Julian Baggini Quotes

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

I became a sceptic of one way of seeing the world. And I think it is what started me in my awareness that any worldview is superstitious.

It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe - you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep.

Faith... must be enforced by reason... when faith becomes blind it dies.

There are a lot of scientists or other people who can be very skeptical or rational within their field, but they may well not do that in other aspects of their lives, when it comes to things like religion, or what have you. People have this amazing gift for being selective with their curiosity and skepticism.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

Faith itself is a horrible mechanism that stunts the growth of ideas. It also stunts the act of questioning, and it does this by pushing the idea that you have to have faith - and that nothing has to be proven.

There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method.

Men will die upon dogma but will not fall victim to a conclusion.

People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.

I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.

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

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

I think so many people tend to think of faith as blind adherence to a dogma or unquestioned surrender to an authority figure, and the result is losing self-respect and losing our own sense of what is true. And I don't think of faith in those terms at all.

Belief is the death of intelligence.

We all think we are right, or we should not believe as we do.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason.