#psychology

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#human-nature #psychology #unpleasant-ideas #nature

What we are witness to in alchemy is the transformation of philosophic ideas concerning the structure and dynamics of the world into psychological considerations on the nature of man and his soul. ↗

— Charles Ponce

#nature

[...] the first lesson about the nature of memory: what you wish to forget, you may not be able to. What seems to have died, perhaps is just asleep. ↗

— Noam Shpancer

#psychology #nature

By what criteria can one decide which of a person's countless beliefs are primitive? The essential factor is that they are taken for granted: a person's primitive beliefs represent the basic truths he holds about physical reality, social reality, and himself and his own nature. Like all beliefs, conscious or unconscious, they have a personal aspect: they are rooted in the individual's experience and in the evidence of his senses. Like all beliefs, they also have a social aspect: with regard to every belief a person forms, he also forms some notion of how many other people have the experience and the knowledge necessary to share it with him, and of how close the agreement is among this group. Unlike other beliefs, however, primitive beliefs are normally not open to discussion or controversy. Either they do not come up in conversation because everyone shares them and everyone takes them for granted, or, if they do come up, they are virtually unassailable by outside forces. The criterion of social support is totally rejected; it is as if the individual said: "Nobody else could possibly know or have experienced what I have." Or, to quote a popular refrain: "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen."  A person's primitive beliefs thus lie at the very core of his total system of beliefs, and they represent the subsystem in which he has the heaviest emotional commitment. ↗

— Milton Rokeach

#primitive #social-psychology #the-problem-of-identity #experience

[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. ↗

— Jonathan Haidt

#religion

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God. ↗

— Richard Rohr

#christianity #psychology #religion

Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it. ↗

— Anthony Storr

#psychology #religion #religion

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum. ↗

— Jonathan Haidt

#politics #presidents #psychology #religion #religion

In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient. ↗

— William James

#proof #religion #science #spirituality #theory

At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitueds--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#psychology #science