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" To become a stoic is to endorse the truthfulness of its world view and accept its prescription for how you ought to live, not just to like how it makes you feel. "
Julian Baggini
Accept
World
Live
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" The border between the natural and the supernatural, religion and philosophy, may not always be clear. But there are lines, and we should know and accept which side of it we are on. "
Julian Baggini
Accept
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Know
" The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives. "
Julian Baggini
True
World
You
" The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place. "
Julian Baggini
Questioning
You
Doubt
" 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
Games
Me
God
" The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy. "
Julian Baggini
God
Recognition
Live
" Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process. "
Julian Baggini
Cooking
Process
End
" The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments. "
Julian Baggini
More
Free
Own
" True virtue would never liken its rewards to points on a loyalty card, not because it is its own reward, but because it is not something we should practice to accrue future benefits. "
Julian Baggini
Reward
Loyalty
Future
" If we now find ourselves looking down on the cheap and convenient, it is only because we now have better things which are affordable. "
Julian Baggini
Cheap
Down
Looking
" People should not expect the state to protect them from fraudsters. If we do, we get into the habit of neglecting our own powers of intellectual discernment. "
Julian Baggini
Intellectual
People
Own
" The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers. "
Julian Baggini
Humanity
Angel
God
" Nature deals the cards without thought or care, and there is no point in blaming the dealer. All we can do is make the best of the hands we have been dealt. "
Julian Baggini
Best
Hands
Thought
" Stress means something different if it is the result of rewarding work rather than struggling to keep the family out of debt. "
Julian Baggini
Keep
Family
Debt
" It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics. "
Julian Baggini
Ethics
Say
Ring
" I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible. "
Julian Baggini
Broken
Hard
Ethics
" 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
Job
Suffering
Best
" I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. "
Julian Baggini
Us
Live
Home
" Trade has played a vital role in the social evolution of humankind. It allowed people to specialise, which raises both skill levels and efficiency. It brought people from different lands together, co-operating rather than competing over resources. "
Julian Baggini
Evolution
People
Together
" No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can't decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you've made in your life to date. "
Julian Baggini
Exercise
Today
Lunch
" Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right. "
Julian Baggini
Live
Knowledge
Go
" Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold. "
Julian Baggini
Poetry
Deaf
People
" 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
Walk
Humility
True
" This is the deal: we are happy to single out people as superior just as long as they don't accept the description themselves. We want heroes and idols, but we also want egalitarianism, and that requires proclamations of humility from our gods. "
Julian Baggini
People
Happy
Heroes
" The idea that there is a sharp boundary between our true inner selves and the outside world is pervasive but highly questionable. The boundaries of the self might well be more porous than we ordinarily think. "
Julian Baggini
Think
World
Self
" Big sporting events and spectacles might give the national morale a shot in the arm, but they are too transient and taste-specific to stand as robust symbols of nationhood. "
Julian Baggini
Events
Morale
Stand
" People do care where their food, or other goods, comes from, not merely if the price is right. And that means no business can afford to ignore the impacts their buying practices have on producers and on the perceptions and choices of consumers. "
Julian Baggini
Food
Business
Care
" 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
Reason
Work
Why
" Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different. "
Julian Baggini
Been
Few
Different
" 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
Universe
Fail
Cosmos
" Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging. "
Julian Baggini
Weather
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