Happy New Year! Here's the latest and greatest installment of rationality quotes. Remember:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LessWrong or Overcoming Bias
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please
Even though this quote is focusing on religion, I think it applies to any beliefs people have that they think are "harmless" but greatly influence how they treat others. In short, since no person is an island, we have a duty to critically examine the beliefs we have that influence how we treat others.
If you actually care about the influence on how you treat others, why don't use that as your test whether to hold a belief? Instead of focusing on whether the belief in likely to be true you could focus on whether it's likely to be harm other people.
A lot of Christian's don't believe in beheading people for mixed-sex dancing and victimizate homosexuals. For them the fact that other Christian's do those thing is no good reason to drop their beliefs.