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Quotes

The Lost SYMBOL


"Human instinct was America's first line of defense against terrorism. It was a proven fact that human intuitiion was more accurate detector of danger than all electronic gear in the world - the gift of fear."

"Our untapped potential is truly shocking."

ORIGIN


"Nostradamus wrote nearly a thousand loosely worded quatrains that, over four centuries, have benefitted from the creative readings of superstitious people looking to extract meaning where there is none."

"The human brain is a binary system - synapses either fire or they don't - they are on or off, like a computer switch. The brain has over a hundred trillion switches, which means that building a brain is not so much a question of technology as it is a question of scale."

"Nicolaus Copernicus was the father of heliocentric model - the belief that the planets revolve around the sun - which ignited a scientific revolution in the 1500s that entirely obliterated the Church's long-held teaching that mankind occupied the center of God's universe. His discovery was condemned by the Church for three centuries, but the damage had been done, and the world had never been the same."

"The truth of science is to eradicate the myth of religion"

"Early humans had a relationship of wonder with their universe, especially withthose phenomena they could not rationally understand. To solve these mysteries, they created a vast pantheon of gods and goddesses to explain anything that was beyond their understanding - thunder, tides, earthquakes, volcanoes, infertility, plagues, even love."

"God of the Gaps - When the ancients experienced gaps in their understanding of the world around them, they filled those gaps with God. As the gaps in our understanding of the natural world gradually disappeared, our pantheon of gods began to shrink."

"For the early Greeks, the ebb and flow of the ocean was attributed to the shifting moods of Poseidon. When we learned that the tides were caused by lunar cycles, Poseidon was no longer necessary, and we banished him as a foolish myth of an unenlightened time."

"Zeus - the god of all gods". The most feared and revered of all the pagan deities. Zeus, more than any other god, resisted his own extinction, mounting a violent battle against the dying of his own light, precisely as had the earlier gods Zeus had replaced. Zeus's followers were so resistant to giving up on their god that the conquering faith of Christianity had no choice but to adopt the face of Zeus as the face of their new God."

"For the human brain, any answer is better than no answer. We feel enormous discomfort when faced with 'insufficient data' and so our brains invent the data - offering us, at the very least, the illusion of order - creating myriad of philosophies, mythologies, and religions to reassure us that there is indeed an order and structure to the unseen world."

"Spiritual inquiry has always been the realm of religion, which encourages us to have blind faith in its teachings, even when they make little logical sense."

"Science is the antithesis of faith. Science, by definition, is the attempt to find physical proof for that which is unknown or not yet defined, and to reject superstition and misperception in favor of observable facts. When science offers an answer, that answer is universal. Humans do not go to war over it; they rally around it."

"Religious fervor has always suppressed scientific progress"

"The city of Baghdad rose to prominence as the greatest center of learning on earth, welcoming all religions, philosophies and sciences to its universities and libraries. A brilliant scholar named Hamid al-Ghazali - now considered one of the most influential Muslims in history - wrote a series of persuasive textx questioning the logic of Plato and Aristotle and declaring mathematics to be 'the philosophy of the devil'. The study of theology was made compulsory, and eventually the entire Islamic scientific movement collapsed. Islamic scientific world is still trying to recover."

"The Church's systematic murder, imprisonment, and denunciation of some of history's most brilliant scientific minds delayed human progress by at least a century"
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