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When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in this stuff?
A.C. Grayling
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A.C. Grayling
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More quotes by A.C. Grayling
Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.
A.C. Grayling
Inculcating the various competing - competing, note - falsehoods of the major faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal.
A.C. Grayling
And I say, the meaning of life is what you make it. There will be as many different meaningful lives as there are people to live them.
A.C. Grayling
A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.
A.C. Grayling
Nothing is truly unnatural, because everything that exists, including human intelligence, is a product of nature. If human intelligence can devise ways for the genes from two men to result in a child, their doing so is an entirely natural event.
A.C. Grayling
...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.
A.C. Grayling
Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn't argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we're doing is, we're presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain.
A.C. Grayling
Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.
A.C. Grayling
It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.
A.C. Grayling
Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.
A.C. Grayling
Christian churches and Muslim groups have no more right to have their say than women's institutes or trades unions. The government has actively encouraged faith-based education, and therefore given a megaphone to religious voices and fundamentalists.
A.C. Grayling
Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.
A.C. Grayling
I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.
A.C. Grayling
Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance.
A.C. Grayling
To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason - to believe something by faith - is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect.
A.C. Grayling
Future generations may or may not judge Wittgenstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other which he is time will tell.
A.C. Grayling
I do not believe that there are any such things as gods and goddesses, for exactly the same reasons as I do not believe there are fairies, goblins or sprites, and these reasons should be obvious to anyone over the age of ten.
A.C. Grayling
The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears.
A.C. Grayling
There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.
A.C. Grayling
Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric.
A.C. Grayling
