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A
Men
create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with
regard to their mode of life.
-
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.):
"It is wrong always, everywhere, and
for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
-
-
John Adams
"Science
is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition".
- Adam Smith
"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through
ignorance that we can solve them."
- Isaac Asimov
In
the end, then, it all comes down to Pascal’s Gamble and the individual freedom
to opt for faith. Pure science, pure reason are very largely on the side of the
rationalists, agnostics, and atheists.
"If you pray for rain long enough, it
eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually
do. The same happens in the absence of prayers."
- Steve Allen
Science
has shown that the story of the creation is a myth and the gods legendary.
Paul
Aurich
The
fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological
point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as
religious knowledge . . . Unless he can formulate his ‘knowledge’ in
propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is
deceiving himself.
The
fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth
and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on.
There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these
matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact
as the Tooth Fairy has.
A.J.
Ayer (1910-1989)
B
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, though religion were
not; but superstition dismounts all these and erected an absolute monarchy in
the minds of men.
-
Sir. Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
If
I had believed in God of rewards and punishments, I might have lost courage in
battle.
Knowledge
and history are the enemies of religion.
Napoleon Bonaparte
(1769-1821)
Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that
claim to be made by theology.
John
Burroughs (1837-1921)
The
atheist does not say, ‘There is no God,’ but he says, ‘ I know not what you
mean by God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct
affirmation.’
Charles
Braudlaugh (1833-1891)
"To explain the unknown by the known is a
logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological
lunacy."
- David Brooks
"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?"
- Dan Barker
"If you think education is expensive,
try ignorance."
- Derek Bok
All
religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the
few.
Marie-Henri
Beyle (1783-1842)
The
more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped
anything but himself.
Sir
Richard Burton (1812-1890)
.
. . 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 had been served
to 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 will I believe. Until then, no.
Luther
Burbank (1849-1926)
Religious
conflicts can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into
fanatics.
William
J. Brennan, U.S. Supreme Court Justice. 1987
C
Not
knowing life, how can we know death? Why talk of spirits when you do not
understand men?
Confucius (6th
Century B.C.E.)
Before
accepting any belief one ought first to follow reason as a guide, for credulity
without enquiry is a sure way to deceive oneself. Celsus, about 170 A.D.
I
will give a million dollars for any convincing proof of a future life.
Andrew
Carnegie (1837-1919)
"By simple common sense I don’t
believe in God, in none."
- Charlie Chaplin
The
universe displays no proof of an all-directing mind.
Auguste
Comte (1798-1857)
What
dos are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s
imagination.
Joseph
Campbell (1904-1987)
D
We
believe whatever we want to believe.
-
Demosthenes (384-322 B.C.E.)
"It has often and confidently been
asserted, that man’s origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently
begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not
those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will
never be solved by science."
- Charles
Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), Introduction
Men
move between extremes. They conceive of themselves as gods, or feign a powerful
and cunning god as an ally who bends the world to do their bidding and meet
their wishes.
Science
is not constituted by any particular body of subject matter. It is constituted
by a method, a method of changing beliefs by means of tested inquiry. . . Scientific method is adverse not only to
dogma but to doctrine as well . . . The scientific-religious conflict
ultimately is a conflict between the allegiance to this method and allegiance
to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never
be modified.
John Dewey (1859-1952)
"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."
- Clarence
Darrow
"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."
- Richard Dawkins
I
think we have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The
argument I shall advance, surprising as it may seem coming from the author of
the earlier chapters, is that, for an understanding of the evolution of modern
man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on
evolution.
If
there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah
and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys
spectator blood sports? ... Is he manuvering to maximize David
Attenborough’s television ratings?
-
Richard Dawkins
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.
Preachers
pray for rain, knowing full well that no such prayer was ever answered. When a
politician is sick, they pray for God to cure him, and the politician almost
invariably dies. The modern clergyman who prays for rain and the health of the
politician is no more intelligent in this matter than the primitive man who saw
a separate miracle in the rising and setting of the sun.
I
do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called a agnostic.
I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure – that is all that
agnosticism means.
Charence
Darrow (1857-1938)
E
A man cannot dispel his fear about
the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the
universe but suspects the truth of some mythical story. So that without natural
science it is not possible to attain our pleasures unalloyed.
"Either God wants to abolish evil,
and cannot; Or he can, but does not want to; Or he cannot and does not want to.
If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he
is wicked. But, if God both can and wants to abolish evil, then how come evil
is in the world?"
- Epicurus
Men,
believing in myths, will always fear something terrible, everlasting punishment
as certain or probable . . . Men base all these fears not on mature opinions,
but on irrational fancies, that they are more disturbed by fear of the unknown
than by facing facts. Peace of mind lies in being delivered from all these
fears.
- Epicurus
"Is God
willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able,
but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both
able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he
neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
- Epicurus
None
of the gods has formed the world, nor has any man, it has always been.
-
Empedocles (495-435 B.C.E.)
Religious
fanaticism has clearly produced, and in all probability will continue to
produce, enormous amounts of bickering, fighting, violence, bloodshed, homicide,
feuds, wars, and genocide.
Albert Ellis
"The important thing is not to stop
questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be
in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the
marvelous structure of reality."
- Albert Einstein
"A man’s ethical behavior should be
based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis
is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by
fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
- Albert Einstein
"I want to know how God created this
world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of
this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details."
- Albert
Einstein
Two things are infinite: the universe
and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe."
- Albert
Einstein
I
cannot believe in the immortality of the soul . . . No, all this talk of an existence for us, as
individuals beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life – our
desire to go on living – our dread of coming to an end as individuals. I do not
dread it, though. Personally, I cannot see any use of a future life.
"I have never seen the slightest
scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life
for individuals, or of a personal God."
- Thomas Edison
"It is an interesting and
demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not
inculcated into their minds, they would remain so."
- Ernestine Rose
F
"The way to see by faith is to shut
the eye of reason."
- Benjamin Franklin
It
is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.
Gustave
Flaubert (1821-1880)
A
religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving
to those who do not belong to it.
Sigmund
Freud (1856-1939)
G
I
don’t see any god up here.
Yury
Gagarin (1934-1968):
(Atheist Soviet Cosmonaut, speaking from the Orbit in 1961)
The
fundamentalists, by ‘knowing’ the answers before they start [examining
evolution], and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited
preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science – or of any honest
intellectual inquiry.
Stephen
Jay Gould, American
Paleontologist, Life Magazine
In
times of death and famine, reason is on the side of the priests – who have
their own kind of logic which cries for miracles and, on occasion, invents
them.
Jean
Giraudoux (1882-1944)
"I do not feel obliged to believe
that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect, had
intended for us to forgo their use."
- Galileo Galilei
"Philosophy itself cannot but benefit
from our disputes, for if our conceptions prove true, new achievements will be
made; if false, their refutation will further confirm the original doctrines."
- Galileo Galilei
"I do not think it is necessary to
believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence
wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information
that we could gain through them."
- Galileo Galilei
The
most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been
committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
Mohandas
Gandhi (1869-1948)
Religious
factions will go on imposing their will on others unless and decent people
connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy.
Sen.
Barry Goldwater. 1981
H
Fear
of things invisible, is the natural seed of that which ever one in himself
calleth religion.
-
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
The
atheist is a man who destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so
leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.
Baran
d’Holbach (1723-1789)
I’m
an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we
should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.
Katharine
Hepburn
When
you tell me that your Deity make you in his own image, I reply that he must
have been very ugly.
Sacrificing
the earth for paradise is giving up substance for the shadow.
Victor
Hugo (1802-1885)
"Facts do not cease to exist because
they are ignored."
- Aldous Huxley
"The invisible and the non-existent
look very much alike."
- David Hume
My
young son asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a
bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the
truth—that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally—but I didn’t want to upset
him."
- Jack
Handey
"We enter church, and we have to say, ‘We have
erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep,’ when what we want to say is,
‘Why are we made to err and stray like lost sheep?’"
- Thomas Hardy
"As we shall see, the concept of time
has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out
by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe?
Augustine didn’t reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such
questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God
created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe."
- Stephen
Hawking
"Religion is a byproduct of fear," he
says. "For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but
why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of God a
pretty good definition of insanity?"
- Stephen Hawking
Every
judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to
become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of
uncertainty.
Frank
Herbert
Self
righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of the guilt.
Eric
Hoffer
Every
great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of
authority.
The
man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by
verification.
Evolution
excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural interventions.
The
supernatural is being swept out of the universe in the flood of new knowledge
of what is natural. It will soon be as impossible for an intelligent, educated
man or woman to believe in a god as it is now to believe that earth is flat,
that flies can be spontaneously generated, that disease is a divine punishment,
or that death is always due to witchcraft.
Thomas
Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
You never see animals going through
the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do no
ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down
rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by
abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence.
Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for
being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Aldous
Huxley (1894-1963)
Dogma
is a lie reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more
persons who believe that they believe what someone else believes.
Formal
religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did
not provide.
Faith
is the effort to believe what your common sense tells you is not true.
Elbert
Hubbard (1856-1915)
I
"Our ignorance is God; what we know
is science."
- Robert Ingersoll
If a god created the universe, then, there must have
been a time when he commenced to create. Back of that time there must have been
an eternity, during which there had existed nothing — absolutely nothing —
except this supposed god. According to this theory, this god spent an eternity,
so to speak, in an infinite vacuum, and in perfect idleness.
Admitting that a god did create the universe, the
question then arises, of what did he create? It certainly was not made of
nothing. Nothing, considered in the light of raw material, is a most decided
failure. It follows, then, that the god must have made the universe out of
himself, he being the only existence. The universe is material, and if it was
made of god, the god must have been material.
- Robert Green Ingersoll
"An honest god is the noblest work of
man. ... God has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they
hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power."
- Robert Green Ingersoll
Who
can estimate the miser that has been caused by this infamous doctrine of
eternal punishment? Think of the lives it has blighted – of the tears it has
caused – of the agony it has produced. Think of the millions who have been
driven to insanity by this most terrible of dogmas. This doctrine renders God
the basest and most cruel being in the universe . . . There is nothing more
degrading than to worship such as god.
Eternal
punishment is eternal revenge, and can be inflicted only by an ternal monster .
. . Infinite punishment is infinite cruelty, endless injustice, immortal
meanness. To worship an ternal jailer hardens, debases, and pollutes even the
vilest soul.
Did
is ever occur to you that if God wrote the Old Testament and told the Jews to
crucify or kill anybody who disagreed with them in religion, and that this God
afterward took upon himself flesh and came to Jerusalem, and taught a different
religion, and the Jews killed him – did it ever occur to you that he reaped
exactly what he has sown?
A
believer is a bird in a cage; a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with
tireless wing.
The
inventor of the plow did more good than the maker of the first rosary; because,
say what you will, plowing is better than praying.
- Robert Green Ingersoll
J
The
question before the human race is, whether God of nature shall govern the world
by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious
miracles.
"Shake off all the fears of servile
prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in
her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with
boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more
approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."
- Thomas Jefferson
K
"Faith is often the boast of the man
who is too lazy to investigate."
- F. M. Knowles
The
beginning of wisdom is the awareness that there is insufficient evidence that a
god or gods have created us and the recognition that we are responsible in part
for our own destiny. Human beings can achieve this good life, but it is by the
cultivation of the virtues of intelligence and courage, not faith and
obedience, that we will most likely to be able to do so.
Paul Kurtz
The
wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend – and
we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are
thus only subjective.
Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804)
L
All
religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and
ridiculous to the philosopher.
-
Lucretius:
How
any man who should inquire and know for himself can content himself with a
faith or belief taken upon trust, is to be astonishing.
-
John
Locke (1632-1704)
"If you don’t think that logic is a
good method for determining what to believe, make an attempt to convince me of
that without using logic. No one has even bothered to try yet."
-
- Brett Lemoine
"Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their
religion."
- Lemuel K. Washburn
It
seems to me that the band of our country is a profession of faith either with
no basis of real belief, or with no proper examination of the gounds on which
the creed is supposed to rest.
James
Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
The
great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of
age, and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them. Incurably
religious – that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many
people - incurably religious.
M
If
you scratch any aggressive tribalism, or nationalism, you usually find beneath
its surface a religious core, some older binding energy or superstition . . .
that is capable of transforming itself into a death-force, with the peculiar
annihilating energies of belief. Faith, the sweetest refuge and consolation,
may harden, by perverse miracle, into a sword – or anyway into a club or a
torch or an assault rifle. Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute.
Lance
Morrow: (Time, March 15, 1993, p. 24)
So
natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that
religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized.
The
world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest
ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom
and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.
My
father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it
immediately suggests the further question, ‘Who made God?’
Miracles
have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly
invalid as evidence of any revelation.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873
Science
has gone on from strength to strength; position to position, once occupied by
religion, has been captured until the whole of science has been emancipated
from the bondage of the supernatural.
Walter Mann
The
God of the theologians is the creation of their empty heads
Benito Mussolini
(1883-1945)
The greatest burden in the world is
superstition, not only of ceremonies in the church, but of imaginary and
scarecrow sins at home.
John
Milton (1608-1674)
History
is full of religious wars; but we must take care to observe, it was not the
multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating
spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.
Baron de Montesquieu
(1689-1755)
"Shake off all the fears of servile
prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in
her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with
boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve
of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."
- Karl Marx
"A law of nature is not a formula
drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts — a "bundle
of facts." Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we
state the "law" because they act in that way."
— Joseph McCabe
"The church says the earth is flat,
but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have
more faith in a shadow than in the church."
- Ferdinand Magellan
How
many things that were articles of faith yesterday are fables today.
-
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592):
Religion
hides many mischiefs from suspicion.
-
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593):
I desire to go to Hell, not to
Heaven. In Hell I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes,
but in Heaven are only beggars, monks, hermits and apostles.
-
- Niccolo Machiavelli
Religion
has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason and
anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to
the earth. It is time now for reason, education and science to take over.
"An atheist believes that a hospital
should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that deed must be done
instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not
escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war
eliminated."
- Madalyn Murray
O’Hair
"Religious experiences are like those
induced by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, and sleep deprivation: They tell no
uniform or coherent story, and there is no plausible theory to account for
discrepancies among them."
- Michael Martin
N
It
is an end with priests and gods, if man becomes scientific. Moral: science is
the thing forbidden in itself – it alone is forbidden. Science is the first
sin, the germ of all sin, original sin. This alones is mortality: Thou shalt
not know.
- Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"Faith: not wanting to know what is
true."
- Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche
"The beauty of religious mania is
that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as
the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is
left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window."
- Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzche.
I
want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses
satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance.
Jawaharlal
Nehru
O
P
One
good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.
"...to argue with a man who
has renouced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead."
- Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
"Whenever
we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and
tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half
the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a
demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to
corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I
detest everything that is cruel."
- Thomas Paine
"Men
never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious
conviction."
- Blaise Pascal
Q
R
They
said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must pray
against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For me,
religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just couldn’t
agree with. . . Religion was so full of inconsistencies that I could see no
point in arguing each inconsistency out. It was background noise that you
ignore.
Gene
Roddenberry (1921-1991)
Existence
exists, and only existence exists. So if you are to postulate something beyond
existence – some supernatural realm – you must do it by openly denying reason,
dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly. ‘To hell
with argument, I have faith.’ That of course, is a willful rejection of reason.
Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore .
. . . it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a
contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also
to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In
other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.
Ayn
Rand (1905-1982)
No
miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept.
Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in
countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who
are disposed to believe in them.
Ernest
Renan (1823-1892)
Religion
is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear . . . Fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear
of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if
cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand.
A
good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a
regretful hankering after the past, or fettering of this free intelligence by
the worlds uttered long ago by ignorant men.
I
feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius
of old, I am so absorbed in the world of the earth and the life upon it that I
cannot thinking of the heaven and the angels.
"Most people would rather die than
think; in fact, they do so."
- Bertrand Russell
"The foolish reject what they see and
not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see."
- Bertrand Russell
"If you think your belief is based
upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and
will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based
upon faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore
resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting
the minds of the young in what is called ‘education.’"
- Bertrand Russell
"Dogma
demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion;
it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of
its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favor of systematic
hatred."
-
Bertrand Russell
"What
is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the
exact opposite."
- Bertrand
Russell
"Religion is based, I think,
primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and
partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother
who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of
the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear
is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion
have gone hand in hand." - Why I Am Not A Christian –
- Bertrand Russell
"We may define "faith" as the firm
belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no
one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or
that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute
emotion for evidence."
- Stephen F Roberts
"We must question the story logic of
having an all-knowing, all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then
blame them for his own mistakes."
- Gene Roddenberry
"What happens when we’re dead? The
irony is that all our questions will be answered after we die. We spend our
whole life trying to figure out the truth and the only way we’ll find out what
it is, is to get hit by a bus. And the only comfort that religion offers is
that God is driving that bus."
- John Ryman
S
"Religion is regarded by the common
people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
- Seneca the Younger
[Believers]
are but triflers who, when they cannot explain a thing, run back to the will of
God; this is, truly, a ridiculous way of expressing ignorance.
-
Baruch
Spinoza (1632-1677)
We
should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and
patriotisms.
George
Santayana (1863-1952)
The
existence of a world without God seems to be less absurd than the presence of a
God, existing in all his perfection, creating an imperfect man in order to make
him run the risk of Hell.
Armand
Salacrou
To
work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then to go to hell after all would be
too damned hard.
Carl
Sandburg (1878-1967)
Every
time we say that God is the author of some phenomenon, that signifies that we
are ignorant of how such as phenomenon was caused by the forces of nature.
If
God has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?
That
which is incapable of proof itself is no proof of anything else.
It
is among men of genius and science that atheism alone is found.
P.B.
Shelly (1792-1822)
There
are scores of thousands of sects who are ready at a moment’s notice to reveal
the will of God on every possible subject.
Emotional
excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whisky and religion.
George
Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"A believer is not a thinker and a
thinker is not a believer."
- Marian Noel Sherman
If
some good evidence for life after death were announced, I’d be eager to examine
it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote . . . Better the hard truth, I say, than the
comforting fantasy.
If
you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate . . .
Try Science.
"The idea that God is an oversized
white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of
every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by ‘God’ one means the set of physical laws
that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is
emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of
gravity."
- Carl Sagan
"I
would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking,
feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe
that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an
afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking."
- Carl Sagan
If
you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate.
- Carl Sagan
You
can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on
evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.
- Carl Sagan
"Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence"
- Carl Sagan
In
science it often happens that scientists say, you know that’s a really good
argument; my position is mistaken, and then they actually change their minds
and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t
happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is
sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time
something like that happened in politics or religion.
- Carl
Sagan.
To
no form to religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike
have taught her inferiority and subjection.
All
through the centuries, scholars and scientists have been imprisoned, tortured
and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a petty text
of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more
impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on
earth.
I decline to accept Hebrew mythology
as a guide to twentieth-century science.
Elizabeth
Cady Stanton (1815-1902)
The
most malicious kind of hatred is that which is built upon a theological
foundation.
George
Sarton (1884-1955)
T
Why
is it when we talk to God, we’re said to be praying, but when God talks to us,
we’re schizophrenic.
Lil Tomlin. 1981
There
lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.
Lord
Tennyson (1809-1892)
Whatever
a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this:
‘Great God, grant that twice two be not four.’
Ivan
Turgenev (1818-1883)
I
did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not
the priest the schoolmaster.
Henry
David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Freethinkers
are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without
fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or
beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right
thinking where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.
Leo
Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Many
of these people have reasoning facility, but no one uses it in religious
matters.
Mark
Twain (1835-1910)
U
"Leave the matter of religion to the
family altar, the church, and the private schools, supported entirely by
private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separated."
- Ulysses S. Grant
Beliefs
are what divide people. Doubt unites them.
V
Atheism
is the vice of a few intelligent people.
We
offer up prayers to God only because we have made him after our own image. We
treat him like a pasha, or a sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and
appeased.
Superstition
sets the world whole in flames; philosophy extinguishes it.
The
word of God is the word of the priests; the glory of God is the pride of the
priests; the will of God is the will of the priests; to offend God is to offend
the priests; to believe in God is to believe all that the priests tell us.
On
religion, many are destined to reason wrongly; others not to reason at all; and
others to persecute those who do reason.
"I do not approve of a word you say
but will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Voltaire
W
Superstition
is rooted in a much deeper and more sensitive layer of the psyche than
skepticism.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)
Why
do born-again people so often make you wish they’d never been born the first
time?
Katrine Whitehorn, British Journalist, The Observer, May 20, 1979.
X
Y
"Atheism is a requirement for a
complete human being. Religion is a crutch that is shackled to you, one you
never really needed in the first place, but were convinced by others that you
couldn’t live without. Once you discover it’s only an illusion, that it’s not
even a real crutch, you discard it gladly."
-
Brent Yaciw
Z
"Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed
him for a day; give him a religion, and he’ll starve to death while praying for
a fish."
- Author Unknown
"Philosophy is questions that may
never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."
- Author Unknown
"Minds are like parachutes - They only function when
open"
- Author Unknown
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