Julian Baggini Quotes - Page 2

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• I don't believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have willfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think. I could no more simply decide to believe in God than I could decide to like beetroot, just like that.

  Julian Baggini

  Religious, Believe, Thinking

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• To a certain extent all philosophers have been involved in a systematic questioning that undermines confidence and certainty. Philosophy as a whole unleashed skeptical forces which, outside of the tightly controlled environment of a rigorous philosophical debate, led a lot of people to throw their hands up in despair and think 'what's the point?'. A lot of the public perception of philosophy is that it leaves you with no answers, and more confused than you were at the beginning.

  Julian Baggini

  Philosophy, Confused, Philosophical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• A lot of religious belief - even the majority - involves making factual claims about the world which do come into conflict with science and history. For Christians, a test of this is the Empty Tomb. I ask Christians: 'are you saying that it does not matter - as a matter of fact - whether or not Christ's tomb was empty and that he was resurrected?' At that point, I find that, to a lot of them, it really does matter, despite all the fine talk about not wanting to confuse science and history with religion.

  Julian Baggini

  Christian, Religious, World

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• If I'm a CEO and I say, 'Misogyny will not be tolerated', that's a more powerful statement than 'It is my sincere hope and our intention to eradicate misogyny from this company'. Sometimes saying things in that more categorical form, has a real function. Although, if you dig beneath it, it is actually one of J.L. Austin's illocutionary acts; you're trying to make something happen rather than describing something already happened. The fact that it has the grammatical form of a description is fine.

  Julian Baggini

  Powerful, Real, Trying

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think the appropriate kind of skepticism is this: you've got to be asking questions all the time, you've also got to make sure that you're doing so in the spirit of genuinely wanting to find the answers - and that also means being open. I battle with this: I know I tend to be very skeptical and as a result, I veer towards the dismissive. But being aware of the tendency, I like to challenge my own skepticism and make sure it's not just knee-jerk. You need to be skeptical towards yourself as well. When you're only skeptical outwards you've got an unbalanced skepticism.

  Julian Baggini

  Mean, Thinking, Challenges

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Some of my understanding of what philosophy and ethics is has changed very slowly. One thing that has changed is this for quite a long time I bought-into the idea that philosophy is basically about arguments. I'm increasingly of the view that it isn't. The most interesting things in philosophy aren't arguments. The thing that I think is underestimated is what I call a form of attending. I think that philosophy is at least as much about carefully attending to things as it is about the structure of arguments.

  Julian Baggini

  Philosophy, Thinking, Interesting

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• We can take suffering to be an opportunity to learn and to grow. But if we are honest, we should remember that this is making the best of a bad job, and that minimising suffering takes priority over optimising its outcome.

  Julian Baggini

  Jobs, Opportunity, Priorities

  "An unequivocal 'no'" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. February 17, 2010.

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• Talking about creating truth tends to alarm people, because truth is meant to be 'just out there'. It doesn't take much thinking to appreciate that we sometimes change truths on the ground - sometimes just by words. A new law will change what is possible. I think - perhaps because the paradigm we follow tends to be scientific, and all about discovery - the creative element of truth is one upon which we don't focus so much attention. This is particularly so in anglophone philosophy, perhaps because we associate it too much with those 'pernicious' continental trends.

  Julian Baggini

  Philosophy, Thinking, Appreciate

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.

  Julian Baggini

  Trying, Argument, Failing

  "The modern believer is not suspicious enough" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. January 26, 2012.

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• No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science.

  Julian Baggini

  Cosmos, Failing, Fractions

  "Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?" by Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss, www.theguardian.com. September 8, 2012.

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• Real life is about accepting ups and downs, the good and the bad, the possibility of failure as well as the ambition to succeed. Atheism speaks to the truth about our human nature because it recognizes all this and does not seek to shield us from the truth by myth and superstition

  Julian Baggini

  Real, Ambition, Atheism

  Julian Baggini (2003). “Atheism: A Very Short Introduction”, p.111, Oxford University Press

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• I am very Aristotelian in approach - not in detail - so I always find I'm saying things that get people frustrated like 'It's a matter of balance and judgement'. To a lot of philosophers these are terrible words because they're admitting of vagueness and uncertainty. The more I've done philosophy, the more I've become convinced that that is the way it is.

  Julian Baggini

  Philosophy, People, Frustrated

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.

  Julian Baggini

  Believe, Games, Use

  "The modern believer is not suspicious enough" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. January 26, 2012.

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• Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.

  Julian Baggini

  Reality, Different, Life Is

  "What good luck to miss out on a £64m lottery win" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. December 6, 2012.

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• I think that a lot of social movements, political movements, powerful ones - certainly they form, collectively, an idea of the truth which becomes hard to question. It becomes a dogma, and from the inside it starts to look like common sense.

  Julian Baggini

  Powerful, Thinking, Common Sense

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• People seem very arrogant when they say 'I'm right and you're wrong', but in practice we all believe we're right. We have a staggering arrogance in our own belief. That can be tempered by not being 100% certain; by being provisional. No matter what the debate is, very few people have the modesty to suspend judgement on a whole range of things; most intelligent people have an opinion and are expected to have an opinion by other people - but it always requires making a personal judgement that goes way-beyond your expertise. We do it all the time.

  Julian Baggini

  Believe, Intelligent, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Whatever the truth is about the extent to which truth is respected in the future, it is going to depend partly on what we do. More important than making predictions is doing things which help bring about this respect.

  Julian Baggini

  Important, Helping, Truth Is

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain, while others are deeply unhappy with how things are but just accept the fact. Complaint occurs when we refuse to accept that things are wrong and we do something about it, even if that something is simply articulating our unease.

  Julian Baggini

  Opportunity, People, Unhappy

  "For God's sake, start moaning" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. December 06, 2007.

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• Being a good neighbour is about compassion, which is as warm-blooded as justice is cool-headed.

  Julian Baggini

  Compassion, Justice, Neighbour

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• I think that internet technologies are making everything so transparent. The arms race of deception and spin against the public trying to keep up with it - I think the forces of spin have to lose. In the corporate world people are finding this. Corporate social responsibility has been on the agenda for a very long time - and a lot of people say it's a kind of green-wash or white-wash - but because there's nowhere to hide anymore, people are coming around to the realization that the only way to be seen to be good is to be good. You can't fake it.

  Julian Baggini

  Responsibility, Technology, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• True respect means taking other people's beliefs seriously and assuming they are adult and intelligent enough to be able to cope with it if you tell them, clearly and civility, why you think they are totally, utterly and disastrously wrong.

  Julian Baggini

  Mean, Intelligent, Thinking

  "Respect for you and your crazy beliefs" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. December 2, 2011.

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• True humility is expressed in deeds, not words. The humble are those who truly walk the same ground as everyone else - not necessarily with grovelling, hunched backs, but certainly not lording it over others, either.

  Julian Baggini

  Humble, Humility, Deeds

  "'I feel so humble' - the common cry of heroes and villains" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. May 18, 2013.

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• When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning, or changes for the worse.

  Julian Baggini

  Trying, Hot, Losing

  "Calm? Why should I be calm?" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. March 2, 2009.

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• Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.

  Julian Baggini

  Might, Satisfaction, Flourishing

  "The secret to happiness? It's complicated" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. May 31, 2013.

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• It is often said that having gone through any kind of suffering tends to makes you appreciate life more and live more in the present. I'm not sure how universal or long-lasting these effects really are.

  Julian Baggini

  Long, Appreciate, Suffering

  "An unequivocal 'no'" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. February 17, 2010.

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