Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
Interpretation
Skepticism promotes rational thinking and helps combat irrational beliefs, which is essential for maintaining social decency.
In this quote, Stephen Jay Gould highlights the importance of skepticism as a tool for reason. He argues that skepticism acts as a defense against organized irrationality, advocating for a rational approach to social and civic matters, ultimately contributing to the decency of human interactions. By applying skepticism, individuals can question dogmas and misinformation, fostering a more thoughtful and principled society.
In practice
In a debate about climate change, one might quote Gould to emphasize the importance of skepticism in evaluating scientific claims.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.
It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.
The judgment: You are now before Yama, King of the Dead. In vain will you try to...deny or conceal the evil deeds you have done. ... the mirror in which Yama seems to read your past is your own memory, and also his judgment is your own. It is you yourself who pronounce your own judgment.
There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.
No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.
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