Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 24

The traditional Indian mind has been for centuries, and still is, first religious, and then everything else.
Abhijit Naskar
Faith in God is optional, but faith in the self – in the spirit within, is imperative.
Abhijit Naskar
Faith in God is optional, but faith in the self – in the spirit within, is imperative. Have faith in yourself. Have faith in the human first, then God if you want.
Abhijit Naskar
Have faith in yourself. Have faith in the human first, then God if you want.
Abhijit Naskar
A being with no faith in the human self is a being with no spirit of life, regardless of how many Fathers or Holy Spirits or Sons it believes in.
Abhijit Naskar
In a society of thinking humanity, it should always be, humans first, and then Gods, Krishna or otherwise.
Abhijit Naskar
The most sensitive period of their developmental age, when the kids are supposed to be taught to question everything and nourish their reasoning skills, they are taught that God created the world in seven days – that the human race did not evolve from apes through millions of years, rather it came from the amorous congress between two God-made humans, named Adam and Eve. And if you ask why? The answers of the uneducated primordial teachers would be that the scriptures say so. And now if you ask, can’t the scriptures be wrong – do I have to take these stories literally? They would lash out with rage and shout at you – how dare you question the scriptures! Every single word in it is true. There is no greater truth than the truth of these sacred texts.
Abhijit Naskar
Mother Nature created God as a neurological anti-depressant sentiment, but Man tore that God apart into pieces and made citadels of differentiation out of them.
Abhijit Naskar
Any religion that does not evolve with time, either gets destroyed or destroys the world.
Abhijit Naskar
When a person believes that a God is truly concerned about the well-being of life on earth, and especially of human life, the belief adorns that person with various positive psychological elements such as emotional stability, in times of distress and a highly functional moral compass. Here this belief has nothing to do with reality whatsoever, rather it serves the evolutionary purpose of self-preservation.
Abhijit Naskar
The argument against faith is all based upon the rigorous analysis of the scriptures, and not upon the objective observation of the actual individual sensation of faith. Historical experiences of the Kingdom of God gave rise to all the scriptures in the world, but the scriptures themselves don’t account for the actual globally prevalent psychological element of faith or divinity in the human mind. Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.
Abhijit Naskar
The moment the religious population of the world begins to see the prophets what they really were - mortal teachers of the mortal world, a great portion of the world's religious conflicts shall vanish into thin air.
Abhijit Naskar
The point is, being a Christian does not mean hating or belittling the non-Christians. Being a Muslim does not mean hating or belittling the non-Muslims. Being an Atheist does not mean hating or belittling the religious people. In a civilized society, diversity in religious orientation should be the reason for celebration, not the cause for hatred and differentiation.
Abhijit Naskar
A religious individual may most gloriously carry out his or her own rituals, as a part of his or her cultural identity, but the moment, that person starts to build a wall of separation between the self and the rest of humanity, coaxed by the textual commands of a scripture, the healthy religiousness turns into dangerous fundamentalism, which is a threat to both the self and the society.
Abhijit Naskar
Killing a bunch of Jihadis may be morally justified, to save humanity from their wrath, but it won't terminate Jihad for long. Jihad or Holy war would keep festering one way or another, until religious fundamentalism is eradicated from the human society. Until the whole humanity learns to scrutinize its most revered scriptures with the sharp tool of reasoning, Jihad will keep on striking over the world. If one does not have the basic conscientious capacity to refute the primitive textual verses of the scriptures that demand one to kill or torture another being for holding a different belief system than one's own, then that entity is no being of the civilized human society, it is merely a pest from the stone-age. No Quran, no Bible, no Gita, no Cow, is greater than the human self. There shall be hope for harmony and peace in the world, only when fundamentalism is destroyed forever. Harmony is not a luxury, it is an existential necessity of the species. And to achieve it, if a hundred Bibles have to be sacrificed, then be it. But for no Bible, Quran or Gita, can harmony be compromised.
Abhijit Naskar
Faith is like a pockpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.
Sam Harris
Faith is like a pickpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.
Sam Harris
Holiness in the purest form is independent of all textual doctrines, all churches and all institutions.
Abhijit Naskar
Blind faith is not real religion my friend.
Abhijit Naskar
Whether you call yourself a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu or an Atheist, if you have kindness in your heart and compassion in your act, you are on the right path of religion.
Abhijit Naskar
The best way to avoid a catastrophic conflict of beliefs is to be more compassionate about other people’s beliefs as long as they do not advocate for prejudices, bigotry and sectarianism.
Abhijit Naskar
I might not have risen to destroy people's beliefs, but some beliefs do need destruction if the human society is meant to progress in harmony instead of sinking into the depths of illustrious interhuman conflicts. Meekness-induced prejudices have no place in the society of thinking humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
Prayers bring comfort, not change. Change requires tangible human efforts.
Abhijit Naskar
Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.
Sam Harris
There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad...To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
Sam Harris
[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
Sam Harris
The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.
Sam Harris
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.
Sam Harris
Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing.
Colleen McCullough
Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.
Sam Harris
We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.
Sam Harris
I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
Sam Harris
Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
David Eagleman
All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
David Eagleman
Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
David Eagleman
Religion is what gives a person hope to keep walking even in the darkest times.
Abhijit Naskar
If a person takes comfort in his or her faith upon divinity in times of distress, then who the hell am I to say, that the person is delusional.
Abhijit Naskar
Habitual identification with discursive thought is the source of human suffering
Sam Harris
Our habitual failure to recognise thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought, is the primary source of human suffering.
Sam Harris
Build roads never seen before. Build bridges never existed before. Build a society never lived before. It is all in your hands now.
Abhijit Naskar
Give me your soul and I will give you a unified humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
I am the thread of unification that goes through humans of all religions, cultures and ideologies while reinforcing their innate sense of one humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
I work to make human beings out of human bodies. I work to make conscience out of mindlessness. I work to make Gods out of obedient worshippers.
Abhijit Naskar
Give me your soul and I will give you a unified humanity replete with courage, conscience and compassion.
Abhijit Naskar
O my brave Almighty Human, with the ever-effulgent flow of courage, conscience and compassion, turn yourself into a vivacious humanizer, and start walking with bold footsteps while eliminating racism, terminating misogyny, destroying homophobia and all other primitiveness that have turned humanity into the most inhuman species on earth.
Abhijit Naskar
The black, the white, the brown, the red, the yellow, the hetero, the homo, the trans, the poor, the rich, the literate, the illiterate, the weak, the strong – all are my sisters and brothers. My life is their life. And till the last breath in my body, I shall be serving you all with all the power in my veins. And beyond death, my ideas shall be serving you for eternity.
Abhijit Naskar
Start small and keep going.
Abhijit Naskar
Sin, blasphemy, heresy – all these are primitive ideas created by primitive creatures, unworthy of the title “human”.
Abhijit Naskar
Shallow intellect is worse than ignorance. Ignorance can be treated with knowledge, but shallow intellect, that is illusion of knowledge, is untreatable and quite dangerous to the progress and wellbeing of humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
What is the point of being humans, if our actions scream with more bestiality than humanity!
Abhijit Naskar
Humanity is not a word my friend. It is a symbol – a symbol of hope – a symbol of wisdom – yet this very symbol has become disgraced by our faults and deluded justification of mistakes.
Abhijit Naskar
Civilized are not those who never make mistakes – civilized are those who learn from their mistakes instead of trying to justify them.
Abhijit Naskar
The more we humanize the society, the more we will become humans.
Abhijit Naskar
Arise, my friend – the world is wailing for kindness – it is wailing for compassion – it is wailing for love.
Abhijit Naskar
Religion without reason is merely an illusion of religion – it is a mockery of religion, like it has become today.
Abhijit Naskar
When the mind is without fear and prejudice, and the head is held high with the strength of reasoning, then only the brightest rays of religion can penetrate the darkest corners of the human society.
Abhijit Naskar
Make films that purify the soul with the flow of rational, vigorous and compassionate thinking.
Abhijit Naskar
Use filmmaking for a greater purpose, than to just entertain some drowsy minds. Wake the whole world up with your movies. It has been sleeping for long. Its eternal sleep has become its darkest nemesis. Now is the time to wake it up.
Abhijit Naskar
Take the clapper and become the alarm that the world so desperately needs.
Abhijit Naskar