Gregory Walter Graffin Quotes
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I would say there's a lot of similarity between folk and punk. It's written for the common man.
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Naturalism teaches one of the most important things in this world. There is only this life, so live wonderfully and meaningfully.
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It's not a random chance that we have Alanis Morissette. She didn't evolve out of a null and void. She came from a former template. She borrowed styles and sounds from a very limited set of other artists.
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A lot of philosophy is bull***t, but a lot of it is what we write songs about too. And it's organizing your thoughts, organizing your intellect.
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I've written almost 200 songs with Bad Religion. No matter where you look in our history, the focus has been trying to instill some of these disturbing realities about the world, some of the implications of evolution into an artistic format that can be interpreted by people who may never study evolution.
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Society has to be structured such that there are checks and balances, so that it can't be manipulated, for instance, for the profit of just some multinational company who's going to get rich on trying to legislate the environment.
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....the songs are universal enough that in ten years time they should still hold up quite well.
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I don't think anyone is going to Hell, because it only exists in the minds of people who wish ill will on others.
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It gives evolutionary biologists great status if they champion competition and the economists have to consult them. The economists have to consult the evolutionary biologists, because they are the ones who invented the idea of competition. It comes from the field of evolution.
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There is so much in this world to be skeptical about if you want to be a skeptical a**hole. I'm kind of a skeptical a**hole. But not about vaccines, that's just not one of them.
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If you accept learning as a dominant determination of your behavior, then all of a sudden you're open to the idea that, for instance, there are other people who are more educated than you about the environment, who you will learn from. It's kind of like you don't even have to believe that you know anything about the environment, but you do have to understand that your behavior has been determined by learning in the past.
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We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.
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We should enjoy and make the most of life, not because we are in constant fear of what might happen to us in a mythical afterlife, but because we have only one opportunity to live.
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If there is no destiny, there is no design. There's only life and death. My goal is to learn about life by living it, not by trying to figure out a cryptic plan that the Creator had in store for me.
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I have great hope and faith, but it's a humanistic faith based in facts; you have to believe that facts exist. We can all arrive at the same facts if we engage in the process of experimentation, observation, and verification, which can solve more of the world's major problems than a debate over whether God does or doesn't exist.
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As I’ve said, I’ve never believed in God, which technically makes me an atheist (since the prefix “a” means “not” or “without”). But I have problems with the word “atheism.” It defines what someone is not rather than what someone is. It would be like calling me an a-instrumentalist for Bad Religion rather than the band’s singer. Defining yourself as against something says very little about what you are for.
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I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.
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I want some fact-based evidence about where we came from. Things we consider mysterious need not be attributed to a deity.
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I usually am thinking about my next book the second I put the last dot on the previous one that I turn in.
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Humans impart meaning and purpose to almost all aspects of life. This sense of meaning and purpose gives us a road map for how to live a good life. This guidance emerges spontaneously from the interactions of human beings living in societies and thinking together about how best to get along. It doesn't require a god or sacred text.
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If you can believe in God, then you can believe in anything. It's a gang mentality.
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It's my firm conclusion that human meaning comes from humans, not from a supernatural source. After we die, our hopes for an afterlife reside in the social networks that we influenced while we were alive. If we influence people in a positive way -- even if our social web is only as big as our nuclear family -- others will want to emulate us and pass on our ideas, manners, and lifestyle to future generations. This is more than enough motivation for me to do good things in my life and teach my children to do the same.
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When I create, I feel that I am a participant in the grand pageant of life, a part of the ongoing creative engine of the universe. I don't know if that feeling is enough to replace the solace of religion in the lives of most people, but it is for me.
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I'm trying to champion the naturalist's worldview and show it's not as heathen as most religious people would make it out to be.