“The Vienna Circle’s preferred term for bullshit was ‘metaphysics’, and so their 1929 manifesto, the Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung (“Scientific World-Conception”), led off with the worry that “metaphysics and theologizing thought is again on the increase today, not only in life but in science.””

Hardcastle, Gary L, and George A. Reisch. _Bullshit and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Get Perfect Results Every Time. , 2006. Print. p. 22

#philosophy #bullshit #metaphysics #theology

“Organisms are algorithms.”

Yuval Harari

Bullshit Asymmetry Principle

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

Alberto Brandolini

“Plato and Aristotle were comfortable in a slave society. They offered justifications for oppression. They served tyrants. They taught the alienation of the body from the mind (a natural enough ideal in a slave society); they separated matter from thought; they divorced the Earth from the heavens - divisions that were to dominate Western thinking for more than twenty centuries. Plato, who believed that “all things are full of gods,” actually used the metaphor of slavery to connect his politic with his cosmology. He is said to have urged the burning of all the books of Democritus (he had a similar recommendation for the books of Homer), perhaps because Democritus did not acknowledge immortal souls or immortal gods or Pythagorean mysticism, or because he believes in an infinite number of worlds.”

Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980. Print. p. 154-5

“One thing the scientist knows full well is that, in experiments, it is just about as useful to be wrong as to be right.”

Beer, Stafford. Designing Freedom. London: Wiley, 2000. Print.

“The trap is a function of the nature of the trapped.”

Beer, Stafford. Designing Freedom. London: Wiley, 2000. Print.

“Millions of German troops marched off to battle in World War II wearing belt buckles with “Gott Mit Uns” (“God is with us”) engraved on them.”

Harrison, Guy P. 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009. Internet resource. p. 120

Armbrüster, Thomas (2005). Management and Organization in Germany. Ashgate Publishing. p. 64. ISBN 978-0-7546-3880-3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gott_mit_uns

“My suspicion is that believers tend to feel this way [i.e. hostile towards atheists] because the mere existence of an atheist casts doubt on their assumption that signs of a god are all around us and that belief is somehow necessary to live a normal life.”

Harrison, Guy P. 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009. Internet resource.

“If a god is really watching and judging us, then one can only conclude that the guiltiest people among us are little children in the developing world. After all, they are deprived of the most. They suffer the most. They die the youngest. One can only wonder what it is they are guilty of.”

Harrison, Guy P. 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009. Internet resource.

“Studies of unequivocally exonerated prisoners have found that between 15 to 20 percent of them had confessed to a crime they had not committed.”

Tavris, Carol, and Elliot Aronson. Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Orlando, Fla: Harcourt, 2008. Print. p.141