, and cattle with disease, preventing cows from giving milk, beer from fermenting, and butter from churning - and that the proper way to cure the problem is to burn her at the stake - then either you are insane or you lived in Europe six centuries ago, and you even had biblical support, specifically Exodus 22:18: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125) — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Yet basically, libertarians are for freedom and liberty for
individuals, while recognizing that in order to be free we must also be
protected. Your freedom to swing your arms ends at my nose. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

In addition to localized neural networks, hallucinogenic drugs have been documented to trigger such preternatural experiences, such as the sense of floating and flying stimulated by atropine and other belladonna alkaloids. These can be found in mandrake and jimsonweed and were used by European witches and American Indian shamans, probably for this very purpose.32 Dissociative anesthetics such as the ketamines are also known to induce out-of-body experiences. Ingestion of methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) may bring back long-forgotten memories and produce the feeling of age regression, while dimethyltryptamine (DMT) - also known as "the spirit molecule" - causes the dissociation of the mind from the body and is the hallucinogenic substance in ayahuasca, a drug taken by South American shamans. People who have taken DMT report "I no longer have a body," and "I am falling," "flying," or "lifting up. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea). — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Life can be a painful struggle and filled with mysteries, so whatever one needs to do to get through the day to find happiness and to bring some resolution to those nagging mysteries ... well ... who am I to argue? As declared in Psalms 46:1: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories of
constrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of human
nature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let's call this the
Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in
all respects - morally, physically, and intellectually - then you hold a
Realistic Vision of human nature. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

'Are science and religion compatible?' It's like [asking]: 'Are science and plumbing compatible?' They're just two different things. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

There is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There is only the natural, the normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Skepticism is not a position; it's a process. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

As the medieval historian Richard Kieckhefer notes, the people of medieval Europe thought of magic as rational for two reasons: first of all, that it could actually work (that its efficacy was shown by evidence recognized within the culture as authentic) and, secondly, that its workings were governed by principles (of theology or of physics) that could be coherently articulated. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Richard Dawkins

As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. ' Michael Shermer, In The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. — Richard Dawkins

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

In theory, of course, abstinence is a foolproof method of preventing pregnancies and STDs and STIs (sexually transmitted diseases and sexually transmitted infections - you can have the latter without the former), just as starvation is a foolproof method of preventing obesity. But in reality the desires to love physically and to bond socially are fundamental to who we are as human beings; and the sex drive is so powerful, and the pleasures and psychological rewards so great, that recommending abstinence as a form of contraception and STI prevention is, in fact, to recommend pregnancy and infection by default. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

What science tells us is that we are but one among hundreds of millions of species that evolved over the course of three and a half billion years on one tiny planet among many orbiting an ordinary star, itself one of possibly billions of solar systems in an ordinary galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars, itself located in a cluster of galaxies not so different from millions of other galaxy clusters, themselves whirling away from one another in an expanding cosmic bubble universe that very possibly is only one among a near infinite number of bubble universes. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness - a statement issued in 2012 by an international group of prominent cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists - there is a convergence of evidence to show the continuity between humans and nonhuman animals, and that sentience is the common characteristic across species. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are six billion of them. — Michael Shermer

Shermer Quotes By Michael Shermer

As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest. — Michael Shermer