---
title: "\"The most Dangerous Idea\": On a call for tolerance"
date: 2006-01-05T17:54:34Z
modified: 2006-01-05T17:54:34Z
permalink: "https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/the-most-dangerous-idea-on-a-call-for-tolerance/"
type: post
status: publish
excerpt: ""
wpid: 437
categories:
  - Uncategorized
timestamp: 2006-01-05T17:54:34Z
tags:
  - Uncategorized
---

> “Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.
> 
>  
> 
> **We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence**.”

[Quote](http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_8.html#gilbert) from [Daniel Gilbert](http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/gilbert.html), Harvard University, hat tip to John Paczkowski, [Good Morning Silicon Valley](http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/). I would recommend you also check out the rest of the answers to [What Is Your Dangerous Idea](http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_8.html#gilbert)? from [_Edge_ The World Question Center](http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_8.html#gilbert). If the thinking doesn’t stimulate you there may be something wrong with your neurons.



How about this [call to action for scientific pantheism](http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_8.html#porco) from [Carolyn Porco](http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/porco.html), Cassini Imaging Science Team Leader:

> “Imagine a Church of Latter Day Scientists where believers could gather. Imagine congregations raising their voices in tribute to gravity, the force that binds us all to the Earth, and the Earth to the Sun, and the Sun to the Milky Way. Or others rejoicing in the nuclear force that makes possible the sunlight of our star and the starlight of distant suns. And can’t you just hear the hymns sung to the antiquity of the universe, its abiding laws, and the heaven above that ‘we’ will all one day inhabit, together, commingled, spread out like a nebula against a diamond sky?”