.A
- D
A
Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages-- as if
the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require
unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.
Thus the fear and hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the
gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward.
John Adams ~ Second U.S. President, Founding
Father of the United States
Where do we find a precept in the Bible for Creeds, Confessions, Doctrines
and Oaths, and whole carloads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered
with in these days?
The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.
This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion
in it.
The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.
Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has
raged and triumphed for 1500 years.
The Government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian
religion.
Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity,
in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any
particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?
Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition
and dogmatism cannot confine it.
But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have
been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them
the most bloody religion that ever existed.
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall
govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule
it by fictitious miracles.
In no instance have the churches been guardians of the liberties of
the people.
As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation.
But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been
blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the
most bloody religion that ever existed?
Scott Adams
Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded
Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that
may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house.
On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.
Alfonso X ~ (Alfonso the Wise ~ 1226-1284
~ King of Castile)
Had I been present at the creation of the world, I would have
proposed some improvements.
Sensible men no longer believe in miracles; they were invented by priests
to humbug the peasants.
Anthony W. Allsop
People will profess to believe the words of the bible, but only the
words they CHOOSE to believe. How hypercritical is that? That's like playing
a game to the rules but only to the rules one agrees with.
Ethan Allen
In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed,
miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant,
miracles are still in vogue.
Abu Ala Al-Maarri
The world holds two classes of men - intelligent
men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.
Martin Amis
Since it is no longer permissible to disparage
any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them.
To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in
reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever.
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record
is near-universally dreadful.
Susan B. Anthony
I
was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about what
God wants them to do to their fellows.
To no form of religion is woman indebted for one
impulse of freedom...
I pray every single second of my life; not on
my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with
men. Work and worship are one with me. I know there is no God of the universe
made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him "great."
I distrust those people who know so well what
God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own
desires.
The religious persecution of the ages has been
done under what was claimed to be the command of God.
Aristophanes
Surely you don’t believe in the gods. What is your argument?, Where’s
your proof?
Karen Armstrong
A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered
with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self
in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate
from its effect. he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all?knowing
tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and
everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that
rejects such a God is amply justified.
Matthew Arnold
1822 - 1888
All the biblical miracles will at last disappear
with the progress of science.
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
Sir David Attenborough
I don't know why we're here. People sometimes say to me, "Why don't
you admit that hte humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are
proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation? And I always say, well,
when you say that, you've also got to think of a little boy sitting on
a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that's got a little worm, a living
organism, in his eye and boring thorugh the eyeball, and is slowly turning
him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that
little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate. . . .
B
Sir Francis Bacon -
English Lawyer and Philosopher. 1561-1626
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws,
to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even
if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and
erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because his ordinary
works convince it.
William Bagley
Creationists criticize evolutionists for the
demeaning idea of 'coming from apes' and say that man is more noble
than that, and then have sermons where man is called a miserable
worm worthy to be burned eternally in hell.
Robert A. Baker
What happens when the same number of people pray
for something as pray against it? How does God decide whose prayer to answer?
Joan Bakewell
Who are these gods that they should require their own creatures to
be ashamed of their bodies? The notion that the supposed creator is offended
by the natural beauty of his own creation is well nigh blasphemous.
Mikhail Bakunin ~ Church and
State - 1872
For ten centuries Christianity, armed with the omnipotence of the Church
and State and opposed by no competition, was able to deprave, debase, and
falsify the mind of Europe. It had no competitors, because outside
the Church there was neither thinkers nor educated persons.
It along taught, it alone spoke and wrote, it alone taught.
Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.
People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern:
to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves,
for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
James Baldwin
If the concept of God has any validity or use,
it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot
do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
Iain M Banks
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects
the present.
Dan Barker ~
Losing Faith in Faith
Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not
join hands every Sunday, singing, "yes, gravity is real! I will have faith!
I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes, up, up, up must
come down. . . . Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty
insecure about it.
I am an atheist because there is no evidence for
the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about
it: no evidence, no belief.
You believe in a book that has talking animals,
wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling
from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical,
absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the
ones that need help?
To think that the ruler of the universe will run
to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height
of arrogance.
You believe in a book that has talking animals,
wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from
the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absure and
primitive storeis, and you say that we are the ones that need?
The very concept of sin comes from the bible.
Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be
thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?
You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time,
But I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime.
Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge.
Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits
on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into
faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.
How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being
monitored by a judgmental ghost?
You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a
bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say
"God is love," they will claim that you are taking things out of
context!
I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never
again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering.
Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not
hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because
they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience,
conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent
upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration,
compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.
I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never
say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life
is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe,
deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently
evil--you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential
to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself.
If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why
pray?
The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state'
does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word
'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does
Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or
unphrased) by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural, Transcendence,
Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate
Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist,
Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation,
Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy,
Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday,
Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality,
Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal
is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual,
Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue,
or Bible.
If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors,
then maybe God is just figure of speech.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
God is the only being who does not have to exist in order to reign.
Saul Bellow
A great deal of intelligence can be invested
in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Bernard Berenson
(1865-1959)
Miracles happen to those who believe in them.
Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans,
or Hindus who have never heard of her.
José Bergamín
A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not
a belief; it is a superstition.
Paul Bert
Modern societies march towards morality in
proportion as they leave religion behind.
Marie Henri Beyle (1783-1842)
All religions are founded on the fear of the
many and the cleverness of the few.
Bhagavad Gita ~ The
Lord's Song (250 B.C.-A.D. 250)
As a man can drink water from any side of a full
tank, so the skilled theologian can wrest from any scripture
that which will serve his purpose.
Franz Bibfeldt ~ German theologian
Any idiot can believe in Jesus H. Christ. To truly understand all
that confusion in the gospels takes a real contortionist scholar.
When you repeat the same thing over and over, Sunday after Sunday, that
makes people believe it whether it is true or not. It also makes writing
theology easy.
Any idiot can believe in Jesus H. Christ. To truly understand all that
confusion in the gospels takes a real contortionist scholar.
The real miracle in the virgin birth story is that Mary got Joseph to
believe it!
John Bice
A belief in an afterlife has the unavoidable
effect of making this life less unique and precious. Good luck finding
an atheist willing to strap a bomb to his or her back, or fly a plane into
a building.
Justice Black ~ US Supreme
Court Justice, on the 1st Amendment
Its first and most immediate purpose rested on
the belief that a union of government and religion tends to
destroy government and degrade religion.
Harold J Blackham (1903-2009) Founder
of the British Humanist Association
Life is not presented by Humanism as something for our judgment, something
finished, take it or leave it. It is presented as raw material for our
creative use, a task for our responsible undertaking.
Robert Blatchford ~God
and My Neighbor ~ 1903
Religions are not revealed: they are evolved.
If a religion were revealed by God, that religion would be perfect
in whole and in part, and would be as perfect at the first moment of its
revelation as after ten thousand years of practice. There has
never been a religion which fulfills those conditions.
Elena Blavatsky
The Christians were the first to make the existence
of Satan a dogma of the church. What is the use in a Pope if there
is no Devil?
There has never been a religion in the annals of the world with
such a bloody record as Christianity.
Napoleon Bonapart
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering
the rich.
All religions have been made by men.
I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom
is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can
get."
God fights on the side with the best artillery.
If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver
of life would be my god.
As for myself, I do not believe that such a person as Jesus Christ ever
existed; but as the people are inclined to superstition, it is proper not
to oppose them.
My fir conviction is that Jesus . . . was put to death like any other
fanatic who professed to be a prophet or a messiah; there have been such
persons at all times. . . . Besides, how could I accept a religion which
would damn Socrates and Plato?
A soul? Give my watch to a savage, and he will think it has a soul.
Daniel J. Boorstin (1914 - 2004)
I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance
than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but
fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever
burned anyone at the stake or tortur.
Father Leo Booth
All women have been sexually abused by the Bible teachings, and institutions
set on its fundamentalist interpretations. There would be no need
for the women's movement if the church and Bible hadn't abused them.
Charles Bradlaugh ~ A Plea for
Atheism ~ 1864
The atheist does not say "there is no God," but he says "I know not
what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word 'God' is
to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation." ... The Bible
God I deny; the Christian God I disbelieve in; but I am not rash enough
to say there is no God as long as you tell me you are unprepared to define
God to me.
Atheists would teach men to be moral now, not because God offers as
an inducement reward by and by, but because in the virtuous act itself
immediate good is insured to the doer and the circle surrounding him.
Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)
The only true immortality lies in one's children.
Nathaniel Branden ~ The
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem ~ 1994
If, in any culture, children are taught: We are all equally
unworthy in the sight of God ~ You are born in sin and are sinful by nature
If children are given a message that amounts to: 'Don't think,
don't question, believe' ~ 'Who are you to place your mind above
that of the priest, the minister, the rabbi?'
If children are told: 'If you have value it is not because of
anything you have done or could ever do, it is only because God loves
you' ~ 'Submission to what you cannot understand is the
beginning of morality'
If children are instructed: 'Do not be "willful", self-assertiveness
is the sin of pride' ~ 'Never think that you belong to
yourself'
If children are informed, 'In any clash between your judgement
and that of your religious authorities, it is your authorities you
must believe' ~ 'Self-sacrifice is the foremost virtue and
the noblest duty'
Then consider what will be the likely consequences for the practice
of living consciously, or the practice of self-assertiveness, or any of
the other pillars of healthy self-esteem.
David Brooks
To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain
the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.
Justin Brown
If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where
we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?.
James Buchanan
1857-1861
I have seldom met an intelligent person whose
views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
Pearl S. Buck
Believing in gods always causes confusion.
When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their
place.
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of
human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon
it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.
Buddha
Doubt everything. Find your own light.
Chaz Bufe ~ The American
Heretic's Dictionary
Agnostic, n. A person who feels superior to atheists
by merit of his ignorance of the rules of logic and evidence.
J.S. Bullion, Jr.
Armies of Bible scholars and theologians have for centuries found respected
employment devising artful explanations of the Bible often not really meaning
what it says.
Luther Burbank (1849-1926)
Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion;
give them nature... Do not terrify them in early life with the fear of
an after- world. Never was a child made more noble and good by the
fear of a hell.
The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly
damnable to me the ravings of insanity, superstition gone to seed! I want
no part of such a God.
The time has come for honest men to denounce false teachers and attack
false gods.
As a scientist, I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering
foundation.... I am an infidel today. I do not believe what has been served
for me to believe. I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. When it can
be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond
the gates of death, then I will believe. Until then, no.
Anthony Burgess
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems
to be somewhere else.
Robert Burns
All religions are auld wives' fables, but an
honest man has nothing to fear, either in this world or the world to come.
Jeff Burroughs
Science has done more for the development of
western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen
hundred years.
John Burroughs
Science has done more for the development of
western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen
hundred years.
Every day is a Sabbath to me. All pure water is holy water, and this
earth is a celestial abode.
When I look up into the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what
it is I really see there, I am constrained to say, 'there is no god'.
Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious
and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
Sir Richard Burton
The more I study religions, the more I am convinced
that man never worshipped anything but himself.
Samuel Butler
Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.
They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them seriously.
Lord Byron
Of religion I know nothing -- at least, in its
favor.
C
Elizabeth Cady-Stanton ~ American
suffragist (1815-1902)
The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing
one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion.
The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in
the way of women's emancipation.
The bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that
she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the
judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her
was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish,
and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent
on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information
she might desire...Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.
I found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated
in the Pentateuch. Surely the writers had a very low idea of the nature
of their god. They made him not only anthropomorphic, but of the very lowest
type, jealous and revengeful, loving violence rather than mercy. I know
of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of
women." [Women Without Superstition]
Gregory Wallace Campbell
It is extremely naive to think that mankind is capable of sinning against
god. If god exists as a being who watches us, judges us, and cannot be
contradicted, then how could anyone possibly contradict laws of conduct
set forth by that being?
Joseph Campbell
~ American mythologist (1904-1987)
. . . god is a metaphor for that which trancends
all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.
The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity
of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth
of the Persian savior Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light,
was born the night of the winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight,
the instant of the turn of the year from increasing darkness to light.
Too many of our best scholars, themselves indoctrinated
from infancy in a religion of one kind or another based upon the Bible,
are so locked into the idea of their own god as a supernatural fact - something
final, not symbolic of transcendence, but a personage with a character
and will of his own - that they are unable to grasp the idea of a worship
that is not of the symbol but of its reference, which is of a mystery of
much greater age and of more immediate inward reality than the name-and-form
of any historical ethinic idea of a deity, whatsoever . . . and is of a
sophistication that makes the sentimentalism of our popular Bible-story
theology seem undeveloped.
What gods are there, what gods have there ever
been, that were not from man's imagination?
Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.
Thomas Carlyle
God does nothing.
Just in the ratio that knowledge increses, faith
diminishes.
Andrew Carnegie ~ Scottish-born American
industrialist and philanthropist
I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism.
Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life.
Jimmy Carter ~ U.S.
President
I'm not in favor of the government mandating
a prayer in school because our country was founded on the
fact that no particular religious faith would have ascendance over
or preferential treatment over any other.
Noam Chomsky
The figures are shocking. Three quarters of the American population
literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the
devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing.
These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world.
You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies
in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.
Winston Churchill
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and
won't change the subject.
Derek W. Clayton
If only more Christians read their bibles there'd be less Christians.
Bill Clinton
Politics is not religion and we should govern
on the basis of evidence, not theology.
Hillary Clinton
In every religion, there are those who would
drape themselves in the mantle of belief and faith only to distort its
most sacred teachings -- preaching intolerance and resorting to violence.
Jean Cocteau
Mystery has its own mysteries, and ther are gods
above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his
disposal. drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he
disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.
Chapman Cohen
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by
a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
Morris R. Cohen
If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim
effective power for good.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834
To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank
negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the
herd of church-and-meeting trotters.
Have you ever wondered why God waited thousands of years, from Adam
to Jesus, to tell the world he had a son? He, who begins by loving
Christianity more than truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church
better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
Confucius 551 BC - 479 BC
Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that
you would not have them do unto you.
Joseph Conrad 1857-1924
The belief in a suupernatural source of evil
is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Skepticism... is the agent of truth.
David J. Constable
Fundamentalism, of any type, due to its prerequisite
lack of intelligent thought, could prove to be the worst weapon of mass
destruction, of all.
Francis Crick
One of the most frightening things in the Western
world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe
in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth
is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.
If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually
wrong.
Quentin Crisp
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a
woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the
Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
Oliver Cromwell
Keep your faith in God, but keep your powder dry.
Robert Curry
If the theists all shut up, the gods would be speechless.
D
Joseph Daleiden
To date, despite the efforts of millions of true
believers to support this myth, there is no more evidence for the Judeo-Christian
god than any of the gods on Mount Olympus.
Ironically, the pope's opposition to contraceptives results in hundreds
of thousands of abortions, most in illegal and unsafe conditions that threaten
women's lives. Due primarily to the lack of readily available contraception,
55 million abortions are performed in the world annually. Worldwide, 182,000
women die each year from dangerous abortions. In the United States, where
. . . women's right to abortion has been recognized since 1973 (over the
Church's strenuous opposition), the death rate for women who obtain abortions
has dropped almost 90%. So by opposing contraceptives and legalized abortion,
the pope is in effect sentencing many women to die.
C.W. Dalton
You make money promoting religion; you only spend money promoting atheism.
Clarence Darrow
I don't believe in God because I don't believe
in Mother Goose.
Many Christians base the belief of a soul and
God upon the Bible. Strictly speaking, there is no such book.
To make the Bible, sixty-six books are bound into one volume. These
books are written by many people at different times, and no one knows the
time or the identity of any author. Some of the books were written
by several authors at various times. These books contain all sorts
of contradictory concepts of life and morals and the origin of things.
Between the first and the last nearly a thousand years intervened, a longer
time than has passed since the discovery of America by Columbus.
The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful
toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck
of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.
...finally men were saved only through God's son
dying for them, and that unless human beings believed this silly, impossible
and wicked story they were doomed to hell? Can anyone with intelligence
really believe that a child born today should be doomed because the snake
tempted Eve and Eve tempted Adam? To believe that is not God-worship; it
is devil-worship.
I say that religion is the belief in future life
and in God. I don't believe in either.
The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom.
The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead
to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.
The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world
was the child of fear and faith.
Agnostic: One who does not pretend to know what
many ignorant men are sure of.
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children
not to doubt!
In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact
or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality.
Charles Darwin
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and
I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent,
but the one most responsive to change.
Robertson Davies
Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.
Richard
Dawkins:
Evolutionary Biologist (Oxford
University)
Faith
is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate
evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack
of evidence.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that
humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation
myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been
adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more
special
status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world
was created from the excrement of ants. [The Blind Watchmaker, Oxford University
Press (1988), p316]
I am against religion because it teaches us to
be satisfied with not understanding the world
You cannot be both sane and well educated and
disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated
person has got to believe in evolution.
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural
selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable
of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence,
and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
Society bends over backward to be accommodating
to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If
I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured,
including by many atheists.
After my Christmas Lectures I received letters from the pious saying
that they would have no objection if only I had qualified my remarks by
saying: 'But I should warn you that many well-informed people think differently
. . .' When did you last hear a priest-in the pulpit, on radio, on television,
in infants' Sunday School-qualify his statement with 'But I should warn
you that many well-informed people don't think God exists at all . . .
?'
IDEAS PRESENTED IN DAWKINS' CURRENT BESTSELLER: THE GOD DELUSION
(Amazon.ca Review)
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The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were mostly atheists
and deists, not theists, not Christians.
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Agnosticism is too polite for its own good.
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Science and religion do not complement each other: they conflict.
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Being nice to fundamentalists will not result in any good.
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The arguments for God's existence are all bogus.
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If everything was designed, who designed the Designer?
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Evolution primed our psychology for superstition and religion, and then
the catchiest ideas, however crazy they are, keep spreading and mutating.
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Our sense of morality definitely does not come from religion, but is also
the product of our evolution.
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The Bible is mostly a weird, sick, immoral book.
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Religion (well, maybe not the Buddhistic sort) is bad, bad, bad: for peace,
for love, for the reduction of suffering in the world, for the protection
of the environment, for you-name-it.
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"Moderates" refuse to reject nonsensical and violent "holy" books and so
allow fundamentalism to keep growing.
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Religious education for children is a form of child abuse if it teaches
them not to think, not to doubt, not to question.
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Children should not be coined with religious tags: they're not cattle,
and they can't choose their beliefs.
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God may be a kind of imaginary friend for consolation, but the consolation
is meagre.
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There are many many sources of inspiration in life, and they don't have
to be religious at all.
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Our senses are very limited, and the Universe seems to work in some very
counter-intuitive ways, so we have to think and doubt if we wish to understand.
Many of us saw religion [before 9/11] as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might
lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch
for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed
faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense.
Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness.
Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which
automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because
it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited
tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect,
which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop
being so damned respectful!
This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit
that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but
simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous
desire for a second one.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character
in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak;
a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic,
racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal,
sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect
if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing
but blind pitiless indifference.
Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence
is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.
Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging
to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires
of hell?
There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite
good reasons for believing that they do not exist and never have.
It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would
be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.
Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with
religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible
with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about
the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and
that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading.
Blind faith can justify anything. In a man believes in a different god,
or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind
faith can decree that he should die - on the cross, at the stake, skewered
on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in
Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating
themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious
blind faith.
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is
science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists
who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We
have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending
it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. We even have to go
out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity. But it
must be a positive attack, for science and reason have so much to give.
They are not just useful, they enrich our lives in the same kind of way
as the arts do. Promoting science as poetry was one of the things that
Carl Sagan did so well, and I aspire to continue his tradition.
The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears
no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion. If a physicist
says God is another name for Planck's constant, or God is a superstring,
we should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the
nature of superstrings or the value of Planck's constant is a profound
mystery. It has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable
of forgiving sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about
whether or not the Sabbath begins at 5pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil
or have a bit of arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable
of imposing a death penalty on his son to expiate the sins of the world
before and after he was born.
Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence:
the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents
belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best
miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass,
the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available
religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared
to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously
deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this
heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with
such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different
one.
It is not particularly remarkable that a mountebank like Oral Roberts
should succeed in conning his followers out of their money. As P T Barnum
observed, there’s a sucker born every minute. If people are that stupid
and choose to hand over their money to an obvious fake, that is their privilege.
What should concern the rest of us is that the scams pulled off by well-heeled
charlatans like Roberts are tax free. ~ On the death of faith-biased
con artist and anti-gay bigot Oral Roberts
We know what caused the 2010 catastrophe in Haiti. It was the bumping
and grinding of the Caribbean Plate rubbing up against the North American
Plate: a force of nature, sin-free and indifferent to sin, un-premeditated,
unmotivated, supremely unconcerned with human affairs or human misery.
The religious mind, however, restlessly seeks human meaning in the blind
happenings of nature. As with the Indonesian tsunami, which was blamed
on loose sexual morals in tourist bars; as with Hurricane Katrina, which
was attributed to divine revenge on the entire city of New Orleans for
harboring a lesbian comedian, and as with other disasters going back to
the famous Lisbon earthquake and beyond, so Haiti's tragedy must be payback
for human sin. The Rev. Pat Robertson sees the hand of God in the earthquake,
wreaking terrible retribution for a pact that the long-dead ancestors of
today's Haitians made with the devil, to help rid them of their French
masters. Needless to say, milder-mannered faith-heads are falling over
themselves to disown Pat Robertson, just as they disowned those other pastors,
evangelists, missionaries and mullahs at the time of the earlier disasters.
What hypocrisy.
Edward De Bono
A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world
which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence
supports the myth.
Edmond de Goncourt
If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as
less of an insult than religion.
Democritus (460-370 BC)
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space;
everything else is opinion.
Daniel Dennett
If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality
and scientific progress, what is?
I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us
all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism,
Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless
smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here?
There most certainly is.
Denis Diderot
~ French philosopher, author, and encyclopedist (1713-1784)
Man will never be free until the last king is
strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest hs
killed a great many philosophers.
The man who first pronounced the barbarous word God ought to have been
immediately destroyed.
The Christian religion: the most absurd in its dogmas, the most unintelligible,
the most insipid, the most gloomy, the most Gothic, the most puerile.
It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsly, but to believe
or not believe in God is not important at all.
I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of
a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.
If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.
Annie Dillard
I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local
missionary priest, " If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to
hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why,"
asked the Eskimo, "did you tell me?"
Benjamin Disraeli
Where knowledge ends, religion begins.
Chester Dolan ~ Blind Faith
To create a world in which reason is suspect,
religious faith is a virtue, and doubt is regarded as sin, is to
sanctify ignorance.
Marjory Stoneham Douglas
(b. 1890) American conservationist
Life should be lived so vividly and so intensely
that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.
Frederick Douglass ~ escaped slave
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer
until I prayed with my legs.
John William Draper 1811-1882
The history of science is not a mere record of
isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending
powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on the one hand, and
the compression arising from traditionary faith, and human interest on
the other.
How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible,
which falls into so many errors in the visible?
The universe is only a vast automatic engine. The vital force which
pervades the world is what the illiterate call God.
William Drummond
He who will not reason, is a bigot; He who cannot, is a fool; And he
who dares not, is a slave.
Ann Druyan ~ Carl
Sagan's wife and collaborator
The roots of this antagonism to science run very
deep. We see them in Genesis. . . in which the first humans are doomed
and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge. [Eden] is more like a maximum-security prison
with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place.
There was no deathbed conversion. No appeals to
God, no hope for an afterlife, no pretending that he and I, who
had been inseparably for twenty years, were not saying goodbye forever..
. . Carl never wanted to believe. He wanted to KNOW.
Alexandre Dumas
If God were suddenly condemned to live the life
which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.
