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We do not just blindly concede control to authorities instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.

Michael Shermer

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Michael Shermer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 8
Historian Of Science
Journalist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Sport Cyclist
Writer
Glendale
California
USA
Michael Brant Shermer
Instead
Concede
Control
Blindly
Moral
Authorities
Community
Provided
Best
Communities
Behave
Authority
Follow
Cues

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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.
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We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.
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Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.
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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.
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Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.
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Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.
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Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from and where we are going.
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Anecdotal thinking comes naturally science requires training.
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Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.
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Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios.
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But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
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No such individual would find the Golden Rule surprising in any way because at its base lies the foundation of most human interactions and exchanges and it can be found in countless texts throughout recorded history and from around the world - a testimony to its universality.
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Skepticism is not a position skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.
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In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong, it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.
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The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition — thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.
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We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.
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Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
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Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.
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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.
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Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.
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