'Believing' cannot tip the scales in making a historical judgment about whether something really happened. I can choose to believe that George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock, but my believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether or not he really did to it. So also with the story of Jesus walking on the water: Believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether he really did do it. 'Belief' cannot be the basis for historical conclusion; it has no direct relevance.
["Faith and Scholarship" by Marcus J. Borg August, 1993 issue of Bible Review]
'But if oxen (and horses) and lions… could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen… Aethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians have gods with grey eyes and red hair.' Like many later critics of anthropomorphism, Xenophanes evidently did not question the gods themselves but only their human attributes. Later Western writers think the Greek gods especially anthropomorphic, but gods in many other religions are equally so.
Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 178.
'But look,' said Ponder, 'the graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely.'
'Ook.'
'What did he say?' said the Bursar.
'I think he said, "Sooner or later the graveyards are full of everybody".'
(Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)
'God works in many ways his wonders to perform.' But He's not a skillful mechanic. A man drives over a cliff and 'by a miracle' he only breaks his back. It would be more divine if he were a better driver and stayed on the road.
[Paul Goodman]
'God's' message in my dream was very different. It confirmed what I have come to believe — that we are here on earth to live life fully. It helped me respect myself, and stop feeling wrong for doing what felt right. When I consider some kind of life-force, I now believe that she/he/it supports me in being who I am. There are no easy answers and life can get tough at times. Yet despite the ambiguity we all need to plunge ahead and do it anyway. We can find the courage and discover great joy.
Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), pp. ix-x.
'I thought we could do it without anyone getting hurt. By using our brains.'
'Can't. History don't work like that. Blood first, then brains.'
'Mountains of skulls,' said Truckle.
'There's got to be a better way than fighting,' said Mr Saveloy.
'Yep. Lots of 'em. Only none of 'em work.'
(Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times)
'It is demonstrated,' [Pangloss] said, 'that things cannot be otherwise: for, since everything was made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose. Note that noses were made to wear spectacles; we therefore have spectacles. Legs were clearly devised to wear breeches, and we have breeches. Stones were created to be hewn and made into castles; [the Baron Thunder-Ten-Tronkh] therefore has a very beautiful castle…'
[Voltaire, Candide]
'Theocracy' has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained tyranny.
[William Archer (1667-1735)]
'Twas only fear first in the world made gods.
[Ben Jonson (1572?-1637), Sejanus]
'Witches just aren't like that,' said Magrat. 'We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it's wicked of them to say we don't. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.'
(Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
'Yes, but humans are more important than animals,' said Brutha.
'This is a point of view often expressed by humans,' said Om.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
'You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?' said Ginger, not paying him the least attention. 'It's all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they're really good at. It's all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It's all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad ploughmen instead. It's all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never born in a time when it is possible to find out.'
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
"And I suppose you know what sound is made by one hand clapping, do you?" said the holy man nastily.
YES. CL. THE OTHER HAND MAKES THE AP.
(Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)
"Any monsters under my bed tonight?"
"Nope." "No." "Uh-Uh."
"Well there better not be, I'd hate to have to torch one with my flamethrower!"
"You have a flamethrower?"
"They lie. I lie."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Bad news Dad. Your polls are way down."
"My polls?"
"You rate especialy low among tigers and six year old white males."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Dad, I'd like to have a little talk."
"Um…ok."
"As the wage earner here, its your responsibility to show some consumer confidence and start buying things that will get the economy going and create profits and employment. Here's a list of some big-ticket items I'd like for Christmas. I hope I can trust you to do whats right for our country."
"I've got to stop leaving the Wall Street Journal around."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Do you believe in the devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man?"
"I'm not sure that man needs the help."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Do you like being a girl?"
"Its gotta be better than the alternative."
"Whats it like? Is it like being a bug?"
"Like a WHAT?"
"I imagine bugs and girls have a dim perception that nature played a cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to really comprehend the magnitude of it."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Faith," said St. Paul, "is the evidence of things not seen." We should elaborate this definition by adding that faith is the assertion of things for which there is not a particle of evidence and of things which are incredible.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
"God" as traditionally defined is a systematic contradiction of every valid metaphysical principle. The point is wider than just the Judeo- Christian concept of God. No argument will get you from this world to a supernatural world. No reason will lead you to a world contradicting this one. No method of inference will enable you to leap from existence to a "super-existence."
[Leonard Peikoff, "The Philosophy of Objectivism"]
"God" as traditionally defined is a systematic contradiction of every valid metaphysical principle. The point is wider than just the Judeo- Christian concept of God. No argument will get you from this world to a supernatural world. No reason will lead you to a world contradicting this one. No method of inference will enable you to leap from existence to a "super-existence.
[Leonard Peikoff, "The Philosophy of Objectivism"]
"God": The word that comes after "go-cart".
[Samuel Butler (1835-1902), English author]
"God"—as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives— is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to.
[Johann Most (c. 1890), Popular anarchist speaker]
"Hello Susie, this is Calvin. I lost our homework assignment. Can you tell me what we were supposed to read for tomorrow?"
"Are you sure you're not calling for some other reason?"
"Why else would I call you?"
"Maybe you missed the melodious sound of my voice?"
"WHAT? Are you crazy? All I want is the STUPID assignment!"
"First say you missed the melodious sound of my voice."
"THIS IS BLACKMAIL!"
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Here comes that new girl. HEY SUSIE DERKINS, IS THAT YOUR FACE OR IS A POSSUM STUCK IN YOUR COLLAR? I HOPE YOU SUFFER A DEBILITATING BRAIN ANEURISM, YOU FREAK!"
"She's cute, isnt she?"
"GO AWAY!
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Here's a movie we should watch."
"Who's in it?"
"It says 'Japanese Cast'…two big rubbery monsters slug it out over major metropolitan centres in a battle for world supremacy…doesn't that sound great?"
"And people say that foreign film is inaccessible."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"I just read this great science-fiction story. It's about how machines take control of humans and turn them into zombie slaves."
"So instead of us controlling machines, they control us? Pretty scary idea."
"I''ll say…HEY What time is it? My TV show is on."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"I wonder where we go when we die?"
"…Pittsburgh?"
"You mean if we're good or if we're bad?"
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"I'm a simple man, Hobbes."
"You?? Yesterday you wanted a nuclear powered car that could turn into a jet with laser-guided heat-seeking missiles!"
"I'm a simple man with complex tastes."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"I'm never gonna get married. Are you?"
"Hmm…I suppose if the right person came along, I might. Someone with green eyes and a nice laugh, who I could call 'Pooty Pie'."
"POOTY PIE?"
"Or bitsy pookums."
"I think that would affect my stomach a lot more than my heart."
"Bitsy pookums I'd say. Yes snoogy woogy, she'd reply…"
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"I'm not going to so my maths homework. Look at these unsolved problems. Here's a number in mortal combat with another. One of them is going to get subtracted. But why? What will be left of him? If I answered these, it would kill the suspense. It would resolve the conflict and turn intriguing possibilities into boring old facts."
"I never really thought about the literary possibilities of maths."
"I prefer to savour the mystery.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"MOM, CAN I SET FIRE TO MY BED MATTRESS?"
"No, Calvin."
"CAN I RIDE MY TRICYCLE ON THE ROOF?"
"No, Calvin."
"Then can I have a cookie?"
"No, Calvin."
"She's on to me."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Mom's not feeling well. So I'm making her a get well card."
"That's thoughtful of you."
"See, on the front it says, 'Get Well Soon' … and on the inside it says,'Because me bed isn't made, my clothes need to be put away and I'm hungry. Love Calvin.' Want to sign it?"
"Sure, I'm hungry too."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"My powerful brain has come up with a topic for my paper."
"Great."
"I'll write about the debate over Tyrannosaurs. Were they fearsome predators or disgusting scavengers?"
"Which side will you defend?"
"Oh, I believe they were fearsome predators, definitely."
"How come?"
"They're so much cooler that way."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Of course I am rich and why shouldn't I be? The Lord has given me a job to do and I'll be darned if I am not going to be well compensated for it! I'm saving souls here!"
Wiley Farmer (Christian Pastor 1952)
"See Any UFOs?"
"Not yet."
"Well, keep your eyes open, they're bound to land here sometime."
"What will we do when they come?"
"See if we can sell mom and dad into slavery for a star cruiser."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"The world isn't fair, Calvin."
"I know Dad, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favour?"
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Theology: The study of elaborate verbal disguises for non-ideas."
Unknown
"There's a new girl in our class."
"Well, whats her name?"
"WHO KNOWS?"
"Is she nice?"
"WHO CARES? Not me!"
"Do you LIKE her?"
"NO!"
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"This article says that many people find christmas the most stressful time of year."
"I believe it. This season sure fills me with stress."
"Really? How come?"
" I hate being good…"
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Too bad the world will be ending soon."
"Beg your pardon?"
"Halley's Comet. Comets are harbingers of doom."
"No they aren't, thats just superstition."
"Really? Guess I'd better write that book report."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Try this," she said, "it can't hurt. A simple experiment, and who knows? It might mean a lot to you in the future." She handed me a pocket Bible, which she carried at all times. "Open it randomly to a passage and read what's written here." I don't know how I managed, but I kept sober as I read the passage chance had sent me. "Does it mean something to you?" I nodded gravely, and handed the passage to Todd. He had to leave the room to keep from bursting. Exodus 22, xviv: Whosoever copulateth with a beast shall be put to death.
[Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations]
"We are a fierce and dirty band of cut-throat pirates! Keep a sharp lookout matey, we dont want any sissy girls on our ship!"
"We don't like girls???"
"Of course not dummy, we're a murderous bunch of pirates, remember?"
"Who do we smooch then?"
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
"Well, why did the Puritans come to this country?" a teacher asked his history class. "To worship in their own way and to make other people do the same" was the reply.
[Frank Zindler]
"What are all of us but self-reproducing robots?" he asked. "We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot - a child."
Richard Dawkins
"What's a philosopher?" said Brutha.
"Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting," said a voice in his head.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
(19) Yet she increased her whorings, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt (20) and lusted after her paramours whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emissions was like that of stallions.
[Ezekiel 23]
(Darwins's notebooks) include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism -- the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products.
Stephen Jay Gould
(When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 percent in China.) When the movie "Jurassic Park" was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago—when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashonhan and every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old.
[Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, p. 325]
[…] the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent and have to be led.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
[66] "To sum up (or I shall be pursuing the infinite), it is quite clear that the Christian religion has a kind of kinship with folly in some form, though it has none at all with wisdom. If you want proofs of this, first consider the fact that the very young and the very old, women and simpletons, are the people who take the greatest delight in sacred and holy things, and are therefore always found nearest the altars, led there doubtless solely by their natural instinct. Secondly, you can see how the first great founders of the faith were great lovers of simplicity and bitter enemies of learning. Finally, the biggest fools of all appear to be those who have once been wholly possessed by zeal for Christian piety. They squander their possessions, ignore insults, submit to being cheated, make no distinction between friends and enemies, shun pleasure, sustain themselves on fasting, vigils, tears, toil and humilations, scorn life and desire only death - in short, they seem to be dead to any normal feelings, as if their spirit dwelt elsewhere than in their body. What else can that be but madness? And so we should not be surprised if the apostles were thought to be drunk on new wine, and Festus judged Paul to be mad.
[Erasmus, 'Praise of Folly']
[as for evolution]….cutting out the sections [on the subject] is preferrable if the portions are not thick enough to cause damage to the spine of the book as it is opened and closed in normal use. When the sections needing correction are too thick, paste the pages together being careful not to smear portions of the book not intended for correction.
[R.E. Martin, American creationist, in Reviewing and Correcting Encyclopaedias (1983: 205-7), instructing followers to censor books that don't follow creation dogma]
[E]very major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 144.
[Fundamentalists] never wonder why, if herpes is sent by 'god' to scourge "adulterers," whooping cough and measles weren't purposely created to lambaste children.
[Fred Woodworth]
[God explaining the doctrine of free will.] "In order not to impair human liberty, I will be ignorant of what I know, I will thicken upon my eyes the veils I have pierced, and in my blind clear-sightedness I will let myself be surprised by what I have foreseen.
[Anatole France]
[I]f history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 262.
[I]n 1776 perhaps 15 percent of all colonists were regular churchgoers.
[Forrest G. Woods, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (Knopf, 1990, p. 247)]
[I]n a like manner we must endure the authority of the prince. If he misuse or abuse his authority, we are not to entertain a grudge, seek revenge or punishment. Obedience is to be rendered for God's sake, for the ruler is God's representative. However they may tax or exact, we must obey and endure patiently.
[Martin Luther, "Tribute to Caesar" sermon, from The Political Theories of Martin Luther, Luther Hess Waring (New York, Putnam's, 1910) p. 104]
[In reference to a creationist book which has a picture of a man and a dinosaur together and states, "Adam wasn't scared to watch dinosaurs eat because all the creatures ate plants and not meat"]: "The kind of thing you're characterizing certainly is silly, just almost as silly as the work of Richard Dawkins, and as damaging.
Philip Johnson in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 39.
[In regard to the Trinity]; "Tom, had you and I been 40 days with Moses, and beheld the great God, and even if God himself had tried to tell us that three was one . . . and one equals three, you and I would never have believed it. We would never fall victims to such lies.
[John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson]
[My] mind is not for rent to any god or government
[Rush, "Tom Sawyer"]
[My] purpose…is is to transform theologians into anthropologists, lovers of God into lovers of man, candidates for the next world into students of this world … I negate the fantastic hypocracy of theology and religion only in order to affirm the true nature of man.
[Feuerbach]
[N]o philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
[Annie Besant, "The Gospel of Atheism"]
[O]ld beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 256.
[P]rescientific people… could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 46.
[T]he true natural sciences lock together in theory and evidence to form the ineradicable technical base of modern civilization. The pseudosciences satisfy personal psychological needs… but lack the ideas or the means to contribute to the technical base.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 54.
[T]heology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 6.
[The U.S. Supreme Court] Declined, without comment, to hear a challenge to the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Religious groups challenged the establishment of diplomatic relations, saying the ties would violate the First Amendment's requirements for separation of church and state. American Baptist Churches vs. Reagan, 86-113, said that religious groups did not have legal standing to try to block the administration's decision.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 21 October 1986]
[This world] exists nonnecessarily, improbably, and causelessly. It exists for absolutely no reason at all. It is inexplicably and stunningly actual . . . The impact of this captivated realisation upon me is overwhelming. I am completely stunned. I take a few dazed steps in the dark meadow, and fall among the flowers. I lie stupefied, whirling without comprehension in this world through numberless worlds other than this one.
Quentin Smith, "Atheism, Theism and Big Bang Cosmology"
[W]e shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.
[Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis", Science V. 155 No. 3767 (10 March 1967), pp. 1203-1207.]
[W]hen the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 245.
… A socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
[Pat Robertson on Feminism]
… believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him 'good' and worshipping him is a still greater danger… The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of scripture is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissable.
[C. S. Lewis, in letter to John Beversluis]
… I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought.
[Robert Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses"]
… mid-eighteenth century America had a smaller proportion of church members than any other nation in Christendom….in 1800 [only] one of every fifteen Americans was a church member
[Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, p. 89]
… the best causes tend to attract to their support the worst arguments, which seems to be equally true in the intellectual and in the moral sense.
R.A. Fisher
… the Bible was a collection of books written at different times by different men — a strange mixture of diverse human documents — and a tissue of irreconcilable notions. Inspired? The Bible is not even intelligent. It is not even good craftsmanship, but is full of absurdities and contradictions.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
… the true utility function of life, that which is being maximized in the natural world, is DNA survival. But DNA is not floating free; it is locked up in living bodies and it has make the most of the levers of power at its disposal.
Richard Dawkins
… This brings us to our familiar resting place. The 'goodness' of God is different in kind from goodness as we comprehend it. To say that God's 'goodness' is compatible with the worst disasters imaginable, is to empty this concept of its meaning. By human standards, the Christian God cannot by good. By divine standards, God may be 'good' in some unspecified, unknowable way - but this term no longer makes any sense. And so, for the last time, we fail to comprehend the Christian God.
George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 87.
… when people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
[Bertrand Russell in "Theory of Knowledge"]
… why have those countries with a strong Church-State alliance displayed such an eagerness to enforce religious dogmas and eliminate dissent through the power of the state. Why has Christianity refused, whenever possible, to allow its beliefs to compete in a free marketplace of ideas? The answer is obvious and revealing. Christianity is peddling an inferior product, one that cannot withstand critical investigation. Unable to compete favorably with other theories, it has sought to gain a monopoly through a state franchise, which means: through the use of force.
[George H. Smith, from Atheism: The Case Against God]
….Man can contemplate his own mortality and finds the thought intolerable. Any animal will struggle to protect itself from a threat of death. Faced with a predator, it flees, hides, fights or employs some other defensive mechanism, such as death-feigning or the emission of stinking fluids. There are many self-protection mechanisms, but they all occur as a response to an immediate danger. When man contemplates his future death, it is as if, by thinking of it, he renders it immediate. His defence is to deny it. He cannot deny that his body will die and rot—the evidence is too strong for that; so he solves the problem by the invention of an immortal soul—a soul which is more 'him' than even his physical body is 'him.' If this soul can survive in an afterlife, then he has successfully defended himself against the threatened attack on his life. This gives the agents of the gods a powerful area of support. All they need to do is to remind their followers constantly of their mortality and to convince them that the afterlife itself is under the personal management of the particular gods they are promoting. The self-protective urges of their worshippers will do the rest.
[Desmond Morris, "Religious Displays," Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour, 1977, Abrams, New York, p. 149-51.]
…a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests…. The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
[Albert Einstein, address at the Princeton Theological Seminary, May 19, 1939, published in Out of My Later Years, New York: Philosophical Library, 1950.]
…a gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.
Richard Dawkins
…a lion wants to eat an antelope's body, but the antelope has very different plans for its body. This is not normally regarded as competition for a resource, but logically it is hard to see why not.
Richard Dawkins
…an absurd problem came to the surface: 'How COULD God permit that [crucifixion of Jesus Christ]!' . . . the deranged reason of the little community found quite a frightfully absurd answer: God gave his Son for forgiveness, as a SACRIFICE . . . The SACRIFICE FOR GUILT, and just in its most repugnant and barbarous form — the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What horrifying heathenism!
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
…and if Jesus were alive today he'd be locked up in an insane asylum, along with all his cohorts.
Walter Kerney 1961 (Excerpt from The Messianic Travesty)
…And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man
[A. E. Housman]
…And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the naive. As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we might be advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately, do us the same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in God, then, is just that — a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect for Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most virtuous inhabitant of Planet Earth. But even well-educated Christians are frustated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognized Bible scholar is perfectly aware of it. Some Christians, alas, resort to formal lying to obscure such reality.
[Steve Allen]
…and now we're down to our last $37,000."
"But just last week you said you were down to your last $50,000, what happened to $13,000 since then?"
"Uh…um…I don't know.
[Tammy Fae Bakker]
…and sporteth twice they the camels, before the third hour. And so the Millionites went forth, to Ramgilliad, in Kadesh-belgamesh, by Shorethberagalion, to the house of Gashbillbethuelbasda, he who brought the butterdish to Balshaza, and the tent-peg to the house of Rashamon. And there, slew they the goats, yeah, and put they the bits, in little pots.
[Monty Python]
…And whereas it has also come to the knowledge of the said Congregation that the Pythagorean doctrine — which is false and altogether opposed to the Holy Scripture — of the motion of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun, which is also taught by Nicolaus Copernicus in De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium, and by Diego de Zuiga on Job, is now being spread abroad and accepted by many… Therefore, in order that this opinion may not insinuate itself any further to the prejudice of Catholic truth, the Holy Congregation has decreed that the said Nicolaus Copernicus, De Revolutionibus orbium, and Diego de Zuiga, On Job, be suspended until they are corrected.
[Decree of the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Index condemning "De Revolutionibus", March 5, 1616]
…Any organization could profit from a 10-year-old member with enough strength of character to refuse to swear falsely.
[New York Times editorial, 12/12/93, on the Boy Scouts' refusing membership to Mark Welsh, who would not sign a religious oath]
…anyone who writes about "Darwin's theory of evolution" in the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.
Ernst Mayr
…Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the 2, in the 1st instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the 2nd a fool.
[Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)]
…but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature.
["An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", David Hume, 10:2:30]
…But in the Bullshit Department, the businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. 'Cause I gotta tell ya the truth, folks, when it comes to Bullshit, big time, major league BULLSHIT, you have to stand in awe, in awe, of the all time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: RELIGION!…No contest, no contest!!
George Carlin
…definitions are temporary verbalizations of concepts, and concepts- particularly difficult concepts- are usually revised repeatedly as our knowledge and understanding grows.
Ernst Mayr
…democracy can be interpreted to assert not only equality before the law but also essentialistic identity in all respects. This is expressed in the claim, "All men are created equal," which is something very different from the statement, "All men have equal rights and are equal before the law." Anyone who believes in the genetic uniqueness of every individual thereby believes in the conclusion, "No two individuals are created equal.
Ernst Mayr
…full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind, that, in other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over the masses, confirms this concept.
[Wilhelm Reich]
…I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
[Stephen F. Roberts]
…I couldn't but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocracy, the intolerance, must consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the passing plesures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle as he murmurs: give the devil his due.
[W. Somerset Maughman, "The Razor's Edge"]
…I was suddenly inspired to describe the Judeo-Christian god as a penis which has been endowed with cosmic significance.
[Soledad de Montalvo]
…if all the bones of all the victims of the Catholic Church could be gathered together, a monument higher than all the pyramids would rise…
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 497]
…if I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
[Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir]
…If we are going to save America and evangelize the world, we cannot accommodate secular philosophies that are diametrically opposed to Christian truth…We need to pull out all the stops to recruit and train 25 million Americans to become informed pro-moral activists whose voices can be heard in the halls of Congress. I am convinced that America can be turned around if we will all get serious about the Master's business. It may be late, but it is never too late to do what is right. We need an old-fashioned, God-honoring, Christ-exalting revival to turn American back to God. America can be saved!
[Jerry Falwell, in the Moral Majority Report, September 1984.]
…in matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.
Gore Vidal
…it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions.
Richard Dawkins
…it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such — it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, seed of all sin, the original sin. This alone is morality. 'Thou shalt not know' — the rest follows.
[Nietzsche, "Antichrist"]
…it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo Sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges.
Richard Dawkins
…it is high time that scholars of all godly religions united to confront the forces of immorality in the present day under various names such as secularism, human rights, freedom of speech.
[Tehran's Kayhan International newspaper urging cooperation with the Vatican in opposing the U.N. population control document]
…it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions.
[Thomas Huxley]
…it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye … It's no wonder 'the' eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom … It is a geological blink.
Richard Dawkins
…it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs about the existence of God in any recognizable sense continuous with the great systems of the past, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.
[Sidney Hook]
…It was as if the interlopers had suggested to a bunch of born-again Christians that they hunt up the Ark of the Covenant and turn it into a pay toilet.
[Stephen King (The Wastelands)]
…it was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.
… Let the reader … attempt to calculate the prior probability that a hundred generations of his ancestry in the direct male line should each have left at least one son. The odds against such a contingency as it would have appeared to his hundredth ancestor (about the time of King Solomon) would require for their expression forty-four figures of the decimal notation; yet this improbable event has certainly happened.
R.A. Fisher
…Jesus was almost certainly not 'of Nazareth'. An overwhelming body of evidence indicates that Nazareth did not exist in biblical times. The town is unlikely to have appeared before the third century.
[Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, The Messianic Legacy]
…Jesus was not as peaceful as commonly believed, and that his actual teachings did not represent a fundamental break with the tradition of Jewish military messianism. A strong pro-zealot-bandit and anti-Roman bias probably pervaded his original ministry. The decisive break with the Jewish messianic tradition probably came about only after the fall of Jerusalem, when the original politico-military components in Jesus' teachings were purged by Jewish Christians living in Rome and other cities of the empire as an adaptive response to the Roman victory.
[Marvin Harris, anthropologist, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches]
…little children who have begun to live in their mothers' womb and have there died, or who, having just been born, have passed away from the world without the sacrament of holy baptism… must be punished by the eternal torture of undying fire.
[quoted in Hell, A Christian Doctrine]
…most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.
Ernst Mayr
…once a person admits to not believing in God, this raises the question of whether or not that person believes in America . . ." - -
[Chief spokesman for National office of the Boy Scouts]
…once a person admits to not believing in God, this raises the question of whether or not that person believes in America….
[Chief spokesman for national office of the Boy Scouts]
…our constitutional tradition, from the Declaration of Independence and the first inaugural address of Washington… down to the present day, has, with a few aberrations, see Church of Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457, 12 S.Ct. 511, 36 L.Ed. 226 (1892), ruled out of order government-sponsored endorsement of religion—even when no legal coercion is present, and indeed even when no ersatz, "peer-pressure" psycho-coercion is present—where the endorsement is sectarian, in the sense of specifying details upon which men and women who believe in a benevolent, omnipotent Creator and Ruler of the world are known to differ (for example, the divinity of Christ).
[Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577, 641 (1992)]
…perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.
(Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)
…so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrranize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
[Voltarine de Cleyre]
…that freedom of the press is one of the greatest evils threatening modern society. Freedom of the press was universally one of the most pernicious of the evils of the day.
[Cardinal Pedro Segura, NY Herald Tribune, 12/5/52]
…the Bible as we have it contains elements that are scientifically incorrect or even morally repugnant. No amount of "explaining away" can convince us that such passages are the product of Divine Wisdom.
[Bernard J. Bamberger, The Story of Judaism]
…the fundamentalist mind, running in a single rut for fifty years, is now quite unable to comprehend dissent from its basic superstitions, or to grant any common honesty, or even any decency, to those who reject them.
HL Mencken
…the genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants and bacteria … All earthly living things are certainly descended from a single ancestor.
Richard Dawkins
…the likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition—into colonies in outer space…
Richard Dawkins
…the only "right" a sodomite has in a Chrisian Theocracy is the right to die.
[Dan Gentry, of Christian Research]
…the stereo- type of scientists being scruffy nerds with rows of pens in their top pocket is just about as wicked as racist stereotypes.
Richard Dawkins
…the stereo- type of scientists' being scruffy nerds with rows of pens in their top pocket isjust about as wicked as racist stereotypes."
…a fairly common pattern in television news: right at the end a smile comes onto the face of the newsreader and this is the scientific joke—'some scientist has proved that such and such is the case.' … And it's clearly the bit of fun at the end, it's not serious at all. I want science to be taken seriously, because, after all, it's less ephemeral—it has a more eternal aspect than whatever the politics of the day might be, which, of course, gets the lead in the news.
Richard Dawkins
…Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded…
[Plato, Phaedrus]
…They tried to make me go to Catholic school, too. I lasted a very short time. When the penguin came after me with a ruler, I was out of there.
[Frank Zappa]
…this monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornotherapy, pollution, poisoning and proliferation of crimes of all types.
[Judge Braswell Dean, in Time Magazine, March 1981]
…to argue with a man who has renouced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead.
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p.127]
…truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
Thomas Jefferson
…two devils rose from the water, and flew off through the air, crying, 'Oh, oh, oh!' and turning one over another, in sportive mockery….
[Martin Luther]
…unless one is able to find faint foreshadowings of it in the dryopithecids. Pilbeam assumes that the relationship exists, and has so indicated in a chart he has constructed — although he does leave a huge gap in it, and makes no attempt to link any specific dryopithecid with any living ape. He contents himself with the observation that dryopithecids are primitive apes with certain things in common, things that they do not have in common with a second group of Miocene apes that he has also succeeded in sorting out and lumping together: the ramampithecids, named after the aforementioned Ramapithecus.
What is the distinction? It is a simple but overwhelmingly important one. With the exception of their premolars, which are apelike, all of the ramapithecids have peculiar unapelike teeth: Big molars, heavy enamel, small canines. They foreshadow hominids. The dryopithecids, with apelike teeth, foreshadow modern apes.
"LUCY The Beginnings of Humankind" Donald Johanson & Maitland Edey, Copyright 1981
…we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.
Steve Allen
…when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
Richard Dawkins
…you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.
Richard Dawkins
…your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.
[Krishnamurti]
++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
(Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times)
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)
Atheism, therefore, is the absence of theistic belief. One who does not believe in the existence of a god or supernatural being is properly designated as an atheist. Atheism is sometimes defined as "the belief that there is no God of any kind," or the claim that a god cannot exist. While these are categories of atheism, they do not exhaust the meaning of atheism— and are somewhat misleading with respect to the basic nature of atheism. Atheism, in its basic form, is not a belief: it is the absence of belief. An atheist is not primarily a person who believes that a god does not exist, rather he does not believe in the existence of a god.
[George Smith]
Telegraph: For God to create the universe he would have to be hyper- intelligent. But intelligence only evolves over time. Is that about the strength of it?
Dawkins: It's worse than that, the argument for God starts by assuming what it is attempting to explain — intelligence, complexity, it comes to the same thing — and so it explains nothing. God is a non-explanation. Whereas evolution by natural selection /is/ an explanation. It really does start simply and become complex.
[Sunday Telegraph (UK) interview with Richard Dawkins, Sept. 26, 1999]
As historians we are not obliged to take anybody's word for anything; we must attempt to verify every scrap of information we decide to use in our reconstructions. That an involves an assessment of the proclivities of our sources along with an evaluation of the sources from which they got their information.
Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 58.
Atheism, therefore, is the absence of theistic belief. One who does not believe in the existence of a god or supernatural being is properly designated as an atheist. "Atheism is sometimes defined as 'the belief that there is no God of any kind,' or the claim that a god cannot exist. While these are categories of atheism, they do not exhaust the meaning of atheism— and are somewhat misleading with respect to the basic nature of atheism. Atheism, in its basic form, is not a belief: it is the absence of belief. An atheist is not primarily a person who believes that a god does not exist, rather he does not believe in the existence of a god.
George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 7.
Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method.
Richard Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 1)
There is virtually nothing which the Christian will accept as evidence of God's evil. If disasters that are admittedly 'unmerited, pointless, and incapable of being morally rationalized' [quoting Hick] are compatible with the 'goodness' of God, what could possibly qualify as contrary evidence? The 'goodness' of God, it seems, is compatible with any state of affairs. While we evaluate a man with reference to his actions, we are not similarly permitted to judge God. God is immune from the judgment of evil as a matter of principle.
George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 86
Ubi dubium ibi libertas:
Where there is doubt, there is freedom
Latin proverb
McDonald: "Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are—-well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good—-not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort."
Dawkins: "There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting—-it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true."
Richard Dawkins
3. Interpreting the Bible: All reading of Scripture (including a literalist approach) involves subjective interpretation. For example, to read the stories of Jesus' birth as literal historical accounts involves an act of interpretation just as much as reading them as symbolic narratives (namely, it involves a decision to read them literally). The recognition that all interpretations are subjective does not, however, mean that all are equally good. About any interpretation, one may ask (or be asked), "what have you got to go on? Why do you read it that way?
["Faith and Scholarship" by Marcus J. Borg August, 1993 issue of Bible Review]
7. Certain crimes are committed more immediately against God himself; others, against the state; and a third kind against certain persons. The chief crie in the first class, cognizable by temporal courts, is blasphemy, under which may be included atheism. This crime consists in denying or vilifying the Deity, by speech or writing. All who curse God or any of the persons of the blessed Trinity, are to suffer death, even for a single act; and those who deny him (sic), if they persist in their denial. The denial of a providence, or of the authority of the holy Scriptures, is punishable capitally for the third offence.
[1771 edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica, under Law: Tit. 33 "Of crimes"]
A believer is a bird in a cage, a free-thinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
A blow to the head will confuse a man's thinking, a blow to the foot has no such effect, this cannot be the result of an immaterial soul.
[Heraclitus, 500 BC]
A Boss in Heavan is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.
[Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) Russian anarchist, atheist author, and founder of Nihilism]
A boy missing for 15 hours in a partly flooded cave where six others drowned was pulled out of the cave alive Saturday, providing a moment of light in the relentless gloom of the Midwest flood. …'It was God that was with him and brought him back,' said his grandmother. The bodies of a 21-year-old female school counselor and another 12-year-old boy were discovered in the cave, raising the total number of victims in the tragedy to six.
[Bob Burgdorfer, Reuters, San Francisco Examiner, 25 July 1993]
A callous, heartless religion is that which defines it's God as a cold and unmerciful deity, quick to anger and even quicker to condemn it's people to an eternity in fire. I know of only one such God and he is the God of Christianity.
Sherman Milliken [Playwrite and Author of books on world religions]{1923}
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
[Nietzsche]
A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Mortal hostility against the masters of the earth, against the 'noble', that is also Christian. Hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind, is Christian; hatred of the sense, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian.
[Nietzsche]
A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.
Jane Smiley (in the Chicago Tribune)
A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday, and what he is going to do on Monday.
[Thomas Ybarra]
A Christian Reconstructionist is a Dominionist. He takes seriously the Bible's commands to the godly to take dominion in the earth. This is the goal of the gospel and the Great Commission. The Christian Reconstructionist believes the earth and all its fullness is the Lord's: that every area dominated by sin must be "reconstructed" in terms of the Bible. This includes, first, the individual; second, the family; third, the church; and fourth, the wider society, including the state.
[The Creed of Christian Reconstruction by Rev. Andrew Sandlin]
A church that sets up a religious faith as more essential than purity, than kindness, charity or goodness, is a dangerous institution.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
A clergyman is a man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his earthly ones.
[Ambrose Bierce]
A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.
[Voltaire]
A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.
Elbert Hubbard
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
A crime against god is a demonstrated impossibility.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
A critic may reject some miracle stories as legendary, and not others, with no inconsistency at all for the simple reason that even if one holds miracles to be possible, one need not hold legends to be impossible! There are other factors, literary and historiographical ones, that might lead a critic to conclude that even though miracles can happen, it does not appear that in this or that case they did.
Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again, p. 116.
A cult is a religion with no political power.
Tom Wolfe
A disturbing fact continues to surface in sex abuse research. The first best predictor of abuse is alcohol or drug addiction in the father. But the second best predictor is conservative religiosity, accompanied by parental belief in traditional male-female roles. This means that if you want to know which children are most likely to be sexually abused by their father, the second most significant clue is whether or not the parents belong to a conservative religious group with traditional role beliefs and rigid sexual attitudes. (Brown and Bohn, 1989; Finkelhor, 1986; Fortune, 1983; Goldstein et al, 1973; Van Leeuwen, 1990). (emphasis in original)
["Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches", by Carolyn Holderread Heggen, Herald Press, Scotdale, PA, 1993 p. 73]
A dogma is the hand of the dead on the throat of the living.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
A dogma will thrive in soil where the truth could not get root.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.
Robert G. Ingersoll
A few weeks ago a hurricane struck the little religious community of Bethany, Okla. A number of pious citizens of the little town were killed. Houses were destroyed — homes in which prayer and devotion reigned. A church was demolished. Only a few miles away is the large, wicked city of Oklahoma City — at least we can certainly assume that, from the religious viewpoint, many sinners live in Oklahoma City. Assuming also (which is a great deal riskier assumption) that there is a God, why should he perpetrate this grim and sardonic joke? The sinners in the big city were left untouched. The godly folk in the little nearby village were punished by the evidences of God's wrath. How do the religious people interpret this calamity? Often and often they explain such calamities as flood, fire and storm by saying that God is angry at the sinful people and is warning them or destroying them for their sins. Was the hurricane in Bethany a sign of the love of God for his faithful worshipers? And God missed an even better chance, if there were a God who wished to punish rebels against his majesty and inscrutability. Just a few hundred miles north and east of Bethany, Okla., is Girard — the home of The American Freeman: and The Debunker and The Joseph McCabe Magazine and the Little Blue Books — the center of American free thought where an enormous stream of atheistic literature and. godless modern knowledge pours forth to enlighten the masses. If there were a God directing hurricanes and he wanted to really "get" an uncompromising foe, whom he has no chance of persuading in the ordinary way, it would have been a devastating stroke for him to send his howling punitive blasts through the town of Girard. It would be a more remarkable suggestion of the avenging act of a God if only the Haldeman-Julius plant were destroyed and the rest of the town left unhurt — and, as good neighbors, we shouldn't wish the Christian and respectable, people of Girard nor those who are respectable and not so Christian nor those who are Christian and not exactly respectable to suffer from our proximity and our propaganda of atheism. Is God a joker? No — let us whisper it — the joke is that there is no God. Hurricanes come upon the just and the unjust, the pious and the impious.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
A fools prayer: Dear Lord, Please help us not to be blasphemers. In Jesus name we pray….
[Bill Huston]
A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.
[H. L. Mencken]
A God of love, a God of wrath, a God of jealousy, a God of bigotry, a God of vulgar tirades, a God of cheating and lying — yes, the Christian God is given all of these characteristics, and isn't it a wretched mess to be offered to men in this twentieth century? The beginning of wisdom, the beginning of humanism, the beginning of progress is the rejection of this absurd, extravagantly impossible myth of a God.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
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.
[Karen Armstrong, A History of God, pg. 383, speaking on Paul Tillich]
A good rule for interpretation is: 'If the literal sense makes good sense, seek no other sense lest you come up with nonsense'
[Anonymous]
A great deal is already gained with the first step: the humanization of nature. Impersonal forces and destinies cannot be approached… if everywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a kind that we know in our own society…. we can apply the same methods against these violent supermen outside that we employ in our own society; we can try to adjure them, to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so influencing them, we may rob them of a part of their power
[Sigmund Freud, "The Future of an Illusion"]
A great many men believe in providence until they get caught in a railroad accident.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
A great many people who worship Jesus would not let him come at the back door.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
A handsome bonnet covers a multitude of sins.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
A healthy nature needs no God or immortality.
[Johann Schiller]
A hearty fool is he that believeth every word of the bible.
Jacob Elleker 1638 (English Philospher and Physician)
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
[Albert Einstein]
A large number of deaf, crippled and blind people are afflicted solely through the malice of the demon. And one must in no wise doubt that plagues, fevers and every sort of evil come from him.
[Martin Luther]
A LITTLE BOY LOST
"Nought loves another as itself,
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know:
"And Father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door."
The Priest sat by and heard the child,
In trembling zeal he seiz'd his hair:
He led him by his little coat,
And all admir'd the priestly care.
And standing on the altar high,
"Lo! what a fiend is here!" said he,
"One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy Mystery."
The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents were in vain;
They strip'd him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain;
And burn'd him in a holy place,
Where many had been burn'd before:
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such things done on Albion's shore?
[William Blake, from "Songs of Experience"]
A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
A long acquaintance with the literature of the Witnesses leads one to the conclusion that they live in the intellectual `twilight zone'…. Whenever their literature strays onto the fields of philosophy, academic theology, science or any severe mental discipline their ideas at best mirror popular misconceptions, at worst they are completely nonsensical.
[Alan Rogerson, Millions Now Living Will Never Die: A Study of Jehovah's Witnesses, 1969, p. 116]
A major function of fundamentalist religion is to bolster deeply insecure and fearful people. This is done by justifying a way of life with all of its defining prejudices. It thereby provides an appropriate and legitimate outlet for one's anger. The authority of an inerrant Bible that can be readily quoted to buttress this point of view becomes an essential ingredient to such a life. When that Bible is challenged, or relativized, the resulting anger proves the point categorically.
Bishop John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, (San Fransisco: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 5.
A man cannot be happy who believes in hell, any more than he can sweeten his coffee with a pickle.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
A man said to the Universe, "Sir, I exist."
"Yes, said the Universe, but that has not created within me a sense of obligation."
[Stephen Crane]
A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a many who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.
[Helvetius]
A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.
[H.L. Mencken]
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; 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, "Religion and Science", New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930]
A miracle is not an explanation of what we cannot comprehend.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
A miracle was not in our development plan, but this Madonna thing will go well with our new water amusement park.
[Pietro Tidei, Mayor of Civitavecchia (1995), from a news story in the Ottawa Citizen]
A Mormon is a man that has the bad taste and the religion to do what a good many other people are restrained from doing by conscientious scruples and the police.
[Mr. Dooley]
A mutation doesn't produce major new raw material. You don't make new species by mutating the species. That's a common idea people have; that evolution is due to random mutations. A mutation is NOT the cause of evolutionary change. Something else than natural selection brings about species at new levels, trends and direction.
Stephen Jay Gould
A mystery dating from medieval times — the ability of the reputed clotted blood of a saint to turn liquid when handled in a religious ceremony — may be just ordinary chemistry, researchers say. The scientists say they created a dark brown gel that turns easily to liquid when disturbed and then thickens back into a gel. Such a mixture may be in the vial that is said to hold the blood of St. Januarius, also called San Gennaro, in the Roman Catholic cathedral of Naples, Italy, the researchers propose in today's issue of the journal Nature. In a ceremony performed since the 14th century, the hermetically sealed, four-inch glass container is repeatedly turned upside down. Many Neapolitans believe that good luck will come if the vial's contents liquefy, but that disasters such as earthquakes may await if the contents remain solid. …The gel was made with substances available in the 14th century, including table salt, water, calcium carbonate and ferric chloride hydrate, the researchers wrote.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 10 October 1991 (AP)]
A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious but who understands the nonexistent
[Elbert Hubbard]
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
[James Feibleman, "Understanding Philosophy", 1973]
A nation can assume that the addition of the words "under God" to its pledge of allegiance gives evidence that its citizens actually believe in God whereas all it really proves is that they believe in believing in God.
[Huston Smith, "The Religions of Man
[Buddhism]"]
A one sentence definition of mythology? "Mythology" is what we call someone else's religion.
[Joseph Campbell]
A person has not much excuse for living who can make no better use of life than passing it in a nunnery.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.
[Jean de La Bruy re (1645-1696)]
A Planarian has a better grasp of the world at large than a fetus to viability.
A pleasant justice, that, which a river or a mountain limits. Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, may be heresy on the other!
[Blaise Pascal, Pensees]
A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass, and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts--physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!
Richard Feynman
A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood… How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts— physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on— remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
Richard Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 1)
A prevalent fallacy is the assumption that a proof of an after-life would also be a proof of the existence of a deity. This is far from being the case. If - as I hold -there is no good reason to believe that a god either created or presides over this world, there is equally no good reason to believe that a god created or presides over the next world, on the unlikely supposition that such a thing exists.
[Sir A.J. Ayer, in the Sunday Telegraph, Aug. 28, 1988, pg. 5]
A reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20: Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals… Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.
[Monty Python, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"]
A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong. The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak certainty of reason- but one cannot have both.
[Robert A. Heinlein, from "Friday"]
A Roman Catholic priest and theologian has called on his church to consider the possibility of evangelizing extraterrestrials, according to published reports. After two Swiss astronomers said they had discovered the first planet in a solar system similar to Earth's, Piero Coda, a theology professor in Rome, said any beings living on the planet would be in need of salvation.
[Associated Baptist Press article, as quoted Jennifer Graham, Knight-Ridder Newspaper, in "Mork from Ork is going to hell? Some scholars say extraterrestrials would be tainted by original sin."]
A Roman Catholic worships a god who speaks through the Pope, while a Baptist worships a god who does not. They cannot be worshipping the same god.
Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.
A second possible thing that creationists might look for is some kind of instrument that will detect darkness. It is my conclusion, based on [scripture] that darkness is a positive thing.
[Richard Niessen, Professor, Christian Heritage College]
A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
a sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised
[Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume]
A sober, devout man will interpret "God's will" soberly and devoutly. A fanatic, with bloodshot mind, will interpret "God's will" fanatically. Men of extreme, illogical views will interpret "God's will" in eccentric fashion. Kindly, charitable, generous men will interpret "God's will" according to their character.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
A society without religion is like a crazed psychopath without a loaded .45
A spokesman for the Lyon Group, producers of Barney and Friends, denied that Barney is an instrument of Satan.
[the Advocate, spring 1994]
A tack points heavenward when it causes the most mischief. It has many human imitations.
[Texas Siftings]
A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidence is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence.
[John Allen Paulos, mathematics professor, in "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences"]
A theologian is a person who uses the word "God" to hide his ignorance.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
[Oscar Wilde]
A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to atheism.
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologian]
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
[Aristotle, "Politics"]
A universe with a God would like quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory. "
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.
Richard Dawkins
A universe with a God would like quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different.
Richard Dawkins
A very pious friend of mine, having heard that I had said the world was full of imperfections, asked me if the report was true. Upon being informed that it was, he expressed great surprise that any one could be guilty of such presumption. He said that, in his judgement, it was impossible to point out an imperfection "Be kind enough," said he, "to name even one improvement that you could make, if you had the power." "Well," said I, "I would make good health catching, instead of disease." The truth is, it is impossible to harmonize all the ills, and pains, and agonies of this world with the idea that we were created by, and are watched over and protected by an infinitely wise, powerful and beneficent God, who is superior to and independent of nature.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
A whole generation started the day with prayer and ended up not benefiting very much from it. After all, it was not 7-year-olds who gathered stoned and naked at Woodstock.
[Richard Cohen]
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
David Hume
A woman is a pitcher full of filth with it's mouth full of blood, yet all run after her
[Talmud, Shabbath 152]
A woman suspected of being a witch was dragged from her hut, tied to a tree and then axed to death by her neighbors in an eastern India village, police said yesterday. Sonamoni Kisku was killed Sunday by Ganesh Soren and his brother, Meghraj, in Goaljoi, about 155 miles northwest of Calcutta, police said. …It was the latest in several killings of women suspected of being witches in the predominantly tribal region of the state.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 26 April 1989 (AP)]
A world where most men prefer sex with little children to sex with grown women, mostly allegedly Christian parents secretly engage in bloody Satanic rituals and every third person has suffered anal, genital and other harassments by demonic dwarfs from outer space makes as much sense - and just as little sense - as a world where the universe is ruled by the ghost of a crucified Jew and George Bush had rational reasons (which no one can now remember) for bombing Iraq again two days before leaving the White House.
[Prof. T.F.X. Finnegan, Trinity College, Dublin]
A zealot's stones will break my bones, but gods will never hurt me.
About 200 B.C. mystery cults began to appear in Rome just as they had earlier in Greece. Most notable was the Cybele cult centered on Vatican hill … Associated with the Cybele cult was that of her lover, Attis (the older Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, or Orpheus under a new name). He was a god of ever-reviving vegetation. Born of a virgin, he died and was reborn annually. The festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday and culminated after three days in a day of rejoicing over the resurrection.
[Gerald L. Berry, "Religions of the World"]
Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.
[Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"]
According to a story in the New Republic magazine, Pat Robertson paid former football star Roosevelt Grier a $3,000 'honorarium' for appearing at a rally in a Brooklyn ghetto to express his support for the candidate. … He introduced the candidate as Pat Robinson. … The magazine also reported that Robertson paid singer and Christian Pat Boone $5,000 for his endorsement.
[Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 31 March 1988]
According to a survey being published in the April 3, 1997, Nature, 40% of scientists in the U.S. believe in God. This ratio has not changed in the 80 years since a similar survey was conducted in 1916. Biologists were the biggest doubters in 1916; physicists and astronomers are now the leading disbelievers, with 77.9% denying the existence of God. Mathematicians, who create their own universes, are the most inclined to believe in God with a total of 44.6%.
According to the theologians, God prepared this globe expressly for the habitation of his loved children, and yet he filled the forests with ferocious beasts; placed serpents in every path; stuffed the world with earthquakes, and adorned its surface with mountains of flame. Notwithstanding all this, we are told that the world is perfect; that it was created by a perfect being, and is therefore necessarily perfect. The next moment, these same persons will tell us that the world was cursed; covered with brambles, thistles and thorns, and that man was doomed to disease and death, simply because our poor, dear mother ate an apple contrary to the command of an arbitrary God.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
According to theism, if a universe is to have any probability of existing, this probability is dependent upon God's beliefs, desires and creative acts. But the Hartle-Hawking probability is not dependent on any supernatural considerations; Hartle and Hawking do not sum over anything supernatural in their path integral derivation of the probability amplitude.
Quentin Smith, "Quantum Cosmology's Implication of Atheism" (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/quentin_smith/quantum.html, 1997).
According to this account the promise of the devil was fulfilled to the very letter, Adam and Eve did not die, and they did become as gods, knowing good and evil.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition.
[Pliny to Trajan about the Christians, 111 AD]
Actors," said Granny, witheringly. "As if the world weren't full of enough history without inventing more.
(Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent and the serpent didn't have a leg to stand on.
[Anonymous]
Adam lived 930 years and may have been around 15 feet tall! Then mankind "deteriorated"…Noah at 12 feet…and now we're down to half of that! NOTE: If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS??
Jim Pinkoski
Adam may not have been so perfect after the 'fall," but he was not so big a fool.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.
Albert Einstein
After all, any religion that can get numerous Christians to ignore a simple and direct command from jesus in the name of "context" obviously is going to have a hard time with teaching better morality to everybody else. Maybe this explains the widespread explosion of religion in America and the widespread rise in hatefulness, racism, right winged savagery, and widespread lack of honesty.
[William Barwell, wbarwell@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM]
After all, the principle objection which a thinking man has to religion is that religion is not true — and is not even sane.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil.
Gary Potter, president of Catholics for Christian Political Action
After the survivor of the Spanish conquest has told his life's story he is convicted by the Inquisition: "He posted no brief in defense or mitigation of his offenses, and when he was most solemnly advised by the Court President of the dire consequences he faced if found guilty, Juan Damasceno volunteered only one comment: 'It will mean I do not go to the Christian heaven?' He was told that that would indeed be the worst of his punishments: that he would most assuredly not go to Heaven. At which, his smile sent a thrill of horror through every soul of the Court.
["Aztec", by Gary Jennings]
Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of to-day arises.
[Margaret Sanger, "Shall We Break This Law?", The Birth Control Review, vol. 1 no. 1, Feb. 1917]
Agnosticism is not properly described as a 'negative' creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainity. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny, and repudiate as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence.
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Agnosticism and Christianity" Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays (1889, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1992), p. 193.
AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah's chariotters.
[Jerry Falwell]
All Bibles are man-made.
[Thomas Edison]
All countries censored books; Protestant authorities labored to keep "papist" works from the eyes of the faithful … … In the Catholic world, with the trend toward centralization under the pope, a special importance attached to the list published by the bishop of Rome, the papal Index of Prohibited Books. Only with special permission, granted to reliable persons for special study, could Catholics read books listed on the Index, on which most of the significant works written in Europe since the Reformation have been included.
[A History of the Modern World, R.R. Palmer,p. 90]
All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants.
[Saint Augustine (354-430)]
All Gaza's temples are torn down and burned and the city is cleansed of every belief but the Christian faith. The most stubborn opponents, faute de mieux, are tied up, marched away to the provincial capital, severely tortured, and all killed mala morte, 'a great number.'
[Ramsay MacMullen, "Christianizing the Roman Empire", p.89, from information from the Life of Porphyry.]
All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable.
[Fran Lebowitz]
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
[George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Annajanska" (1919)]
All holy piety in public, and all peeled grapes and self-indulgence in private.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
All honorable men of good character who may be lucky enough to get a BJ not only refrain from pointing the finger, but lie about it if asked.
All in all, I can't say I believe in god. If, in fact, I ever find out that he does indeed exist, I think I'll stay away from him, because if he's responsible for half the things he gets credit for, he's got to be one mean son of a bitch.
[Peter Gether, A Cat Abroad, pp. 89-90]
All my work in the field of science and research has come through a change in my earlier opinions on religion. Growth is the law of life. Orthodoxy is the death of scientific effort.
[Luther Burbank, from "Burbank the Infidel" by Joseph Lewis]
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
All of the "extant post-Pauline epistles of the New Testament which are likely to have been written before the end of the first century (and probably before 90) refer to Jesus in essentially the same manner as Paul does. They stress one or more of his supernatural aspects — his existence before his life on earth, his resurrection and second coming - - but say nothing of the teachings or miracles ascribed to him in the gospels, and give no historical setting to the crucifixion, which remains the one episode in his incarnate life unambiguously mentioned, at least in some of them."
G.A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 47.
All of us, indeed, who have ever come to close quarters with theologians must have left them with an elated feeling that our sort of decency is a great deal better than theirs. For they are not, as a class, fair men, nor is there any honesty in them. To find their match in secular life recourse must be had, not to philosophers, but to politicians.
HL Mencken
All our experience with history should teach us, when we look back, how badly human wisdom is betrayed when it relies on itself.
[Martin Luther (1483-1546), German Protestant leader]
All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.
Hunter S. Thompson
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
[Edgar Allan Poe]
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
[Stendhal]
All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them.
[George Bernard Shaw]
All religions die of one disease - that of being found out.
[John Morley]
All religions have been made by men.
[Napoleon Bonaparte, letter to Gaspard Gourgaud, 28 January 1817]
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All separated from government are compatible with liberty.
[Henry Clay]
All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete personality of their intellectual powers.
[Mikhail A. Bakunin]
All religious vows, codes, and commitments are null & void herein. Please refrain from contaminating the ideosphere with harmful memes through prayer, reverence, holy books, proselytizing, prophesying, faith, speaking in tongues or spirituality. Fight the menace of second-hand faith! Humanity sincerely thanks you!
[Greg Erwin, The Nullifidian]
All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be skeptical, or at least cautious; and not to admit of any hypothesis, whatsoever; much less, of any which is supported by no appearance of probability.
[David Hume]
All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention — of barbarian invention — is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the coiled form of superstition — then read the Holy Bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such atrocity.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
[Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)]
All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.
[Simone de Beauvoir, "The Second Sex"]
All the ills from which America suffers can be traced to the teaching of evolution.
[William Jennings Bryan]
All the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable, grew, blossomed and bore fruit in this one word, Hell.
[Ingersoll]
All the other prophets came back with commandments!"
"Where they get them?"
"I … suppose they made them up."
"You get them from the same place.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
All thinking men are atheists.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible Part 2. (From Great Infidels pg. 143.)]
All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true'.
(Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent)
All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.
Hunter S. Thompson
Allegations by U.S. presidential candidate Pat Robertson that the Soviet Union has placed nuclear missiles in Cuba are 'wild fantasy,' the official Soviet news agency Tass said yesterday. 'Of course it is up to the Americans themselves to decide who will be the next occupant of the White House. But in this case we are dealing with problems concerning international security, concerning all,' Tass said. 'That is why Robertson's wild fantasy gives rise to a legitimate question: How is it that such an irresponsible politician could at all become a candidate for the presidency in such a country as the United States?'
[San Francisco Chronicle, 17 February 1988 (Chronicle Wire Services)]
Almighty God, dear heavenly Father. In Thy name let us now, in pious spirit, begin our instruction. Enlighten us, teach us all truth, strengthen us in all thatis good, lead us not into temptation, deliver us from all evil in order that, as good human beings, we may faithfully perform our duties and thereby, in time and eternity, be made truly happy. Amen.
[Mandatory secondary school prayer in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, from July-August 1995 issue of Liberty: A Magazine of Religious Freedom, published by the North American Division of the Seventh- day Adventist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland]
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisement said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.
(Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality. All proffered samples of learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to common tests. It is the essence of all dogmatic faiths to hold that any such "show-down" is sacrilegious and perverse. The characteristic of religion, from their point of view, is that it is intellectually secret, not public; peculiarly revealed, not generally known; authoritatively declared, not communicated and tested in ordinary ways…It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists, there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics where the method of free inquiry has made its way. The "religious" would be the last to be willing that either the history or the content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit.
[John Dewey, "Democracy in the Schools", 1908]
Although I cannot believe that the individual survives the death of his body, feeble souls harbor such thought through fear or ridiculous egotism.
[Albert Einstein]
Although intelligent design fits comfortably with a belief in God, it doesn't require it, because the scientific theory doesn't tell you who the designer is. While most people - including myself - will think the designer is God, some people might think that the designer was a space alien or something odd like that.
Michael Behe
Although it does not logically follow, I would claim that there is a strong case for the subjectivity of morality if there is such widespread disagreement. This is so especially if, as is the case, proponents of subjective morality can provide plausible accounts of such disagreement (social and biological evolution, psychological influences from individuals and cultures) whilst the proponents of objective morality can provide no account of such disagreement, except the rather unsatisfactory statement that we may, in the future, detect the reasons why there is such disagreement. Indeed, we may, but until we have done so, it seems as if the subjectivists have a much more convincing story to tell.
Niclas Berggren, "On the Nature of Morality" (1998)
Although it has many of religion's virtues, [science] has none of its vices. Science is based upon verifiable evidence.
Richard Dawkins
Although it is uncertain, it is necessary to make science useful. Science is only useful if it tells you about some experiment that has not been done; it is not good if it only tells you what just went on.
Richard Feynman (The Character of Physical Law)
Although Murray O-Hair did play an important role in this controversy [government-led prayer in public schools], she did not 'single-handedly' remove state-sponsored religious exercises from public schools. Other people were involved. Today the controversial Texas atheist serves as a convenient villain for Religious Right propagandists who hate religious liberty and church-state separation.
Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 227.
Although the ICR often emphasizes that it is the scientific nature of creationist theory which brings scientists to a belief in a supreme being, it is curious that they include a requirement for membership (the inerrancy of the Christian Bible) which effectively excludes Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and the majority of Christian sects (who do not accept a literal reading of all parts of the Bible) from membership. It is clear that the ICR, which is the most respected of creationist groups in its attempts to appear scientifically legitimate, is essentially an organization composed solely of Christian Fundamentalists.
Kenneth R. Miller, "Scientific Creationism versus Evolution" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 22.
Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
[Isaac Asimov, "On Religiosity", Free Inquiry]
America was founded by the refuse of the religious fanatics of England, these undesirable elements that came over on the Mayflower. Ignorant, religious fanatics who land here, abuse the Indians, and then go to bed with a board down the middle, you know, the bundling board, so they don't have sex. That's how we got started.
[Frank Zappa]
America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Hunter S. Thompson
American conservatism works from the premise that a system of economic anarchy coupled with social intolerance is the true road to liberty, freedom and fairness.
Among all mental diseases that have been systematically inoculated into the human cranium, the religious pest is the most abominable.
[Johann Most, "The God Pestilence",]
Among mammals, a virgin birth (parthenogenesis) can only produce female offspring, for chromosomal reasons. Messiahs are mammals. Therefore, Jesus was… On the other hand, among turkeys, the chromosomal situation is such that all products of virgin birth are males. So if Jesus was a male, he might also have been…" (Zindler's own punctuations)
[Frank Zindler, in a note to the debate Does god exist? with John Koster]
An agreeable opinion is accepted as true: this is the proof by pleasure (or, as the church says, the proof by strength), that all religions are so proud of, whereas they ought to be ashamed. If the belief did not make us happy, it would not be believed: how little must it then be worth!
[Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human]
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
[Samuel Butler]
An appointment is an engagement to see someone, while a morningstar is a large lump of metal used for viciously crushing skulls. It is important not to confuse the two.
(Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms)
An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.
[John McCarthy]
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
[Fulton Sheen (1895-1979)]
An attempt to give credibility to Hebrew mythology by making people believe that the the world's foremost biologists, paleontologists, and geologists are a bunch of incompetent nincompoops.
[Ron Peterson, on "creation science"]
An eartly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects.
[Martin Luther]
An engineering professor is treating her husband, a loan officer, to dinner for finally giving in to her pleas to shave off the scraggly beard he grew on vacation. His favorite restaurant is a casual place where they both feel comfortable in slacks and cotton/polyester-blend golf shirts. But, as always, she wears the gold and pearl pendant he gave her the day her divorce decree was final. They're laughing over their menus because they know he always ends up diving into a giant plate of ribs but she won't be talked into anything more fattening than shrimp." "Quiz: How many biblical prohibitions are they violating? Well, wives are supposed to be 'submissive' to their husbands (I Peter 3:1). And all women are forbidden to teach men (I Timothy 2:12), wear gold or pearls (I Timothy 2:9) or dress in clothing that 'pertains to a man' (Deuteronomy 22:5). Shellfish and pork are definitely out (Leviticus 11:7, 10) as are usury (Deuteronomy 23:19), shaving (Leviticus 19:27) and clothes of more than one fabric (Leviticus 19:19). And since the Bible rarely recognizes divorce, they're committing adultery, which carries the rather harsh penalty of death by stoning (Deuteronomy 22:22)." "So why are they having such a good time? Probably because they wouldn't think of worrying about rules that seem absurd, anachronistic or — at best — unrealistic. Yet this same modern-day couple could easily be among the millions of Americans who never hesitate to lean on the Bible to justify their own anti-gay attitudes.
[from `And Say Hi To Joyce' by lesbian columnist Deb Price]
An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.
Max Planck
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. … Most of the gods were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "Gods", 1879]
An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible.
[Russell Hoban, "Pilgermann"]
An organization that requires the suppression of facts and the discouragement of knowledge in order to maintain its supremacy, is the relic of a tyranny which our free age and our free thought are in duty bound to remove from the earth.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
And all the good you've done will soon be swept away, You've begun to matter more than the things you say
[Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Weber, Jesus Christ Superstar]
And how can we ever again succeed in educating children to become moral men and women if, in America's public schools, we consciously deny them all religious instruction, and deny them access to that primary source of morality, God's own word. The Bible is the one book from which they are expressly not allowed to be taught.
[US Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, "The City and The Crusade", Commencement Address for Christendom College, May 6, 1996]
And I want to conquer the world,
Give all the idiots a brand new religion…"
[Bad Religion]
And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.
Robert A. Wilson (Prometheus Rising, 1986)
And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.
[Adolf Hitler, speech, April 12 1922, published in "New Order"]
And it is in his own image, let us remember, that Man creates God.
[H. Havelock Ellis]
And it's not just faith itself: it's the idea that faith is a virtue and the less evidence there is, the more virtuous it is. You can actually quote, well, Tertullian for example: "It is certain because it is impossible." Sir Thomas Brown, actually seeking for more difficult things to believe, because things for which there is mere evidence are just too easy, and it's no test of his faith. In order to have a test of your faith, you must be asked to believe really daft things like the transubstantiation, you know, the blood of Christ turning into wine, and stuff… That is so manifestly absurd that you've got to be a really great believer, in the class of the Electric Monk, in order to believe it….. You're actually showing off your believing credentials by the ability to believe something like that… If it were an easy thing to believe, substantiated by facts, then it wouldn't be any great achievement.
[Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams]
And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?"
They replied,"You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed."
And Jesus replied, "What?"
And lo, Jesus did say unto the soldiers 'Not the OTHER hand. Ow shit, that hurts! You assholes!'
[2 Kinison 3:45]
And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky, Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die, Lift not thy hands to It for help Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.
[from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam trans. Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883)]
And the alcoholic bastard waved his finger at me His voice was filled with evangelical glee Sipping down his gin and tonics While preaching about the evils of narcotics And the evils of sex, and the wages of sin While he mentally fondles his next of kin…
[Danny Elfman, "Insanity"]
And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.
Thomas Jefferson
And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God.
[Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.174]
And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it is absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain because it is impossible.
Tertullian
And there shall in that time be rumours of things going astray, and there will be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia work base, that has an attachment they will not be there. At this time a friend shall lose his friends's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before …
[Prophet in Monty Python's, "Life of Brian"]
And we are called upon to worship such a God; to get upon our knees and tell him that he is good, that he is merciful, that he is just, that he is love. We are asked to stifle every noble sentiment of the soul, and to trample under foot all the sweet charities of the heart. Because we refuse to stultify ourselves — refuse to become liars — we are denounced, hated, traduced and ostracized here, and this same god threatens to torment us in eternal fire the moment death allows him to fiercely clutch our naked helpless souls. Let the people hate, let the god threaten — we will educate them, and we will despise and defy the god.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
And what if we picked the wrong religion? Every week, we're just making God madder and madder!
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
Another meme of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
[Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene"]
Another point important to recognize is that the creation was 'mature' from its birth. It did not have to grow or develop from simple beginnings. God formed it full-grown in every respect, including even Adam and Eve as mature individuals when they were first formed. The whole universe had an 'appearance of age' right from the start. It could not have been otherwise for true creation to have taken place. 'Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them' (Genesis 2:1).
Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism, (General edition, second edition, El Cajon, CA: Master, 1985), p. 210.
Another possible danger is that in presenting the gospel to the lost and in defending God's truth we ourselves will seem to be false. It is time for Christian people to recognize that the defense of this modern, young-Earth, Flood-geology creationism is simply not truthful. It is simply not in accord with the facts that God has given. Creationism must be abandoned by Christians before harm is done. The persistent attempt of the creationist movement to get their points of view established in educational institutions can only bring harm to the Christian cause. Can we seriously expect non-Christian educational leaders to develop a respect for Christianity if we insist on teaching the brand of science that creationism brings with it? Will not the forcing of modern creationism on the public simply lend credence to the idea already entertained by so many intellectual leaders that Christianity, at least in its modern form, is sheer anti-intellectual obscurantism? I fear that it will.
[Christianity and the Age of the Earth, by Davis Young, Zondervan 1982. p. 163.]
Anti-abortionists believe that life begins at the moment you agree with them.
[Saturday Night Live]
Anti-intellectualism among millenarians and Bible Literalists is a recurrent phenomenon, but no other religious movement in America ever has been as programatically set against its intellect as are Jehovah's Witnesses. The Fundamentalist majority wing of the Southern Baptist Convention are devotees of pure reason compared to Jehovah's Witnesses.
[Harold Bloom, The American Religion, pg. 162]
Antichrist is the pope and the Turk [Muslim] together. A beast full of life must have a body and soul. The spirit or soul of Antichrist is the pope, his flesh or body the Turk.
[Martin Luther, Table Talk]
Any belief worth having must survive doubt.
Any Latter-day Saint who denounces or opposes, whether actively or otherwise, any plan or doctrine advocated by the 'prophets, seers, and revelators' of the Church is cultivating the spirit of apostasy. Lucifer….wins a great victory when he can get members of the Church to speak against their leaders and to 'do their own thinking'…. "When our leaders speak, the thinking had been done. When they propose a plan — it is God's plan. When they point the way, there is no other which is safe. When they give direction, it should mark the end of controversy.
[Mormon Elder Boyd K. Packer, The Improvement Era, June 1945, pg. 354]
Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.
[Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 171]
Anyone who asserted wrong teachings, anyone serving the devil or his demons, earned instead an equally remarkable antagonism. In their official high meetings together, Christians thus could not keep their own disagreements within the bounds of civil language; their continual quarrels required the intervention of the civil authorities; and all this was well known and noted by friends and foes alike.
[Ramsay MacMullen, "Christianizing the Roman Empire", p.92]
Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything… just give him time to rationalize it.
[Robert A. Heinlein, "JOB: A Comedy of Justice"]
Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 166.
Appointed. The Rev. Lloyd John Ogilvie, 64, Presbyterian minister, to the post of Chaplain of the U.S. Senate. Currently senior pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, California, Ogilvie is also host of a daily radio show and a weekly TV program, Let God Love You. His new job will pay $115,700 a year in taxpayer dollars.
[Time magazine, 6 February 1995]
Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here).
Richard Dawkins
Archbishop: A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
[H.L. Mencken]
Are there any heinous sins being committed today that could again fan the flames of God's righteous anger to the scorching point? Is there any need in today's world for men of the stamp of Phinehas? Could the bold daring of Cozbi and Zimri in parading before Moses as he wept over sin have any modern parallels? The righteous zeal of Phinehas did not permit him to stay his hand long enough to even ask Moses or the church leaders of the wisdom of his action. If any similar zeal be found among us today, occasion to exercise it will not be lacking.
[Paul J. Hill, Should We Defend Born And Unborn Children With Force?, 1993, Defensive Action, Pensacola, FL, p. 4]
Are we to infer from this that the world was made by a Creator? Certainly not, if we are to adhere to the cannons of valid scientific inference. There is no reason whatever why the universe should not have begun spontaneously, except that it seems odd that it should do so; but there is no law of nature to the effect that things which seem odd to us must not happen. To infer a Creator is to infer a cause, and causal inferences are only admissable in science when they proceed from observed causal laws. Creation out of nothing is an occurrence which has not been observed. There is, therefore, no better reason to suppose that the world was caused by a Creator than to suppose that it was uncaused; either equally contradicts the causal laws that we can observe.
Bertrand Russell, "Science and Religion" (1931) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 177-78.
Are you a physicist?"
"Me? I don't know anything about science!"
"Marvellous! Ideal qualification!
(Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead)
Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of a new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.
Francis Bacon
Aristotle once said, "Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth." So we say, "The Bible is dear, but dearer still is truth.
[J. Frank Schulman, in UU pamphlet "UU views of the Bible."]
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.
[J.S. Bullion, Jr., U.S. freethinker, writer]
Arms races probably account for the spectacularly advanced engineering of eyes, ears, brains, bat "radar" and all the other high-tech weaponry that animals display.
Richard Dawkins
Article I Section 16 FREE EXERCISE OF RELIGION; NO ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION. That religion or the duty which we owe to our creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not be force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other. No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or effect their civil capacities. And the General Assembly shall not prescribe any religious test whatever, or confer any particular privileges or advantages on any sect or denomination, or pass any law requiring or authorizing any religious society, or the people of any district within this Commonwealth, to levy on themselves or other, any tax for the erection or repair of any house of public worship, or for the support of any church or ministry, but it shall be left free to every person to select his religious instructor, and to make for his support such a private contract as he shall please.
[Current Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia]
As "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make one drink," so also, "You can drag a Christian to the truth, but you can't make one think.
[Delmar Coughlin]
As a literary monument the Bible is of much later origin than the Vedas; as a work of literary value it is surpassed by everything written in the last two thousand years by authors even of the second rank, and to compare it seriously with the productions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe would require a fantacized mind that had entirely lost its power of judgment. Its conception of the universe is childish, and its morality revolting, as revealed in the malicious vengeance attributed to God in the OT and in the New, the parable of the laborers of the eleventh hour and the episodes of Mary Magdelene and the woman taken in adultery.
[Max Nordau]
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.
[Bhagavad Gita
[The Lord's Song] (250 B.C.-A.D. 250)]
As a math atheist, I should be excused from this.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
As a methodology for research, science adopts as its cardinal postulate (proved fruitful by its enormous success since the time of Galileo, Newton and Descartes) the commitment to explain empirical phenomena by reference to invariant laws of nature and to avoid appeals to the miraculous, defined as a suspension of those laws for particular events. The notion of 'abrupt appearance,' the origin of complex somethings from previous nothings, resides in this domain of miracle and is not part of science.
Stephen Jay Gould
As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.
[Anita Bryant, 1977]
As an active Humanist for almost fifty years, I am astonished at the wild statements of LaHaye and Wine. Humanists have unfortunately remained a minority in the United States. The American Humanist Association has never had more than 6,000 members, and that number at present is approximately 3,000. The AHA has no more than half a hundred small chapters throughout the country. Of course, there is quite a large number of Humanists who do not belong to the AHA, and multitudes more who do not realize they are Humanists and multitudes more who do not even know the word. Our philosophy (or religion) does wield considerable does wield considerable influence throughout the civilized world; Humanists would indeed rejoice if it possessed the powers ascribed to it by the Moral Majority.
Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Seventh ed., New York: Continuum, 1990), p. x.
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
M. Cartmill
As Christians try to force prayer into public schools, they often settle for a 'moment of silence.' But that supposedly innocuous 'moment of silence' is a deafening roar to a nonbeliever.
Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 163.
As Darwin so convincingly argued, there are many details which his hypothesis explains while that of special creation does not.
J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 140.
As for the demented, I hold it certain that all beings deprived of reason are thus afflicted only by the Devil.
[Martin Luther]
As for the future, your task is not to foresee, but to enable it.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Wisdom of the Sands
As I argued in "Beloved Son", a book about my son Brian and the subject of religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction in the methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless conversions — to anything — less likely. Brian now realizes this and has, after eleven years, left the sect he was associated with. The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy — and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational — the powers of reason are suprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind.
[Steve Allen]
As I told Newsweek, human evolution is not my scientific specialty, so I'm not willing to offer my scientific opinion about whether human beings are descended from apes. I happen to believe for theological reasons that human beings couldn't have evolved from apes, but I don't think that there is solid scientific evidence for such a conclusion, so I don't think that we should teach it in schools, and in any case it is not part of the scientific theory of intelligent design. Those who cite the genetic similarity of human beings and apes as scientific evidence for their common ancestry are no better off than I am, since they find the inference compelling only because they are in the grips of an ideology—naturalism—that is in truth no more scientific than my theological beliefs. Indeed, what we should be telling students is that human beings and apes are genetically similar, but there is a scientific controversy about what accounts for that similarity: common ancestry or common design.
Stephen Meyer, Discovery Institute
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?
[John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816]
As in 1925, creationists are not battling for religion. They have been disowned by leading church men of all persuasions, for they debase religion even more than they misconstrue science. They are a motley collection to be sure, but their core of practical support lies with the evangelical right, and creationism is a mere stalking horse or subsidiary issue in a political program…The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the 'liberal' rhetoric of 'equal time'.
[Stephen J Gould]
As it happens, Josephus, who mentions John the Baptist, does not mention Jesus. There is, to be sure, a paragraph in his history of the Jews which is devoted to Jesus, but it interrupts the flow of the discourse and seems suspiciously like an afterthought. Scholars generally believe this to have been an insertion by some early Christian editor who, scandalized that Joesphus should talk of the period without mentioning the Messiah, felt the insertion to be a pious act.
[Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Guide To The Bible ISBN 0-517-34582-X]
As long as man believes the Bible to be infallible, that book is his master. The civilization of this century is not the child of faith, but of unbelief — the result of free thought.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.
[J. Robert Oppenheimer, Life, 10 October 1949]
As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.
[Voltaire]
As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. The bible was not written by a woman. Within its leaves there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (1841)]
As nations improve, so do their gods.
[G. C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799) German physicist, writer]
As nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it must clearly follow that miracles are only intelligible as a relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle.
[Benedict Spinoza, Ethica ordine geometrica demonstrata]
As our ever growing conservative ideology rushes us down the road of selfishness, intolerance, bigotry, and petty hatreds, the only thing the Religious Right has done about it is to raise the speed limit.
As Pastor X slips out of bed He puts a neat disguise on That halo round his priestly head Is merely his horizon.
[Piet Hein, 1966]
As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power….
[Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica,Q92, art. 1, Reply Obj. 1]
As set forth by theologians, the idea of "God" is an argument that assumes its own conclusions, and proves nothing.
[Johann Most (c. 1890), popular anarchist speaker]
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
Noam Chomsky (1928 - ), in a television interview
As soon as you are willing to discard observational data because it conflicts with religion, you are giving up any hope of ever really understanding the universe. As soon as you pick religion as the touchstone of reality, then we have to start discussing how one can demonstrate the correctness of one religion over another when different religions disagree.
[Wilson Heydt (whheydt@PacBell.COM)]
As the caterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
[William Blake, from "Proverbs of Hell"]
As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree" — probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
[Woody Allen]
As to the common people, … one has to be hard with them and see that they do their work and that under the threat of the sword and the law they comply with the observance of piety, just as you chain up wild beasts.
[Martin Luther]
As to the existence of God, I’m dumb enough to not know, but I’m at least smart enough to understand no one else does either.
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, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 8
As will be all too evident, when we examine the creationists' position in detail, their arguments are devoid of any real intellectual content. Creationists win debates because of their canny stage presence, and not through clarity of logic or force of evidence. The debates are shows rather than serious considerations of evolution."
To the extent that creationism is science, of course, it is merely bad science. Mostly, it isn't science at all." (p21)
Creationists seek to dilute the science curriculum with the equivalent of medical quackery." (p22)
Students ought to know that the evidence for evolution has been scrupulously scrutinized daily by thousands of biologists for well over a hundred years — and no one yet has called a press conference trumpeting his new proof that evolution had NOT occurred. Evolution is as well-established a scientific notion as gravity. A student ought to know that." (p23)
For 'creation-science' isn't science at all nor have creation 'scientists' managed to come up with a single intellectually compelling, scientifically testable statement about the natural world." (p80)
The Monkey Business, Niles Eldredge, 1982
As with the Christian religion, the worst argument for socialism is its adherents.
[H.G. Wells]
Asking about a time before the beginning of our spherical spacetime is like asking what lies north of the North Pole. There is no such thing.
Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
Assuming that he believes at all, the everday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.
[Nietzsche, "Human, All too Human"]
At a recent PTL convention, the hotel reported that over 80% of the conventionites watched at least one x-rated movie on the hotel's ppv cable…
At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs. It has nothing to do with time periods, whether three days, forty days, or fifty days. It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension.
Bishop John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 12.
At Poltersberg, there is a lake similarly cursed. If you throw a stone into it, a dreadful storm immediately arises, and the whole neighboring district quakes to its centre. 'Tis the devils kept prisoner there.
[Martin Luther]
At several points in his critiques, Craig makes things easy for himself by supposing that Davies, Hawking and Grünbaum must demonstrate that he—Craig—ought to give up his belief in the soundness of the argument; when, in fact, all that Davies, Hawking and Grünbaum need to show is that there is no good, non-question-begging, reason for them to be persuaded that the arguments which Craig offers are sound. What is at issue is a choice between two quite different kinds of models of the origins of the universe; if it turns out that there are no suitably independent reasons for preferring Craig's favoured theistic model, then there is sufficient justification for those who wish to pursue alternatives.
Graham Oppy, "Professor William Craig's Criticisms of Critiques of Kalam Cosmological Arguments By Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, And Adolf Grünbaum" (1995)
At Sussen, the Devil carried off, last Good Friday, three grooms who had devoted themselves to him.
[Martin Luther]
At the age of eighteen … I read Mill's Autobiography, where I found a sentence to the effect that his father taught him that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question 'Who made God?'. This led me to abandon the 'First Cause' argument, and to become an atheist. Throughout the long period of religious doubt, I had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual loss of belief, but when the process was completed, I found to my surprise that I was quite glad to be done with the whole subject.
[Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, chap. 2]
At the birth of a boy all are joyful, but at the birth of a girl all are sad
[Talmud, Niddah 31]
At the bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
[Sigmund Freud]
At the deathbed of Christianity.— Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead - that is the best and most vital thing that still remains of Christianity. But one should notice that Christianity has thus crossed over into a gentle moralism: it is not so much 'God, freedom and immortality' that have remained, as benevolence and decency of disposition, and the belief that in the whole universe too benevolence and decency of disposition prevail: it is the euthanasia of Christianity.
[Nietzsche, Daybreak, s. 92]
At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
At the time of its Founding, the United States seemed to be an infertile ground for religion. Many of the nation's leaders - include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin - were not Christians, did not accept the authority of the Bible, and were hostile to organized religion. The attitude of the general public was one of apathy: in 1776, only 5 percent of the population were participating members of churches.
[Ian Robertson, Sociology, 3rd editions, Worth Publishing Inc.: New York, 1987, page 410]
Atheism deprives superstition of its stand ground, & compels Theism to reason for its existence.
[George Jacob Holyoake]
Atheism does not entail the theory of evolution, and evolution does not entail atheism. Many theists are evolutionists. They believe that god has guided evolution. So of what use is an attack on evolution when the target is atheism? Zacharias seems to think that if he can show that belief in evolution is unwarranted that this shows that the "atheistic" worldview is untenable as a whole. Perhaps this is the "existential" hurdle mentioned earlier. But that approach is doomed. Even if the theory of evolution could be shown to be false, this would not affect atheism. True, one who rejects supernatural explanations would want a naturalistic explanation of human origins, but there could be any number of other naturalistic explanations of human origins besides evolution.
Doug Krueger, "That Colossal Wreck"
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
George Carlin
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, ATHALFLB@AOL.COM]
Atheism is the world of reality, it is reason, it is freedom. Atheism is human concern, and intellectual honesty to a degree that the religious mind cannot begin to understand. And yet it is more than this. Atheism is not an old religion, it is not a new and coming religion, in fact it is not, and never has been, a religion at all. The definition of Atheism is magnificent in its simplicity: Atheism is merely the bed-rock of sanity in a world of madness.
[Atheism: An Affirmative View, by Emmett F. Fields]
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.
[Francis Bacon]
Atheism makes sense for America.
Atheist: A person who believes in one less god than you do.
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologist]
Atheistic apathy is likely to be encouraged when it is noted that Alvin Plantinga — the finest of theistic philosophers, in my view — expends vast labors of logic to prove that theism, at best, can only claim to break even with atheism.
Keith M. Parsons, God and the Burden of Proof, p. 147.
Atheists are now here to stay. We are ready to take over the culture and move it ahead for the benefit of all mankind. 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.
[Madalyn O'Hair, "Atheists: The Last Minority"]
Atheists are often charged with blasphemy, but it is a crime they cannot commit… When the Atheist examines, denouces, or satirises the gods, he is not dealing with persons but with ideas. He is incapable of insulting God, for he does not admit the existence of any such being… We attack not a person but a belief, not a being but an idea, not a fact but a fancy.
[G.W. Foote, "Who are the Blasphemers?" in Flowers of Freethought]
Attaching a Creator to the boundary is metaphysical skullduggery.
Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our own ignorance about ourselves.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
Babble about 'The wages of sin' serves to cover up 'the sin of wages'. We want rights, not rites — sex, not sects. Only Eros and Eris belong in our pantheon. Surely the Nazarene necrophile has had his revenge by now. Remember, pain is just God's way of hurting you.
[Bob Black, "The Abolition of Work"]
Bart: What religion are you?
Homer: You know, the one with all the well-meaning rules that don't work out in real life. Uh… Christianity.
The Simpsons
Bart: Why the crap do we have to go to church anyway?
Marge: You just answered your own question with that commode mouth. Besides, you kids need to learn morals and decency and how to love your fellow man.
[in church]
Lovejoy: And with flaming swords, the Aromites did pierce the eyes of their fellow men and did feast on what flowed forth. Among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh…
The Simpsons
Basically, there were two sides to the world. There was the entire computer games software industry engaged in a tremendous effort to stamp out piracy, and there was Wobbler. Currently, Wobbler was in front.
(Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind)
Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.
[Pearl S. Buck, Advice to Unborn Novelists]
Be not misled by reports or tradition or common opinion. Be not misled by proficiency in the scriptures, nor by speculation and conclusions, nor by attractive theories and favorite ideas, nor by impressions of personal merits (of the teacher) and not by the authority of some master. But rather, Kalamas, when you discern yourselves: these things are unprofitable, these things are blameworthy, these things are censured by the wise; these things, when performed and undertaken are conducive to misfortune and sorrow, indeed do you then reject them." "…And when you discern yourselves: these things are profitable, these things are not blameworthy, these things are praised by the wise; these things, when performed and undertaken are conducive to good fortune and happiness, indeed do you then accept them.
[G. Buddha, from the Anguttara Nikaya]
Be sure to understand than when you hear the word statist or statism you are communicating with a Looneytarian; the most selfish sentient species this side of the Milky Way.
Before the year 2000, the Christian Coalition will be the most powerful organization in America.
[Pat Robertson]
Being omnipotent means not only 'never having to say you're sorry' but also never having to say how, that is, being able to get away with being just an idea man.
Richard M. Gale, "Some Difficulties in Theistic Treatments of Evil" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 211.
Being unable to reason is not a positive character trait outside religion.
[Dewey Henize]
Belief in gods and belief in ghosts is identical. God is taken as a more respectable word than ghost, but it means no more.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
[Edward Abbey]
Belief is an obsolete Aristotelian category.
Dr. Jack Sarfatti, physicist
Belief means not wanting to know what is true.
[Nietzche, The Anti-Christ, 1889]
Beliefs, including religious ones, are learned. Which makes atheism a normal state of affairs and religious beliefs a learned "abnormality". No psychological theory is necessary to explain the causes of a normal base state. Any psychological theory of learning, attitude change or socialisation can explain the causes of religious belief.
[Rosemary Lyndall, clinical Neuro-psychologist]
Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than thinkers.
[Bruce Calvert]
Better be late to church Sunday morning than late at home Saturday night.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Better sleep with a sober cannibal that a drunken Christian.
[Herman Melville]
Beware of the man of one book.
Thomas Aquinas
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
[George Bernard Shaw]
Biblical higher criticism "is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer. So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand. In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance."
Bishop John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 12.
Bill Clinton does not inhale marijuana, right? You bet. Like I chew on LSD but I don't swallow it.
Hunter S. Thompson
Bill Clinton was a wonderful father and a great president, but he isn’t such a good husband, and in these times, two out of three ain’t bad.
Billy Graham is the chief servant of Satan in America.
[Jerry Falwell]
Blacks in America are judged by the worst of their race, putting them all on the primary suspect list.
Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense.
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 5, p. 49]
Blessings on the man who first dared to doubt.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
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.
[Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene"]
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 6.
Born again?! No, I'm not. Excuse me for getting it right the FIRST time.
[Dennis Miller]
Both the view that God created the universe 100 years ago and, for reasons beyond our ken, deceived us in doing that and the view that there are reasons beyond our ken that would justify God, if he exists, in allowing all the suffering we see are like the view that there are blue crows beyond our powers of observation. Once we have conducted the relevant search for crows (looking all over the world in different seasons and at crows at different stages of maturity), we are justified in virtue of that search in believing there are no crows beyond our powers of observation which are relevantly different from the crows we've seen. If after the relevant search we weren't justified in believing that, then we would have to remain skeptical about all generalizations about crows. … Similarly, once we have conducted the relevant search search for moral reasons to justify allowing the relevant suffering (thinking hard about how allowing the suffering would be needed to realize sufficiently weighty goods, reading and talking to others who have thought about the same problem), we are justified in believing that there are no morally sufficient reasons for allowing that suffering.
Bruce Russell, "Defenseless" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 197.
Bound by a common theology and the spreading sensation that their number is great and their time and leader have come, the Rev. Pat Robertson's fellow Pentecostal and charismatic evangelists are stirring to his still-unannounced quest for the Republican nomination for the presidency. … Robertson is the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and a regular commentator on its '700 Club.' … It is a quickening that the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who is supporting Vice President George Bush, said was the beginning of 'a mighty army.' … No preacher has ever tried to summon this latent religious army to his own political cause. … In the last two weeks, however, Robertson has persuaded two evangelists, [Jimmy] Swaggert of Louisiana and Oral Roberts of Oklahoma, both of whom are Pentacostals, to give him emotional public endorsements. The evangelist Rex Humbard sat on stage with him at Constitution Hall in Washington last week, and the camera picked him out as Robertson announced to a national audience on a satellite telecast that 3 million signatures on a petition would persuade him to declare for the nomination. Evangelist Jim Bakker of North Carolina, in response to a reporter's inquiry, gave a mild reply: 'I would have no problems standing with him. My feeling is that our viewers would welcome his candidacy.' … Robertson, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, is a charismatic. Unlike other evangelicals who also believe that the Bible is true and that one must be reborn to experience salvation, Pentecostal churches such as the Assemblies of God and charismatic Christians of any denomination share an additional theology. It is a belief in the 'gifts' of the spirit, the abilities to heal and work other miracles through faith, to speak in tongues, to discern the will of God.
[Dudley Clendinen, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 October 1986]
Burn the libraries, for their value is in this one book (the Koran).
[Omar I, 2nd Caliph, at the capture of Alexandria]
Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.
Hunter S. Thompson
Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no other endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure.
[Harvard Lamphoon, "Doon" (paraphrase)]
But 'chance' is only a word invented by humans to conceal our ignorance. If we perfectly understood all the laws of motion, we could infallibly predict whether a coin will come down heads or tails. A Christian believes that God does perfectly understand His own laws and knows which side up the coin will land, but Epicureans and neo-Darwinists believe that nobody knows!
Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 85.
But before we consider the Gospels individually, two further special difficulties have to be mentioned. First they cannot be checked effectively from other sources. The assistance provided by pagan literature, in particular, is meagre indeed. References to the Christians in Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the younger are a good deal later, and in any case they throw little or no light on the life of Jesus himself. The Jewish evidence, too, notably in the Talmud, comes from a subsequent period, and some of the Talmud passages are based on Christian sources, so that they carry no independent weight.
Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (New York: Collier, 1977), p. 183.
But could the divine command theorist hold, as some theologians have, that God's will is restricted by His own nature or character? For example, it has been claimed that God's nature is unalterably loving and just, and hence that God cannot violate his nature by performing and unloving or unjust act. Notice, however, that this view places the ultimate source of moral value outside of God's will, in his unalterable nature or character; from this perspective, it is God's inability to will acts contrary to His loving nature which guarantees the goodness of His commands. Thus, to place restrictions on God's will is to admit that something outside of His will determines what is right. So, the 'unalterable nature' approach is not open to the divine command theorist.
C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 40.
But even with these conservative assumptions, the time taken to evolve a fish eye from fiat skin was minuscule: fewer than 400,000 generations. For the kinds of small animals we are talking about, we can assume one generation per year, so it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye.
Richard Dawkins
But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.
[Bakunin, God and the State (1874)]
But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not mind; this short life counts for too little in their eyes.
[Jean Jacques Rousseau, Contrat Social (The Social Contract)]
But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner depravity and care for ones salvation - all concepts originating in nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration.
[Nietzsche, from Human, all too Human, s.27]
But in the present state of psychology and physiology, belief in immortality can, at any rate, claim no support from science, and such arguments as are possible on the subject point to the probable extinction of personality at death. We may regret the thought that we shall not survive, but is a comfort to think that all the persecutors and Jew-baiters and humbugs will not continue to exist for all eternity. We may be told that they would improve in time, but I doubt it.
Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 108-09.
But it is neither as God nor as a man that Jesus must be regarded, but as a myth. No such person ever lived either as a human or divine existence. He is simply a creature of fancy, the fruit of the imagination. He is a character of the brain, the creation of religious genius.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
But it is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct"
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes—the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.
Richard Dawkins
But knowledge of Jesus was limited to knowledge of Christianity; that is, had Jesus' adherents not started a movement that spread to Rome, Jesus would not have made it into Roman histories at all. The consequence is that we do not have what we would very much like, a comment in Tacitus or another Gentile writer that offers independent evidence about Jesus, his life and his death.
E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 50.
But LaHaye, Wine, Falwell, and their associates magnify beyond all reason the control Humanism exerts. In my view the Moral Majority is a demagogic assembly of religious fanatics and, like demagogic politicians, needs a demonic scapegoat to rally its followers and to provide a simple, one-word solution for the serious problems disrupting America and the world. The Moral Majority has chosen the social-minded Humanists as its target and aims to destroy them. This malicious campaign is not unlike the wild witchhunt against Communism and alleged Communists in the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Seventh ed., New York: Continuum, 1990), pp. x-xi.
But might not one suppose as some have supposed, that the feeling which is observed in animated bodies, might belong to a being distinct from the matter of these bodies, to a substance of a different nature united to them? Does the light of reason allow us in good faith to admit such conjectures? We know in bodies only matter, and we observe the faculty of feeling only in bodies: on what foundation then can we erect an ideal being, disowned by all our knowledge?
[Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) "The Natural History of the Soul" (1742)]
But of course there were the rules. Everyone knew there were rules. They just had to hope like Hell that the gods knew the rules, too.
(Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)
But perhaps the rest if us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
Richard Dawkins
But the argument is still unsound, because the first premise is false: there are other unmentioned alternatives, for example, that Jesus as described in the gospels is a legendary figure, so that the trilemma is false as it stands.
William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p. 39.
But the likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition—into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.
Richard Dawkins
But we need now to move into organization. We developed and have developed this fantastic computer model where we can identify all the voters in a particular area. We can give people maps. They can look precisely at who people are by issues. It's very sophisticated and it will get more so. So we can put into your hands weapons that are incredible.
Pat Robertson, Sept 13, 1997
But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something — it doesn't matter what — in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. It is this that makes the often-parroted claim that 'evolution itself is a matter of faith' so silly. People believe in evolution not because they arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 198.
But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birthcontrol, otherwise the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.
Richard Dawkins
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 45.
By itself, 1 Corinthians 15 just wouldn't mean much. He wants the appearances of 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 to be read as if they had in parentheses after them 'See Luke 24; Matthew 28; John 21.'
Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"
By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic credentials (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) who give credence to creation-science, the general theory that complex life forms did not evolve but appeared "abruptly.
[Newsweek, June 29, 1987, pg. 23]
By the cold and religious we were taken in hand - shown how to feel good; and told to feel bad.
[Roger Waters, from The Final Cut (Pink Floyd)]
By the efforts of these infidels, the name of God was left out of the Constitution of the United States. They knew that if an infinite being was put in, no room would be left for the people. They knew that if any church was made the mistress of the state, that mistress, like all others, would corrupt, weaken, and destroy.
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 3, p. 382]
By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
Alan Kay
By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God…
[Gloria Steinem, Saturday Review of Education, March 1973]
By their own words, therefore, creation-scientists admit that they appeal to phenomena not covered or explicable by any laws that humans can grasp as laws. It is not simply that the pertinent laws are not yet known. Creative processes stand outside law as humans know it (or could know it) on Earth — at least there is no way that scientists can know Mendel's law through observation and experiment. Even if God did use His own laws, they are necessarily veiled from us forever in this life, because Genesis says nothing of them.
Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1996), p. 359.
C.S. Lewis is certainly right to suppose that in considering the question of whether miracles exist there is a danger that one will appear to a priori arguments and assumptions. But the solution to this problem is not to decide on naturalism or supernaturalism beforehand. Rather, one must attempt to reject the a priori arguments and instead base one's position on inductive considerations. Lewis has not shown that this is impossible. Thus he has not shown that one must choose between naturalism and supernaturalism before investigating the possibility of miracles.
Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 193.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
[Indian proverb]
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
Hunter S. Thompson
Calvin : "Do you really think Bogeymen exist?"
Hobbes : "I'm not sure, but if they do, I think this is where they live…"
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Calvin : I think we have got enough information now, don't you?
Hobbes : All we have is one "fact" that you made up.
Calvin : That's plenty. By the time we add an introduction, a few illustrations and a conclusion, it'll look like a graduate thesis.
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
Calvin : You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
Hobbes : What mood is that?
Calvin : Last-minute panic.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Calvin founded a little theocracy, modeled after the Old Testament, and succeeded in erecting the most detestable government that ever existed, except the one from which it was copied.
["Heretics and Heresies",Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 226]
Calvin: "Know what I pray for?"
Hobbes: "What?"
Calvin: "The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can't, and the incapacity to tell the difference.
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
Calvin: Do you believe in the devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man?
Hobbes: I'm not sure that man needs the help.
Bill Watterson
Calvin: I'm a genius, but I'm a misunderstood genius.
Hobbes: What's misunderstood about you?
Calvin: Nobody thinks I'm a genius.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Calvin: Our top-secret club, G.R.O.S.S.— Get Rid Of Slimy girlS!
Susie: Slimy girls?!
Calvin: I know that's redundant, but otherwise it doesn't spell anything.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Careful. We don't want to learn from this.
Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes"
Catholics and Protestants are fighting with one another… while the enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom is laughing up his sleeve.
[Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.309]
CEE is opposed to censoring such things as the true Christian history of our nation and the scientific evidence that renders macro-evolution impossible. Both of these have been extensively censored. We do support rejection or removal of obscene, morbid and unhealthy materials.
[David Muralt, Texas Director of Citizens for Excellence in Education, from Feb. 7, 1994 Austin American-Statesman]
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
Richard Dawkins
Certainly the affirmative pursuit of one's convictions about the ultimate mystery of the universe and man's relation to it is placed beyond the reach of law. Government may not interfere with organized or individual expressions of belief or disbelief. Propagation of belief — or even of disbelief — in the supernatural is protected, whether in church or chapel, mosque or synagogue, tabernacle or meeting-house.
[Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court justice, majority decision, Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, 1940]
Chads are falling out! Republicans scream. Chads are suppose to fall out you Boneheads! Rack screams back.
Chain letters," said the Tyrant. "The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain — the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Chalma, Mexico. At least 41 Indian pilgrims, most of them elderly women and children, were trampled to death yesterday in a crush of worshipers heading through a narrow marketplace to church for this town's Ash Wednesday celebration. … Chalma, about 35 miles southwest of Mexico City, is famous for its gold-trimmed church and the Father of Chalma image of Christ that is said to perform miracles.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 14 February 1991 (Los Angeles Times)]
Changes in the educational levels of the general population in recent years appear to account for much of the variance in biblical beliefs over time. The current proportion of biblical literalists is 32%, only half of what it was in 1963, when 65% of Americans said they believed in the absolute truth of all words in the Bible and that it represented the actual word of God. Belief in inerrancy is most likely to be found among people who did not complete high school (58%), and least likely among college graduates (29%).
[One Nation Under God, (1993) Barry A. Kosmin & Seymour P. Lachman. pg. 268]
Charles Robert Darwin stands among the giants of Western thought because he convinced a majority of his peers that all of life shares a single, if complex, history. He taught us that we can understand life's history in purely naturalistic terms, without recourse to the supernatural or divine.
Niles Eldredge
Children are naive—they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.
Frank Zappa
Christ came, and Christianity arose…But originating in Judaism, which knew woman only as a being bereft of all rights, and biased by the Biblical conception which saw in her the source of all evil, Christianity preached contempt for women.
[August Bebel, "Woman and Socialism"]
Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?
Jules Feiffer
Christ rode on an ass, but now asses ride on Christ.
[Heine]
Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.
[Soren Kierkegaard, Time magazine, 16 December 1946]
Christian doctrine was shredded to pieces by biblical scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the information didn't get out to the bulk of people beyond the academic world. With the Information Age, this will all change.
[Farrell Till, The Skeptical Review]
Christian faith is a habit of flouting reason in forming and maintaining one's answer to the question whether there is a god. Its essence is the determination to believe that there is a god no matter what the evidence may be.
Richard Robinson, "Religion and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 121.
Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life.
[Andrew Lias]
Christian Liberalism: The doctrine that there may be an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about baby seals but doesn't give a damn about my sex life.
Christian piety makes a strange image of the object of its devotion, "Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." -Him-. The bearded moralist with the stern, kind, and vaguely hurt look in his eyes. The man with the lantern, knocking at the heart's door. "Come along, now, boys! Enough of this horsing around! It's time you and I had a very serious talk." Christ Jesus our Lord. Jeez-us. Jeez-you. The Zen Buddhists say, "Wash out your mouth every time you say 'Buddha!'" The new life for Christianity begins just as soon as someone can get up in church and say, "Wash out your mouth every time you say 'Jesus!'
[Alan Watts]
Christian Science repudiates the evidences of the senses and rests upon the supremacy of God. Christian healing . . . places no faith in hygiene or drugs; it reposes all faith in mind, in spiritual power divinely directed.
[Mary Baker Eddy, on Christian Science "healing"]
Christian soldiers armed with virtue- hearts afire with blind obsession, cannot see the difference 'twixt compassion and oppression.
[Sabbat, "The Clerical Conspiracy"]
Christian theology has taught men that they should submit with unintelligent resignation to the worst real evils of life and waste their time in consideration of imaginary evils in "the life to come.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Christian theology is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is opposed to every other form of rational thinking.
[H. L. Mencken]
Christian, n.: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
[Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
Christian: I'll pray for you.
Atheist: Then I'll think for both of us.
Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the heart; but now it has to burden the heart first, in order to lighten it afterward. Consequently it will perish.
[Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human, s.119]
Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind dying, came to a tranmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the Church; the Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of Christian literature and ritual; the Greek mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the Mass. Other pagan cultures contributed to the syncretist result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the Last Judgement, and a personal immortality of reward and punishment; from Egypt the adoration of the Mother and Child, and the mystic theosophy that made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the Christian creed; there, too, Christian moanasticism would find itsw exemplars and its source. From Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the resurrection drama of Adonis; from Thrace, perhaps the cult of Dionysus, the dying and saving god. From Persia came millennarianism, the "ages of the world," the "final conflagration," the dualism of Satan and God, of Darkness and Light; already in the Forth Gospel Christ is the "Light shining in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out." The Mithraic ritual so closely resemled the eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass that Christian fathers charged the Devil with inventing these similarities to mislead frail minds. Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.
[Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization]
Christianity exceeds all other faiths in its power to deform and finally invert the mental process.
[Ida White]
Christianity faces no greater enemy than the age of information.
["Psycho" Dave, Psycho0@ix.netcom.com]
Christianity has done it's utmost to close the circle and declare even doubt to be a sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature - is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on it's origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.
[Nietsche, "Daybreak"]
Christianity inculcates the necessity of supplicating the Deity. Prayer may be considered under two points of view; -as an endeavor to change the intentions of God, or as a formal testimony of our obedience. But the former case supposes that the caprices of a limited intelligence can occasionally instruct the Creator of the world how to regulate the universe; and the latter, a certain degree of servility analogous to the loyalty demanded by earthly tyrants. Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.
[Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Queen Mab"]
Christianity is a black spot on the page of civilization.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristrocracy.
[R.J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionist theologian, from _The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism In America_, published by ADL]
Christianity is like a slow clock — always being moved ahead.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Christianity is not a religion; it's an industry.
Christianity is not a religion; it's an industry.
Unknown
Christianity is the enemy of liberty & civilization
[August Bebel]
Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization.
August Bebel
Christianity makes suffering contagious.
[Friedrich Nietszche]
Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
Thomas Jefferson, February 10, 1814
Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness.
[C.S. Lewis, Mere Xtianity]
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that. I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first—rock'n'roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.
[John Lennon, London Evening Standard of March 4, 1966, repeated in Time magazine, Aug 12, 1966]
Christians say that—without exception—their God answers all of their prayers; it's just that He sometimes says "yes" and other times "no," "maybe," or "wait." Of course the same could be said of the rain-god,"Bob.
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
Christs soldiers fight best on their knees
[Brig. General Green, ACMTC]
Church tax exemption means that we all drop our money in the collection boxes, whether we go to church or not and whether we are interested in the church or not. It is systematic and complete robbery, from which none of us escapes.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
Church: A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to people who will never get there.
[H.L. Mencken]
Churches do not stand for moral influence. Not a Christian minister preaches salvation by good behavior. What a poor business Roman Catholicism would do among men if it advertised to save only those who were temperate, upright, intelligent and moral.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Churches should look to their members and friends only for the financing of their undertakings, and no church should engage in any undertaking, no matter how laudable it may be, that its members and friends are unable or unwilling to finance.
[Senator Sam Ervin]
Civilization has come about by going to school more than to church.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviours by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively…
[Sigmund Freud, 1927]
Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will believe whatever the Church teaches.
[Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Summa Theologica]
Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
[H.L. Mencken]
Colfax, Placer County. A mysterious light on a church wall that many believed was a divinely inspired image of the Virgin Mary did not appear yesterday amid heavy clouds, seeming to confirm the theory it was merely sunlight shining through stained-glass window. … When the image failed to appear at its customary time, however, the worshipers trooped out, some in dismay. … Church officials had been considering an investigation to determine whether the appearance of the image, which looked like the outline of the top half of a figure, was a miracle.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 11 December 1990 (Chronicle Wire Services)]
Colfax, Placer County. Yesterday's crowd of pilgrims, some of whom arrived at midnight, saw a blue-gray light form over the right shoulder of a five- foot statue of Jesus near the altar of the 40-year-old Catholic church. For some, the shimmering light that turned green-pink bore the shape of a shawl covering a woman's head and shoulders. Sometimes the image was sharp; other times it was fuzzy. The eerie image appeared about 9:30 a.m., as it has every day since Thanksgiving, and remained for about an hour. At one point, a second light gold in color and resembling the shape of a crown or halo briefly appeared directly above the first image. At the moment the gold light appeared, many people in the line outside said they spotted a rainbow over the church. Inside the 200-seat church, pilgrims gasped, prayed, wept and stared at the image. …According to James Phelps, a physics professor at Sacramento State University, the image is a phenomenon caused by natural light refracting through a stained-glass window and then bouncing off a light fixture and onto the wall. 'There's nothing exotic, nothing esoteric about it,' said the optics expert, who observed the image at the request of a local newspaper.
[Martin Halstuk, San Francisco Chronicle, 8 December 1990]
Colfax. A bishop joined throngs of people packing a Placer County church to see a shining image on the wall that devout Catholics claim is an apparition of the Virgin Mary. … 'It could be the image of the Blessed Mary in a silhouette pose,' Bishop Francis Quinn of the Sacramento Diocese said Tuesday. … The image has been appearing for about an hour each morning since Thanksgiving, bringing throngs of the devout and curious to the 40- year-old church along Interstate 80 northeast of Auburn. … Some viewers say the image, which also resembles the profile of a rabbit head, could be a reflection from a stained glass window. … 'For those who believe, no explanation is necessary,' Quinn said. 'And for those who not believe, no explanation is possible.'
[Press Democrat, 6 December 1990 (AP)]
Colfax. The day before the shining apparition that some believe represents the Virgin Mary began appearing at St. Dominic's church, the hanging light fixtures in the sanctuary were stabilized with wire — perhaps setting the stage for a reflection that could create the image. … 'It might explain it,' said parishioner Edmund 'Mick' Molloy, whose father Ed Molloy is the parish coordinator. … Molloy said the work was done Wednesday afternoon just before Thanksgiving. … 'So on Thanksgiving morning we have this reflection,' Molloy said.
[Press Democrat, 7 December 1990 (McClatchy News Service)]
Common people do not pray, my lord: they only beg.
[George Bernard Shaw]
Commonly, those who have professed the strongest motives of love of a God have demonstrated the deepest hatred toward human joy and liberty.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Concerning the argument from design, "You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.
Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 62.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
[First Amendment, Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution]
Consequently, in the name of God Almighty, by the authority of the Apostles Saints Peter and Paul, and by our Own, We reprove and condemn this Charter [the Magna Carta]; under pain of anathema We forbid the King to observe it or the barons to demand its execution. We declare the Charter null and of no effect, as well as all the obligations contracted to confirm it. It is Our wish that in no case should it have any effect.
[Pope Innocent III (1161-1216)]
Conservatism can most honestly be described as the distrust of progress and the opposition to change in order to hold to the traditional established order of the past.
Conservatives are much like paleontologists. They dig through prehistoric garbage heaps and anything they discover they define as a new find.
Conservatives are needed as the opposition party to rein in the excesses of moving too far too fast, but as we have witnessed time and again, when they are in control nothing good comes of it.
Conservatives have gotten away with the big lie that the PRESS has a liberal bias by confusing it with the MEDIA.
Conservatives haven’t had a new idea since they began purchasing women rather than clubbing them.
Conservatives only want to go back in time a couple of hundred years, Libertarians want to take us back about 100,000 years.
Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent 'mutation.' In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that 'survival value' here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. There are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
[Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene"]
Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new 'fire' stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst of them wanders into the cave and starts to purr.
(Terry Pratchett, The Unadulterated Cat)
Consider this. If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal demonstration of telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, whatever it is), he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new fundamental force that moves objects around a table top, deserves a Nobel prize and would probably get one. If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake.
Richard Dawkins
Consider, for example, Hugh Ross's use of the sharpshooter analogy near the end of his essay "Astronomical Evidences for the God of the Bible" (which appears on the web site mentioned previously). In the example, a prisoner is to be executed by a firing squad consisting of 100 sharpshooters, but although they all fire their guns he fails to get shot. Two hypotheses are put forward to explain the remarkable event. One of them, which is supposed to be like B, above, is that all 100 sharpshooters missed by sheer accident. The other hypothesis, which is supposed to be like G, is that there was a plot to prevent the execution. Naturally, the plot hypothesis is more reasonable than the accidental-miss hypothesis, which is supposed to show that G is more reasonable than B. I find this to be a very bad analogy to the case of the universe's physical constants. There is nothing in the case of the universe that corresponds to a scheduled execution by firing squad. We know perfectly well how firing squads operate, based on how they have operated in the past. We know that if they are intent on doing their job, then they simply do NOT all miss! But there is no corresponding information about the process by which universes might acquire their physical constants. We would need to be aware of some connection between the process of physical-constant formation and the presence or absence of life forms in the universe. But we simply do not have any such information, and that in turn destroys the analogy. Those who put forward such bad analogies are simply showing their confusion about the issue at hand.
Theodore Drange, "The Fine-Tuning Argument" (1998)
Considering my rebellious nature, if I had been born Black I wouldn’t have seen 21.
Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these — the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure — emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. xxii-xxiii.
Convicts register their religious affiliation when they're processed into prison. And about 99.5% of the huge U.S.A. prison population consists of inmates who identified themselves as members of religious denominations.
[Gene M. Kasmar]
Could it not be said that it is improbable that we would have a universe in which life arose anywhere? One answer that might be given is that we do not know whether it is improbable or not. Judgments about a priori probabilities in such cases are arbitrary, and we have no evidence in this case of any relevant empirical probabilities.
Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 132.
Couples who are not childless by choice are of course not culpable. But something is wrong if a couple refuses to have children without a very good reason.
[Bishop Santer, addressing the Birmingham [england] Diocesan Synod, Daily Telegraph, June 26 1995 pg 8]
Cowboy George has not been content with just screwing up America these past two years, he is now intent on spending the rest of his time screwing up the whole World.
Cowboy George may indeed be stupid enough to start World War III.
Cowboy George started a war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein threatened his father, he wants more control of the oil in the region for his friends, and because Saddam is such an asshole he can get away with it.
Craig (1992:238) claims that it is 'philosophically unobjectionable' to conceive of God as causally prior to the Big Bang, since 'God's act of creation may be regarded as simultaneous with the origin of the universe'. However—as Grünbaum observes on several occasions— many of us find it hard to make any sense of this suggestion. It is true that there are contexts in which it clearly makes sense to speak of 'simultaneous causation'—e.g. as Craig notes, there is no impropriety in the claim that the downward pressure exerted by the otherwise unsupported head causes the indentation in the pillow—but this is compatible with the claim that, strictly speaking, causation must be local and mediated by finite signals. On this view, given a sufficient margin of error, causation can appear simultaneous—but there is no reason to think that there is any genuinely simultaneous causation.
Graham Oppy, "Professor William Craig's Criticisms of Critiques of Kalam Cosmological Arguments By Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, And Adolf Grünbaum" (1995)
Craig simply confesses that he does not have a good argument against those who claim that there are things other than God which do not have a cause of their existence. But if one can be reasonable in holding this opinion, then Craig is wrong: his argument is not entirely successful unless he provides compelling support for the causal premise. […] there are people—myself included—who think that it might well be the case that there are non-abstract things other than God whose existence is uncaused, and who are not obviously irrational in this belief. No useful purpose is served by the insistence that such people are obviously mistaken: mere rhetoric is no substitute for argument.
Graham Oppy, "Reply to Professor Craig" (1995)
Craig's kalam cosmological argument "is vaguely explanatory, apparently satisfying; but these appearances fade away when we try to formulate the suggestion precisely.
J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 95.
Creation 'scientists' must be aware that the informed workers in literary interpretation and in physical and biological sciences regard their stance as irresponsible, and that in the scholarly world as well as in the schools they are doing irreparable damage to the Christian cause.
[Prof. Ken Campbell, Australian National University, in St. Mark's Review 137 (Autumn, 1989) (Anglican)]
Creation is not taking place now, so far as can be observed. Therefore, it was accomplished sometime in the past, if at all, and thus is inaccessible to the scientific method.
Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism, (General edition, second edition, El Cajon, CA: Master, 1985), p. 5.
Creation out of absolute nothing is a metaphysical quagmire for theists anyway, since nothing must at least have the potentiality for becoming something. Since theists are stuck with potentiality, it might as well be something like a quantum vacuum.
Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false.
Stephen Jay Gould
Creation science" has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage — good teaching — than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?
[Stephen Jay Gould, "The Skeptical Inquirer"]
Creation-science is not like physics, which exists as part of humanity's common cultural heritage and domain. It exists solely in the imaginations and writing of a relatively small group of people. Their publications (and stated intentions) show that, for example, there is no way they will relinquish belief in the Flood, whatever the evidence. In this sense, their doctrines are truly unfalsifiable.
Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1996), p. 360.
Creationism was created. Evolution evolves.
[John Nicholson]
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
[Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack]
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
Isaac Asimov
Creationists standardly make two mistakes. They assimilate apparent randomness to irreducible randomness, and they overlook the fact that processes that are irreducibly complex may be governed by probabilistic laws.
Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 88.
Credulity is not a crime for the individual — but it is clearly a crime as regards the race. Just look at the actual consequences of credulity. For years men believed in the foul superstition of witchcraft and many poor people suffered for this foolish belief. There was a general belief in angels and demons, flying familiarly, yet skittishly through the air, and that belief caused untold distress and pain and tragedy. The most holy Catholic church (and, after it, the various Protestant sects) enforced the dogma that heresy was terribly sinful and punishable by death. Imagine — but all you need do is to recount — the suffering entailed by that belief. When one surveys the causes and consequences of credulity, it is apparent that this easy believer in the impossible, this readiness toward false and fanatical notions, has been indeed a most serious and major crime against humanity. The social life in any age, it may be said, is about what its extent of credulity guarantees. In an extremely credulous age, social life will be cruel and dark and treacherous. in a skeptical age, social life will be more humane. We assert that the philosophy of humanity — that the best interests of the human race — demand a strong statement and a repeated, enlightening statement of atheism.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Creeds made in Dark Ages are like drawings made in dark rooms
[Joseph McCabe, The Story of Religious Controversy, 1929]
Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys.
(Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.
[Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951, section 57]
Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Dad are you vicariously living through me in the hope that my accomplishments will validate your mediocre life and in some way compensate for all the opportunities you botched ?
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
Damn the Solar System. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better myself.
[Francis
[Lord] Jeffery]
Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Richard Dawkins
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
George Orwell, 1984
Dear God. We paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.
[Bart Simpson saying grace]
Dear Santa. Why is your operation located at the North Pole? I'm guessing cheap elf labour, lower environmental standards, and tax breaks. Is this really the example you want to set for us impressionable kids? …My plan is to put him on the defensive before he considers how good I've been.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Death Before Dishonor. Where is that from again? I forgot if it was the Marines or the Crips.
Death opens her cavernous mouth before you. Thousands upon thousands of children are consumed by her every day. You have the ability to save some from being tossed into her gaping mouth. As hundreds are being rushed into eternity, other questions shrink in comparison to the weighty question, 'Should we defend born and unborn children with force?' "Take defensive action!
[Rev. Paul J. Hill, abortion doctor murderer]
Defame not the good name of God with your profane Christian rantings!
Eldridge Kane [Irish Theologian] {1836}
Democracy is the great love of the failures and cowards of life.
[R.J. Rushdoony, Thy Kingdom Come,1978]
Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.
[Sigmund Freud, New York Times Magazine, 6 May 1956]
Demons have existed on the Discworld for at least as long as the gods, who in many ways they closely resemble. The difference is basically the same as between terrorists and freedom fighters.
(Terry Pratchett, Eric)
Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
(Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)
Did Jesus, before he produced bread and fish out of the air to feed the masses, preface his miracle commanding they first don orange vests and pick up empty wine cups along the Road to Damascus?
Die verfluchte Huhre, Vernunft." (The damned whore, Reason).
[Martin Luther]
Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth.
Thomas Jefferson
Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
[Wendell Phillips, Speech, 7 November 1860]
Do not allow the Church or State to govern your thought or dictate your judgment.
[Matilda Joslyn Gage]
Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong.
Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature.
[Luther Burbank]
Do not let evidence fuel your appreciation of God. Let your appreciation of God influence your view of the evidence.
Carl Kerby
Do not put your trust in such trinkets of deceit!
[Dracula, on the crucifix]
Do not thank God for what man does.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?
[Euripedes, "Hecuba"]
Do you know the mind of God so well that you could rule out the possibility that God conceived evolution as the process to bring His design to fruition? […] The truth is that if you are saying that you cannot imagine that a God could be that creative, that imaginative, then aren't you limiting in a very severe fashion your construct of God?
Barry Lynn in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, pp. 36-37.
Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti. and Mr. Winston Churchill? Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe."
I am not very impressed by the splendor of those people. Therefore I think that this argument of design is really a very poor argument indeed. Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending — something dead, cold, and lifeless.
Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 62.
Do you want real TRUTH in capital letters? Then search yourself for why you believe the things you do. Don't be afraid to analyze why your religion gives you the high it does. Answer yourself this question: Is TRUTH important enough for me to give up my religion if that is required? Until you answer yes to this you are not being honest with yourself.
[Dave Trissel]
Does it take a blanket presupposition for a historian to discount some miracle stories as legendary? No, because, as even Bultmann recognized, there is no problem accepting reports even of extraordinary things that we can still verify as occurring today, like faith healings and exorcisms. However you may wish to account for them, you can go to certain meetings and see scenes somewhat resembling those in the gospels. So it is by no means a matter of rejecting all miracle stories on principle. Biblical critics are not like the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"
Dogma still smells the same whether it comes from the podium or the pulpit.
[Steve Mading]
Don't believe anything. Regard things on a scale of probabilities.
The things that seem most absurd, put under 'Low Probability', and
the things that seem most plausible, you put under 'High
Probability'. Never believe anything. Once you believe anything, you
stop thinking about it. The more things you believe, the less mental
activity. If you believe something, and have an opinion on every
subject, then your brain activity stops entirely, which is clinically
considered a sign of death, nowadays in medical practice. So put
things on a scale or probability, and never believe or disbelieve
anything entirely.
-Robert A. Wilson (interview with "innerview")
Don't put too much faith in the man who wants to know the distance to the nearest church before he has written his name in the hotel register.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Don't take our word for it. Read the Bible itself. Read the statements of preachers. And you will understand that God is the most desperate character, the worst villain in all fiction.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways. There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about- a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverance can you have for a Supreme being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was going through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the ability to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain…. Who created the dangers? Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of red and blue neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead?…. They certainly look beautiful now, writhing in agony or stupified with morphine, don't they? What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It's obvious He never met a payroll. Why,no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!
[Yossarian to Lt. Scheisskopf's wife, Catch-22, Joseph Heller]
Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.
[Tom Waits]
Don’t forget that old conservative adage; war should always be considered as the first resort.
Door-to-door Mormon: "Would you like a copy of the Bible / Koran / Book of Mormon?"
Freethinker: "No, thanks, I'm waiting for the sequel."
Doubt everything. Find your own light.
Last words of Gotama Buddha, in Theravada tradition
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
[Voltaire]
Dozens of motorists on Memorial Drive say they have seen Jesus shrouded in pasta and tomato sauce on a pizza chain's billboard. … The billboard overlooks a Jiffy Lube and a Texaco gas station in DeKalb County, Ga. … According to those who say they see it, the face, with deep-set eyes, beard and crown of thorns, is on a billboard advertising Pizza Hut spaghetti. It shows a forkful of steaming, hot spaghetti and the words 'Spaghetti Junction.' … Austin Kelly Advertising Inc., which handles the Pizza Hut account locally, used a stock photograph from the food chain, the agency said. … Nowak, who expressed surprise that people have been seeing the image, said Pizza Hut had used the photograph before, and that she had a difficult time seeing anything unusual in the spaghetti. … 'I'm looking at it right now,' she said. 'Unless Jesus looks like a Muppet…'
[San Francisco Chronicle, 24 May 1991 (Cox News Service)]
Dr. Laura Schlessinger got her PhD in the effects of insulin on 3-0-methylglucose transport in isolated rat adipocytes. She still does her rat work well.
During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.
James Madison
During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
James Madison (from Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, 1785)
During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.
[Mark Twain, "Europe and Elsewhere"]
Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.
Ludwig von Mises
EACH nation has created a god, and the 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. Each god was intensely patriotic, and detested all nations but his own. All these gods demanded praise, flattery, and worship. Most of them were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume. All these gods have insisted upon having a vast number of priests, and the priests have always insisted upon being supported by the people, and the principal business of these priests has been to boast about their god, and to insist that he could easily vanquish all the other gods put together.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
[George Santayana, Reason in Religion]
Education and religion are two things not regulated by supply and demand. The less of either the people have, the less they want.
[Charlotte Observer, 1897]
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 in the world?
[Epicurus, 350-?270 BC]
Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.
[Samuel Beckett]
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
Priest: "No, not if you did not know."
Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
Eternity is really long, especially near the end.
Woody Allen
Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
HL Mencken
Evangelist, n., A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbours.
[Ambrose Bierce]
Even assuming that God was willing to wait a long time and to confine his interest to just a small bit of space, there is the question why he didn't do a better job with evolution. He is supposed to be all-loving. Why, then, didn't he set up evolution in a way which would cause less suffering to the organisms involved in it? One thing he could have done would have been to increase the proportion of beneficial mutations within the total set of mutations. Instead of having only about one out of a thousand mutations turn out beneficial to the organism and the species, why not have it, say, one out of five? That would certainly have speeded up the evolutionary process and eliminated much unnecessary suffering along the way. It is an additional bit of "fine-tuning" that one would expect from the sort of being described in G.
Theodore Drange, "The Fine-Tuning Argument" (1998)
Even if I knew nothing of the atoms, I would venture to assert on the evidence of the celestial phenomena themselves, supported by many other arguments, that the universe was certainly not created for us by divine power: it is so full of imperfections.
[Lucretius, "On the Nature of the Universe"]
Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence? After all, don't we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines?
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 109.
Even if there is a very high improbability of the universe existing with observers, the properties of the universe that allow us to exist are also what allow us to observe the universe with properties compatible with the existence of observers. If the universe did not have these properties, then we would not exist to observe the incompatible properties.
Kyle Kelly, "Is the Weak Anthropic Principle Compatible With Divine Design?" 1997
Even if there were undesirable consequences if atheism were true, this would not make atheism false. To think otherwise is to simply engage in wishful thinking. 'If death if final, that would be a bad thing. I dont want to believe anything which results in bad things. Therefore, death is not final.' Compare that with the following, which is no doubt on the minds of millions every week: 'If this is not the winning lottery ticket, then I will be terribly disappointed. I do not want to believe anything which results in my being terribly disappointed. Therefore, this is the winning lottery ticket.' By similar reasoning, no one's house would burn down, no one would go bankrupt, no one would be killed in automobile accidents. All that would be required to avert such disasters is to realize that terrible consequences would follow if those things happened and then realize that one does not want to believe it. Then it wouldn't happen. But clearly that is absurd.
Doug Krueger, "That Colossal Wreck"
Even many of those who claim to believe in immortality still tell themselves and others that neither side of the question is susceptible of proof. Just what can these hopeful ones believe that the word "proof" involves? The evidence against the persistence of personal consciousness is as strong as the the evidence for gravitation, and much more obvious. It is as convincing and unassailable as the proof of the destruction of wood or coal by fire. If it is not certain that death ends personal identity and memory, then almost nothing that man accepts as true is susceptible as proof.
[Clarence Darrow, "The Myth of Immortality"]
Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him.
[Walter Savage Landor, "Melancthon and Calvin"]
Even though they grow weary and wear themselves out with child- bearing, it does not matter; let them go on bearing children till they die, that is what they are there for.
[Martin Luther, Works 20.84]
Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.
Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for amoment on a correct metaphysics…. Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary; it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it 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, for the reasons I have already given, 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 thats all.
[Leonard Peikoff, "The Philosophy of Objectivism", lecture series (1976), Lecture 2]
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
[Thomas Huxley]
Every kiss of love imprinted by a mother's lips on the face of her babe gives the lie to the Christian doctrine of total depravity, and every gift which the heart of pity lays in the hand of misfortune brands this doctrine as false and a libel on our human nature.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Every man is free to adopt and profess any religion, which, under the guidance of reason, he believes to be true.
[Rome's "Syllabus of Condemned Opinions"]
Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
[Jean Anouilh]
Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together
James Madison
Every politician, clergyman, educator, or physician, in short, anyone dealing with human individuals, is bound to make grave mistakes if he ignores these two great truths of population zoology: (1) no two individuals are alike, and (2) both environment and genetic endowment make a contribution to nearly every trait.
Ernst Mayr
Every pulpit is a pillory, in which stands a hired culprit, defending the justice of his own imprisonment.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
Every religion in the world that has destroyed people is based on love.
[Anton LaVey]
Every sect as far as reason will help them, gladly use it; when it fails them, they cry out it is a matter of faith, and beyond reason.
John Locke
Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go.
(Terry Pratchett, The Unadulterated Cat)
Everything about the economics of Dobson's business is geared to obtaining a written and financial response from the organization's millions of radio listeners, as often as possible.
Gil Alexander-Moegerle, James Dobson's War on America (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997), p. 47.
Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun a hot rock.
[Anaxagorus, ca. 475 BC]
Everything is more or less organized matter. To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same.
[Napoleon Bonapart]
Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, infamous, sullying, and grotesque is contained for me in this single word: God.
[Andre Breton (1896-1966)]
Everything will be all right. From History's point of view, that is. There really isn't any other.
(Terry Pratchett, Mort)
Everywhere the voice of those who preach death is heard; and the earth if full of those to whom one must preach death. Or, "eternal life"—-that is the same to me, if only they pass away quickly.
[Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"]
Evolution as such is no longer a theory for a modern author. It is as much a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun.
Ernst Mayr
Evolution does not require the nonexistance of God, it merely allows for it. That alone is enough to evoke condemnation from those who fear the nonexistance of God more than they fear God Himself.
[Keith Doyle, talk.origins posting]
Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. … Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.
[Rev. Jimmy Swaggart]
Evolution is a theory. It is a theory, it's not a fact. There is no fact for evolution, none. …Why are we teaching a theory, when we have [another] position—creation—that the majority of the people in this country believe?
Rep. Charlie Howard
Evolution is both fact and theory. Creationism is neither.
[Anonymous]
Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented.
William Provine
Evolution is the root of atheism, of communism, nazism, behaviorism, racism, economic imperialism, militarism, libertinism, anarchism, and all manner of anti-Christian systems of belief and practice.
[H. M. Morris, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, San Diego, Creation-Life Publishers, 1972]
Evolution should be one of the first things you learn at school… and what do they [children] get instead? Sacred hearts and incense. Shallow, empty religion.
[Sunday Telegraph (UK) interview with Richard Dawkins, Sept. 26, 1999]
Exhausted, dehydrated, yet spiritually uplifted, some 350,000 Catholic pilgrims packed themselves onto a hot and dusty field yesterday to say good-by to Pope John Paul II. … More than 10,000 people were treated at field hospitals for mostly minor problems. Leading the list of maladies were dehydration, severe asthma, altitude-caused dizziness, and twisted ankles suffered by pilgrims tripped up by prairie-dog holes. …The 73-year-old pontiff made two visits to the site by Marine helicopter.
[Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 August 1993]
Explaining the unknown by means of the unobservable is always a perilous business.
Explanations are never the most interesting part of science.
Fritz Leiber
Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.
[Huxley]
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
[Carl Sagan]
Facts are not science—as the dictionary is not literature.
Martin H. Fischer
Faith - the ability to believe the ridiculous for the sublime.
[Rich Bennett]
FAITH -
An attitude fostered by individuals in high places in order to ensure the subservience of those in their charge.
Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 198.
Faith does not enhance reason, it replaces it.
Faith in God necessarily implies a lack of faith in humanity.
Barbara G. Walker, "" (1993, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.
Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
Dan Barker
Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition.
[Paul Keller, American rationalist]
Faith is an absolutely marvelous tool. With faith there is no question too big for even the smallest mind.
[Rev. Donald Morgan (b. 1933), "Atheist theologian"]
Faith is an island in the setting sun, But proof is the bottom line for everyone.
["Proof", Paul Simon]
Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.
[George Seaton]
Faith is cold as ice- Why are little ones born only to suffer For the want of immunity Or a bowl of rice? Well, who would hold a price On the heads of the innocent children If there's some immortal power To control the dice?
[Rush, "Roll The Bones"]
Faith is deciding to allow yourself to believe something your intellect would otherwise cause you to reject — otherwise there's no need for faith."
Faith is often the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate.
[F. M. Knowles]
Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 330-331.
Faith is the antithesis of proof.
[NY State Supreme Court Justice Edward J. Greenfield, 1995]
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
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion.
Jon Krakauer
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable…. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.
[H.L. Mencken, New York Times Magazine, 11 September 1955]
Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains… But it can put mountains where there are none.
[Nietzche, Human, All Too Human - 1879]
FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)
Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.
Matt Groening
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.
[Edward Abbey]
Fantasy and precision go together, and fantasy stands there with the air of an eyewitness. Fantasy fills in all of knowledge's gaps, and not with coarse strokes but with the fine touches of a miniaturist. Witnesses often know more about an episode twenty years later than they did immediately afterward. So whenever we find precise details, a certain amount of caution is always called for. It might be mere fantasy. The exactitude of the eyewitness and that of fantasy are hard to tell apart.
Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Putting Away Childish Things (San Fransisco: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 92.
Fascism is a religious concept.
[Benito Mussolini, Fascism, Institutions And Doctrines]
Fascism mainly concerns some non elected power who the people must dogmatically obey or suffer dire consequences, with God as the role model.
Father don’t ever forgive them for they know just what they do. And so I beseech you to found a religion in my name based on the personal pride taken in executing more people, more often and more quickly for ever less reason. The last exclamation of Christ.
Father Junipero Serra moved closer to sainthood when a miracle attributed to the Spanish friar was 'confirmed' by Pope John Paul II yesterday. …The miracle was reported by a Franciscan nun, Sister Bonafice Dyrda, who said she was cured in 1960 of a skin disease, diagnosed as lupus, after praying to Serra. …A group of Indians held a two-day prayer vigil in Carmel to protest the pope's visit to Serra's grave at Carmel Mission. The group charged that Serra set the policies for the Spanish priests and soldiers that led to the death of 80 percent of the local Indian population.
[Michael McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 December 1987]
Fear believes — courage doubts. Fear falls upon the earth and prays — courage stands erect and thinks. Fear is barbarism — courage is civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion, courage is science.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty.
Bertrand Russell, "Unpopular Essays"
Fear was the first thing on earth to make gods.
[Lucretius (96?-55 B.C.)]
Few intelligent Christians can still hold to the idea that the Bible is an infallible Book, that it contains no linguistic errors, no historical discrepancies, no antiquated scientific assumptions, not even bad ethical standards. Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages. The existence of thousands of variations of texts makes it impossible to hold the doctrine of a book verbally infallible. Some might claim for the original copies of the Bible an infallible character, but this view only begs the question and makes such Christian apologetics more ridiculous in the eyes of the sincere man.
[Christianity in America, p. 121, Elmer Homrighausen, former Dean of Princeton Theological Seminary]
Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted, and heaven crammed with these phantoms.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation or creed.
[Bertrand Russell]
Few theologians would care to pursue their research to its logical conclusion and finally assert, as did Thomas Paine, that the biblical account of Jesus has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it.
[George H. Smith, from Atheism: The Case Against God, chapter 2, The Concept of God]
Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
Stephen Jay Gould
Find a christian today and tell him he is sick. Convert him, if that term means anything, to a healthy lifestyle. Christians don't have a monopoly on morality. We too can do 'the good work'.
[On Confrontation, from Essays of an Atheist Activist by Jon G. Murray]
Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.
[Robert Owen, 19th century reformer]
Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us — and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.
[Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,"]
First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principle or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion (citation omitted); finally, the statute must not foster "an excessive government entanglement with religion.
[The "Lemon Test", from Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971]
Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal 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
For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said, "Think!" The many have said, "Believe!
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
For almost three centuries, from the late 1400s on, the best minds of church and state were hard at work ferreting out evidence against men and women accused of making pacts with the Devil, holding diabolic councils and diabolic orgies, using charms and spells and wax figures to kill kings, shipwreck fleets, blast crops and subvert the whole order of Christendom. There are no definitive figures because so many records have been lost, but certainly tens of thousands of people confessed, usually after prolonged torture, to acts of witchcraft and were hanged or drowned or burned alive. During the Spanish Inquisition alone, 100 persons might be burned as witches in a day. By the end of the 17th century, belief in the existence of witchcraft was fading among educated people, and with it went a fading in belief in the existence of witches.
[Robert Wernick, "Don't look now — but all those plotters might be hiding under your bed", Smithsonian 24(12):108, March 1994]
For centuries men have fought in the most unusual and devious ways to prove the existence of a God. But evidently a God, if there were a God, has been hiding out. He has never been discovered or proved. One would think a God, if any, should have revealed himself unmistakably. Isn't this non-appearance of a God (the non- appearance of a God in the shape of a single bit of evidence for his existence) a pretty, strong, sufficient proof of non-existence?
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.
[The Freethinker's Textbook Part II - Christianity, 1876, Annie Besant]
For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was no evolution at all. It made a nonsense of the central point of evolution.
Richard Dawkins
For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early, and the human race come to an end.
[Joseph Conrad (Korzeniowski)]
For every one man saved by the Lord, there are 1000 times that forsaken by him.
C. Spellman
For God so loved the world that He gave Man Free Will and then got pissed when we didn't meet his arbitrary standards. Oh, and he had his Son offed when he realized how impossible those standards were.
[Michael 4:23]
For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmild teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall.
Ray Bradbury
For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
HL Mencken
For let us not underestimate the Christian: the Christian, false to point of innocence, is far above the ape—regarding Christians, a well-known theory of descent becomes a mere compliment.
[Nietzsche]
For man is the maker of all deities, inventer of all abstractions, builder of all laws and from first to last, the measure of all things, the very meaning of the earth.
[Harry A. Murry]
For many centuries the sword and cross were allies. Together they attacked the rights of man. They defended each other.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying and weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, 'where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail.' We shall rouse against you princes and prelates who, alas, will arm nations and kingdoms against this land…and thus blows will avail where blessings and gentleness have been powerless.
[St. Dominic, to the heretical Albiginses, Encyclopedia Brittanica]
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
For more than a century we have heard that scientific progress has made Christian belief obsolete. Given the cultural prestige of science, this claim has prevented many from considering the Christian faith. If intelligent design theory exposes the inadequacy of materialistic explanations in the natural sciences, it will deflate this assertion, and could contribute to a renewal of Christian belief in the twenty-first century. This would be its most significant apologetic contribution.
Jay Wesley Richards of the Discovery Institute
For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs — as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.
Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man, 1871)
For narrowness and sectarianism, there is no equal to the Lord Jesus Christ
["The Southern Baptist Convention and Freemasonry" by James L. Holly, Page 40]
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
[George Santayana, The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare]
For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.
[Albert Ellis]
For the church to say that abortion is not acceptable for a Catholic is fine. To say directly or indirectly that on something that is a church teaching that you must also vote according to that — that's not acceptable in a country based on the First Amendment.
[Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy]
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
Richard Dawkins
For the kinds of small animals we are talking about, we can assume one generation per year, so it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye.
Richard Dawkins
For the old gods, after all, things came to an end long ago; and verily, they had a good gay godlike end. They did not end in a "twilight," though this lie is told. Instead: one day they laughed themselves to death. That happened when the most godless word issued from one of the gods themselves—the word: "There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god before me!" An old grimbeard of a god, a jealous one, thus forgot himself. And then all the gods laughed and rocked on their chairs and cried, "Is not just this godlike that there are gods but no God?" He that has ears to hear, let him hear!
[Zarathustra, in Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", First Part]
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.' …Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe…God choose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.
Paul, 1 Corinthians 1:18-27
For they heard that command of our Creator, if they truly listened to His instructions to be responsible stewards, then their entire framework of human rationalizations for tearing apart Act comes to naught
[U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, using religious arguments to defend the 1973 Endangered Species Act from conservatives who wish to limit or abolish it]
For those of us who have not believed, it is not expected to be very jolly.
[David Stoll, "Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?"]
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
[Charles Bukowski]
For what is hairy is by nature drier and warmer than what is bare; therefore, the male is hairier and more warm blooded than the female; the uncastrated, than the castrated; the mature than the immature.
[Clement of Alexandria, church father, Paedagogus 3.3]
For what is it but an exquisite and priceless chance of salvation due to God alone, that the omnipotent should deign to summon to His service, as though they were innocent, murderers, ravishers, adulterers, perjurers, and those guilty of every crime?
[St. Bernard, appeal for recruits for the Second Crusade, quoted by Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1943), p. 144]
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
[Thomas Szasz]
Fred Hoyle is a distinguished astronomer, as you pointed out. When he speaks about biological phenomena, I would not say that he speaks ex cathedra. As a matter of fact, one of the statements that Fred Hoyle made with Chandra Wickramasinghe is that actually insects are smarter than we think they are, but they're just not letting us know.
Eugene Scott in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 42.
freethinker n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief.
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, "On Life and Essays on Religion"]
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.
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 103.
Freethought is respectable. Freethought is crucial. Freethought needs to be publicized.
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 70.
From a neutral point of view all that is true is that conditions have been right for life far less often than they have been wrong, so their being right once can well be ascribed to chance, and not seen as calling for any further explanation.
J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 141.
From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes. Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions. Normal perceptions, since they have to be useful in the struggle for life, must have some correspondence with fact; but in abnormal perceptions there is no reason to expect such correspondence, and their testimony, therefore, cannot outweigh that of normal perception.
Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 188.
From all this the conclusion follows that what we have here is not a historical tradition of a factual resurrection…but an assertion of faith. The stories of imagined apparitions are, for the most part, apologetic constructions for butressing belief by clothing it in material form. Whence it follows in this crucial case, as in that of miracles in general, that the only history we can glean from stories of supernatural magic is the history of belief.
[Alfred Loisy, Catholic Modernist. bible scholar, Professor at the Institut Catholique in France from 1889 until his excommunication from the Church in 1908, writing on contradiction between various stories of the resurection]
From my dark side comes a thought. If one happens to be set upon suicide forget Kevorcian, just get on down to the gun store with a round in hand. Ask to see a matching caliber handgun, put round in chamber, lay head on the class counter, put gun to temple, point it down; make a big mess and a big statement simultaneously.
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
Edvard Munch
From now on in America, any man lucky enough to get a BJ knows to pull the shade; for there is probably a Republican outside peeking in the window.
Fundamentalism is rigorously and systematically used to indoctrinate and subjugate young minds. It is a contraceptive designed to prevent intellectual fertilization.
Stephen Jay Gould
Fundamentalism means never having to say "I'm wrong."
Fundamentalist Christianity rests on circular reasoning and pat answers. The belief system is brilliantly constructed to provide its own support — if you don't look too closely at the logic. It is a closed system, satisfied with its own internal evidence of truth. It is closed in that any information or argument from outside is rejected a priori because, as discussed above, it is a 'lie,' not of the 'truth.'
Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 83.
Fundamentalists are like the fir trees in German forests: they cannot stand alone, and are only stable when crowded together, branches locked with those of their brothers. That is why we must always fear them, because they will always hate us for our individualism.
[Brent Yaciw, with inspirational regards to Jack M. Bickham]
Fundamentalists long for the return of a more moral America, an America that may never have been. All around them they see what they perceive as declining morality and spirituality. They reason that if humans share ancestry with the other animals, we have no reason to behave as anything other than animals. This view neglects the fact that humans are the only known animals with the ability to contemplate the consequences of their own actions. It also fails to recognize that there is a great deal of good in the world, the nightly news notwithstanding. Crime existed long before the theory of evolution, even before the writing of the Bible, and biologists do not like crime any more than the creationists do. Evolutionary theory is not a license to run amok, and neither is a belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible a guarantor of moral behavior.
[Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism]
GARCIN: "Open the door! Open, blast you! I'll endure anything, your red-hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes - all your fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears - I'll put up with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.
[Jean-Paul Sartre, from "No Exit"]
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
[David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739)]
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
[David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739)]
Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeeezing one's eyes shut and wailing "does not!.
[Dr.Pepper@f241.n103.z1.fidonet.org]
George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States. He was appointed by God.
Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the defense undersecretary in charge of hunting down top terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan
George Bush’s diplomatic skills create about a million more enemies of America every day.
Get the few liberals out. If you don't do it, it ain't gonna be done. You will be doing the Lord's work, and he will richly bless you for it.
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, Christian Coalition's Road to Victory Conference, 2002, Washington D.C
Gilles de Rais supposedly sodomized, mutilated, and murdered more than 700 children. At his trial he told of his usual procedure of sexually assaulting boys, cutting open their chests and burying his face in their lungs, and opening their abdomens and handling their intestines. He also confessed to necrophilia with the dismembered bodies and to attempted intercourse with a fetus he cut out of a pregnant woman. At his trial de Rais REPENTED, and the bishop of Nantes WAS FORCED TO RECEIVE HIM BACK INTO THE CHURCH.
[Bodies Under Siege p.9-10]
Girls are like slugs - they probably serve some purpose, but it's hard to imagine what.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
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.
Timothy Jones
Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It's unreliable levers that are the problem.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Give the church a place in the Constitution, let her touch once more the sword of power, and the priceless fruit of all ages will turn to ashes on the lips of men.
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 203]
Given our common knowledge of the evils and goods in our world and our reasons for believing that P is true, it is irrational to believe in theism unless we possess or discover strong evidence in its behalf. I conclude, therefore, that the evidential argument from evil is alive and well.
Richard M. Gale, "Some Difficulties in Theistic Treatments of Evil" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 216.
Given that sooner or later we're all just going to die, what's the point of learning about integers?
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
[H.L. Mencken]
Giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible.
[John Wesley (1703-1791) English theologian, evangelist, "Journal" (1768)]
Go ahead and hate your neighbor, go ahead and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of heaven - you can justify it in the end.
[From One Tin Soldier]
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
[Mark Twain]
God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.
[Luis Buquel]
God cannot be put into the national Constitution without putting liberty out of it.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
God created sex. Priests created marriage.
[Voltaire]
God does not exist if Big Bang cosmology, or some relevantly similar theory, is true. If this cosmology is true, our universe exists without cause and without explanation. There are numerous possible universes, and there is possibly no universe at all, and there is no reason why this one is actual rather than some other one or none at all. Now the theistically alleged human need for a reason for existence, and other alleged needs, are unsatisfied. But I suggest that humans do or can possess a deeper level of experience than such anthropocentric despairs. We can forget about ourselves for a moment and open ourselves up to the startling impingement of reality itself. We can let ourselves become profoundly astonished by the fact that this universe exists at all.
Quentin Smith in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) ,p. 216.
God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffeable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players
[ie., everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
[Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Corgi Books 1991, pg 17]
God does not play dice with the universe.
[Albert Einstein, on quantum mechanics]
God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, he is weak — and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful — which is equally foreign to god's nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak andspiteful and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?
Epicurus (from "The Epicurus Reader", translated and edited by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, Hackett Publishing, 1994, p. 97)
God gave the savior to the German people. We have faith, deep and unshakeable faith, that he was sent to us by God to save Germany.
Hermann Goering, speaking of Hitler
God had to kill himself to appease himself, so that he wouldn't have to roast us (his beloved creations) alive for all eternity, except that he didn't really die.
[Unknown, capsule description of Christianity]
God has always been hard on the poor.
[Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793)]
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
[Imamu Amiri Baraka, "Home", 1966]
God has done nothing for men and women except to scare them out of their wits.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
God has infinite wisdom, goodness and power; he created the universe; his duration is eternal, a parte ante and a parte post. His presence is as extensive as space. What is space? An infinite spherical vacuum. He created this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory; and with deliberate design of making nine-tenths of our species miserable for ever for his glory. This is the doctrine of Christian theologians, in general, ten to one. Now, my friend, can prophecies or miracles convince you or me that infinite benevolence, wisdom, and power, created, and preserves for a time innumerable millions, to make them miserable forever, for his own glory? Wretch! What is his glory? Is he ambitious? Does he want promotion? Is he vain, tickled with adulation, exulting and triumphing in his power and the sweetness of his vengeance? Pardon me, my Maker, for these awful questions. My answer to them is always ready. I believe no such things. My adoration of the author of the universe is too profound and too sincere. The love of God and his creation-delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existance- though but an atom, a molecule organique in the universe- are my religion".
[John Adams, in a latter to Jefferson, Sept. 14, 1813, from "Christianity and the Constitution: The Founding faith of our Fathers" John Eidsmoe ISBN: 0-8010-3444-2]
God in His law requires the death penalty for homosexuals.
[R.J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionist theologian, in a letter to Mel White]
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
[Voltaire]
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
[John Lennon (1940-80)]
God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers— at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!
[Nietzsche, Ecce Homo]
God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon ignorance and hope.
Steve Allen (More Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
God is dead and no one cares. If there is a hell, I'll see you there.
[Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails)]
God is dead, but fifty thousand social workers have risen to take his place.
[J.D. McCoughey]
God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream…God is dead.
[Sartre]
God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.
[Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915) French novelist, critic, philosopher]
God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.
[Voltaire (1694-1778),French philosopher, writer]
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.
[Robert Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"]
God is real, unless declared integer.
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macetated egos; He will set them above their better.
[H.L. Mencken]
God is usually on the side of big squadrons and against little ones.
[Roger de Bussy-Rabutin]
God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow
[G.W.F. Hegel,Lectures on the History of Philosophy]
God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God, are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves.
[Lestat de Lioncourt, Interiew With the Vampire by Anne Rice]
God knows everybody needs a hand in their decisions. Some of us are not so sure.
[Sisters of Mercy, "Something fast"]
God loves all his children, by gum. That don't mean he won't incinerate some. Can't you feel those hot flames licking you…
[Austin Lounge Lizards, "Jesus Loves Me"]
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
[Paul Valery]
God made the integers; all else is the work of Man.
[Leibnitz]
God must hate common people, because he made them so common.
[Philip Wylie]
God never helps those who need the help of men and women.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
God not only plays dice. He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
[Stephen Hawking]
God often gives nuts to toothless people
Matt Groening
God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.
[John Calvin]
God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That sir, is not free will. It would be akin to a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath and cry out for his imprisonment/execution. When god says the same we call him "loving" and build churches in his honor.
[William C. Easttom II, skeptic@icon.net]
God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.
[Arthur Koestler]
God showed me…that he was going to bless the Christian Coalition beyond our wildest expectations. Before the year 2000, the Christian Coalition will be the most powerful organization in America. We'll be back in 1993. We'll be back in 1994. We'll be back in 1995…We'll be back until we win it all.
[Pat Robertson]
God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of the human race.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends." This may not be true, but it sounds good, and is no sillier than any other theology.
[Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein]
God tells Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If this was the only way they could understand the difference between good and evil, how could they have known that it was wrong to disobey god and eat the fruit?
[Laurie Lynn (sechum-l secular humanist discussion list)]
God will forgive me; thats his business.
[Heinrich Heine]
God, in any but a purely philosophical, and one is almost tempted to say Pickwickian sense, turns out to be a product of the human mind. As an independent or unitary being active in the affairs of the universe, he does not exist.
[Julian Huxley, Science, Religion and Human Nature, Conway Memorial Lecture, 1930]
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. […]and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. […] From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.
[Salman Rushdie, "In God We Trust", 1985]
God, we know you are in charge, but why don't you make it slightly more obvious?
[Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1990, address to students at at West Point]
God: The Immutable Chameleon; whenever the need is felt by one of his followers, He obligingly recreates himself to suit the occasion.
God: The Immutable One, though somewhat different for each person, denomination, religion, society, and historical period. The omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, all-wise, infinite mind who — for strictly personal reasons — makes a point of seeming to be an impotent, know-nothing, nowhere, bumbling oaf.
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
God's name is not considered good at the banks.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
God's only excuse is that he does not exist.
[Stendhal]
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
[Chapman Cohen]
Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the "ordinary" efforts of a vast majority.
Stephen Jay Gould
Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it.
Richard Dawkins
Group selection theory would therefore predict a tendency to evolve towards an all-dove conspiracy… But the trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse.
Richard Dawkins
H : "What are you doing?"
C : "Being cool."
H : "You look more like you're bored."
C : "The world bores you when you're cool."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
H : "What do you think is the secret to happiness? Is it money, power or fame?"
C : "I'd choose money. If you have enough money, you can buy fame and power. That way you'll have it all and be really happy. Happiness is being famous for your financial ability to indulge in every kind of excess."
H : "I suppose thats one way to define it."
C : "The part I think I'd like best is crushing people who get in my way."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Have you noticed there are no interesting people in heaven? —Just a hint to the girls as to where they can find their salvation.
[Nietzche, "The Will to Power"]
Having been admonished by this Holy Office [the Inquisition] entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the center of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth was not the center of the same and that it moved… I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church.
[Galileo Galilei, Recantation, 22 June 1633]
He [Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci] talked about Father Junipero Serra's qualifications for sainthood: 'They say he cured a nun's lupus. A miracle. Now I'm not a doctor, but I know lupus goes into remission. It's not always fatal. Have Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder play ping-pong together. That's a miracle.'
[Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 February 1989]
He [Reverend Sun Myung Moon] frequently criticized Darwin's theory that living things originated without God's purposeful, creative activity…
Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.
Jonathan Wells
He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time.—on Richard Nixon
Hunter S. Thompson
He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating the wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often.
[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian"]
He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
He was a wise man who invented God.
[Plato (427? - 348? BC)]
He was a wise man who originated the idea of gods.
[Euripedes (484-406 B.C.)]
He was considered by Ankh-Morpork's professional underclass to be something of an intellectual because some of his tattoos were spelt right.
(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)
He was Igor, son of Igor, nephew of several Igors, brother of Igors and cousin of more Igors than he could remember without checking up in his diary. Igors did not change a winning formula. {Footnote: Especially if it was green, and bubbled.}
(Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant)
He wasn't good or evil or cruel or extreme in any way but one, which was that he had elevated grayness to the status of a fine art and cultivated a mind that was as bleak and pitiless and logical as the slopes of Hell.
Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
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.
[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]
He who commends the brutalities of the past, sows the seeds of future crimes.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
Thomas Jefferson
He'd researched what was known of the early days of LAncre, and where eactual evidence was a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom(1) and extrapolated from associated sources(2).
(1) Made it up.
(2) Had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.
(Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)
He's the type of guy that has to talk to God because nobody else will listen to him.
[Atheist comedian Rick Reynolds]
Heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water. . . . this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on the twenty-third of October, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning.
[John Lightfoot (Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge), 1859]
Heaven: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound on yours.
[Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) American author]
Heaven: The Coney Island of the Christian imagination.
[Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) American author, editor, publisher]
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your Deity made you in his own image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
[Victor Hugo]
Hell is where cowards have sent heroes.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Hell: A cooking stove which heats the sacerdotal sauce-pan here below. It was founded on behalf of our priests, to the end that the latter may never be wanting in good cheer.
[Voltaire (1694-1778), French philosopher, historian, author, poet]
Hence from all we have hitherto said, it is clear beloved Catholics that we cannot approve the opinions which some [Protestants, Jews, and other heretics] comprise under the head of Americanism [freedom].
[Pope Leo XIII, "Great Encyclical Letters",252]
Here and there in the midst of American society you meet with men full of a fanatical and almost wild spirtualism, which hardly exists in Europe. From time to time strange sects arise which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United States.
[Alexis de Tocqueville, mid 19th century]
Here in Texas, art is the guy who lives on the corner and literature what the NRA leaves in your mailbox.
Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners… But for that very reason, I was shown mercy so that in me… Jesus Christ might display His unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life. Now to the king eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.
[Jeffrey Dahmer, convicted serial killer, in a statement to the court, Milwaukee, WI, February 17, 1992]
Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
Here we are, we're alone in the universe, there's no God, it just seems that it all began by something as simple as sunlight striking on a piece of rock. And here we are. We've only got ourselves. Somehow, we've just got to make a go of it. We've only ourselves.
[Jean, The Entertainer John Osborne (b. 1929) British playwright]
Here's what happens when you die—you sit in a box and get eaten by worms. I guarantee you that nothing cool happens when you die.
[Howard Stern, on E! network show, 4/12/95]
Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.
Robert Ingersoll
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
[Graham Greene, 1981]
Heresy you deem as blasphemy against the holy spirit. Heresy is what I deem as having the balls to stand up to religious hogwash.
Leo Guntermann
Hey brother christian with your high and mighty errand,
You're actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying…"
[Bad Religion]
Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.
Stephen Jay Gould
Hindu speaking to a "Born again" christian:
"Of course I am born again. And again and again and again."
His heart shall be torn from his living bosom and thrown in his face, after which his head is to be taken off and exposed on the church steeple in his native village. His body is to be cut into four pieces and a quarter fastened upon different towers of the City of Alkamaar.
[Diedrich Sonoy, Lutheran governer in Holland, on the Catholic Nanning Koppezoon, who was tortured for refusing to convert]
Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 16.
History aside, the almost universal opinion that one's own religious convictions are the reasoned outcome of a dispassionate evaluation of all the major alternatives is almost demonstrably false for humanity in general. If that really were the genesis of most people's convictions, then one would expect the major faiths to be distributed more or less randomly or evenly over the globe. But in fact they show a very strong tendency to cluster…which illustrates what we all suspected anyway: that social forces are the primary determinants of religious belief for people in general. To decide scientific questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy would therefore be to put social forces in place of empirical evidence…
[Paul Churchland,"Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind]
History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
[Robert Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"]
History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it.
(Terry Pratchett, Mort)
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion — i.e. none to speak of.
[Lazarus Long]
History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points. And history includes too much contingency, or shaping of present results by long chains of unpredictable antecedent states, rather than immediate determination by timeless laws of nature.
Stephen Jay Gould
History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Hobbes : "Do you think there's a God?
Calvin : "Well somebody's out to get me!
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Hobbes : "It says here that by the age of 6, most children have seen a million muders on television."
Calvin : "I find that very disturbing…it means I've been watching all the wrong channels."
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Hobbes: "What would you call the creation of the universe?"
Calvin: "The Horrendous Space Kablooie!
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.
[Han Solo]
Holy Scripture: A book sent down from heaven…. Holy Scriptures contain all that a Christian should know and believe, provided he adds to it a million or so commentaries.
[Voltaire]
Holy virginity is a better thing than conjugal chastity…. A mother will hold a lesser place in the Kingdom of heaven, because she has been married, than the daughter, seeing that she is a virgin …. but if thy mother has been humble and not proud, she will have some sort of place, but not thou…
[Saint Jerome, Roman theologian, Sermon 354]
Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealing and adulteries and deceivings on one another. ….Mortals deem that gods are begotten as they are, and have clothes like theirs, and force, and form…yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds….The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
[Xenophanes, 500BC]
Homo Sapiens did not appear on the earth, just a geologic second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts such an outcome based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.
Stephen Jay Gould
Honesty is never seen sitting astride the fence.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
Hot on the heels of its magnanimous pardoning of Galileo, the Vatican has now moved with even more lightning speed to recognise the truth of Darwinism.
Richard Dawkins
Houston. The Rev. Pat Robertson may have lost his political battle for the presidential nomination four years ago, but he's won some impressive victories at the onset of this week's Republican convention here. The party platform contains some of the most conservative language in modern history about abortion, education and homosexuality, and Robertson's Christian Coalition had a lot to do with that. In 1988, Robertson could only muster about 200 delegates and had almost no influence on the platform. The number of Coalition members among delegates this year has risen to about 750, out of a total of 2,210 delegates.
[Carl Irving, San Francisco Examiner, 16 August 1992]
How can a preacher talk with a straight face about political graft? He is, himself, profiting by one of the most notorious political grafts in this country.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
[Woody Allen]
How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible?
[John W. Draper (1811-1882), U.S. chemist]
How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares 'God wills it thus.' Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
[Napoleon Bonaparte]
How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium - in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away.
Richard Dawkins
How many evils have flowed from religion.
[Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 57 B.C.]
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
Abraham Lincoln
How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us!
[Montaigne]
How many times have you heard that Christ died for you for your sins? This is a heavy responsibility, especially for children. The guilty induction can vary in intensity, depending how the message is presented, but the bottom line is that the Son of God had to come to Earth and die a horrible death because of our failings.
Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 69.
However far back we may be able to trace the — so to speak — internal history of the Universe, there can be no question of arguing that this or that external origin is either probable or improbable. We do not have, and we necessarily could not have, experience of other Universes to tell us that Universes, or Universes with these particular features, are the work of Gods, or of Gods of this or that particular sort.
Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism" God, Freedom, and Immortality, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 51.
However incompatible the spirit of Jesus and armed force may be, and however unpleasant it may be to acknowledge the fact, as a matter of plain history the latter has often made it possible for the former to survive.
[Prof. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity (New York:Harper & Brothers, 1937) Vol. I, p.164]
However un-Christian this may sound, I am not even predisposed against myself.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
However, on religious issures there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C," and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism.
[Senator Barry Goldwater]
However, perhaps the main point is that you are under no obligation to analyse variance into its parts if it does not come apart easily, and its unwillingness to do so naturally indicates that one's line of approach is not very fruitful.
R.A. Fisher
Hubble's observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no onservational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined. It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had been considered previously. In an unchanging universe a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe; there is no physical necessity for a beginning. One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 8-9.
Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told—and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.
Michael Crichton in The Lost World.
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
Stephen Jay Gould
HUMANISM: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.
[John Ralston Saul]
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
[Isaac Asimov]
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
Isaac Asimov
Humanity sees its reflection in the mirrors that surround it, and thus gratified, calls this image perfect, good, merciful, omniscient, omnipresent, holy, just, and above all, love. So enchanted are these hairless apes with this, that they invent a special word for it: 'God'."
Humanity's first sin was faith; the first virtue was doubt.
Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.
Stephen Jay Gould
Humans can find a pattern in just about anything, and we must find such a pattern if we are to comprehend things. Mightn't people be mistaking this order imposed by the human mind for order caused by God?
[J J Hahn (hahn0009@gold.tc.umn.edu) on alt.atheism]
I acted alone on God's orders.
[Yigal Amir, assassin of Yitzak Rabin, Israeli PM]
I agree that God moves in mysterious ways. He's been eluding me from the very start.
C. Spellman
I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved—the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!
[John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson]
I am a prophet sent by God to declare the destruction of the United States because of abortion.
[Michael Courtney]
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world
Richard Dawkins
I am all for unabashed liberal Nancy Pelosi taking over as minority leader. Even though it will surely cause more election losses, at least my head will be held high rather than face down on my desk suffering Democrats following Republicans for a generation.
I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.
[Clarence Darrow]
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.
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 87.
I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and by religious men who are certain they represent the Divine will. … I hope it will not be irreverent in me to say, that if it be probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.
[Abraham Lincoln. Chapter 14 of Part 5 of Six Historic Americans by John Ramsburg]
I am arguing that faith as such, faith as an alleged method of aquiring knowledge, is totally invalid and as a consequence, all propositions of faith, because they lack rational demonstration, must conflict with reason.
[George H. Smith, from Atheism: The Case Against God]
I am arguing that if we are not justified in believing that no reason would justify God in allowing the brutal rape and murder, then we are not justified in believing that no reason would justify the onlooker for allowing the same act.
Bruce Russell, "Defenseless" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 198.
I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. vi.
I am convinced that some political and social activities and practices of the Catholic organizations are detrimental and even dangerous for the community as a whole, here and everywhere. I mention here only the fight against birth control at a time when overpopulation in various countries has become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle to any attempt to organize peace on this planet.
[Albert Einstein, letter, 1954]
I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense. But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity.
[Abraham Lincoln]
I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.
Richard Dawkins
I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so
[Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]
I am often wrong. My prejudices are innumerable, and often idiotic. My aim is not to determine facts, but to function freely and pleasantly - as Nietzsche used to say, to dance with arms and legs.
HL Mencken
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.
[Napoleon Bonaparte]
I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do.
[D. Dale Gulledge]
I ask you this whole week to pray for me and pray for the members of Congress; ask us not to turn away from our ministry. Our ministry is to do the work of God here on earth
[Pres. Bill Clinton]
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes— a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Where I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. . . I. . . hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.
Frederick Douglass (After the Escape)
I believe Christ was a man like ourselves; to look upon him as God would seem to me the greatest of sacrileges
[Leo Tolstoy]
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference—and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
[John F. Kennedy]
I believe in eight of the ten commandments; and I believe in going to church every Sunday unless there's a game on.
[Steve Martin]
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
[Frank Lloyd Wright]
I believe in serving God and trying to understand and obey God's will for our lives. Cynics may wave the idea away, saying God is a myth, useful in providing comfort to the ignorant and in keeping them obedient. I know in my heart - beyond all arguing and beyond any doubt - that the cynics are wrong.
[Vice Pres. Al Gore's commencement address at Harvard, 1994]
I believe sanity and realism can be restored to the teaching of Mathematical Statistics most easily and directly by entrusting such teaching largely to men and women who have had personal experience of research in the Natural Sciences.
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
I believe that at every level of society—familial, tribal, national and international—the key to a happier and more succesful world is the growth of compassion. We do not need to become religious, nor do we need to believe in an ideology. All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good human qualities. I try to treat whoever I meet as an old friend. This gives me a genuine feeling of happiness. It is the practice of compassion.
[Tenzin Gyatso, The XIVth Dalai Lama]
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
HL Mencken
I believe that no one who is familiar, either with mathematical advances in other fields, or with the range of special biological conditions to be considered, would ever conceive that everything could be summed up in a single mathematical formula, however complex.
R.A. Fisher
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
HL Mencken
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind—that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
[H.L. Mencken, New York Times Magazine, 11 September 1955]
I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal. There is real tragedy in his life, but he knows that he has a responsibility which he dare not disclaim, and he is urged on, apart from all utilitarian considerations, by something or someone which he feels to be higher than himself.
J.B.S. Haldane, "Daedalus, or Science and the Future," 1923
I believe that the people of Israel are the chosen people of God.
[Jerry Falwell, interview on Cable News Network, 21 Nov 1982]
I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degredation left in the world.
[Charles Dickens]
I believe to this day what I believed when I was eight — science.
[Rick Reynolds]
I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work.
[Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]
I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.
[Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 46]
I bet you don't want anything about the Bible taught in school." "If they teach Greek and Roman mythology, they should also teach Middle Eastern mythology.
[Morton Downey, controversial TV talk-show host, to Rob Sherman, spokesman for American Atheists, on the show]
I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.
[Mark Twain, Speech to the Red Cross, New York, Dec. 31, 1899]
I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one mortal blemish of mankind.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
I call him free who is led solely by reason.
[Spinoza]
I came of age in the 60’s. In both the military and in college I saw drug use run rampant. Of the hundreds of people I have known who used drugs often, not one ever went to the hospital, a mental ward, into a dry-out program or died. But at least a score of them ended up in such places because of alcohol. And my experience is not that unusual. It’s that hypocrisy that has lost the War on Drugs.
I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know, but I cannot imagine what potential data could lead creationists to abandon their beliefs. Unbeatable systems are dogma, not science.
SJ Gould
I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.
[George Norman Douglas, "South Wind" (1917)]
I can give you several examples of new species that have emerged within human observation. The best example that I can give you is the butterfly, the genus of butterfly known as Hedylypta. Hedylypta is a genus of butterfly that feeds on various plants. It's endemic to the Hawaiian Islands, which means it's only found there. And there turn out to be two species of Hedylypta with mouthparts that only allow them — only allow them to feed on bananas. Now why is that significant? It is significant because bananas are not native to the Hawaiian Islands. They were introduced about 1,000 years ago by the Polynesians — we know this from the written records of the Hawaiian Kingdom — and what that means is that by mutation and natural selection, these two species have emerged on the Hawaiian Islands within the last 1,000 years. And I think that's a very good case in point.
Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 24.
I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
[Charles Darwin]
I can imagine no greater misfortune for a cultured people than to see in the hands of the rulers not only the civil, but also the religious power.
[Caius Valerius Catullus, Roman poet 87-54 BC]
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here…
I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.
Richard Feynman (interview with Christopher Sykes, in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out," BBC-TV, 1981, [recorded in the book, Genius, the life and science of Richard Feynman])
I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life — the power to create.
[Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo. Art News Annual, 1950]
I can't believe in the God of my Fathers. If there is one Mind which understands all things, it will comprehend me in my unbelief. I don't know whose hand hung Hesperus in the sky, and fixed the Dog Star, and scattered the shining dust of Heaven, and fired the sun, and froze the darkness between the lonely worlds that spin in space.
[Gerald Kersh (1911-1968), British author, journalist]
I can't help an occasional semi-shudder as I remember that millions of intelligent men think that I am barred from the face of God unless I change. But how can one pretend to believe what seems to him childish and devoid alike of historical and rational foundations?
[Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., book review by Holmes for Time]
I can't tell you how much I enjoyed Dr. Berlinski's statement, because he focused in on one of the major deficiencies of the four people on the other side of the table who argue against evolution. That major theoretical deficiency is they have no explanation for natural history.
Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 22.
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.
[Albert Einstein, in the London Observer, 5 April 1964, on his problems with quantum mechanics and not, as popularly misinterpreted, an expression of religious belief.]
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
[Albert Einstein,The World as I See It]
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.
Albert Einstein (The World as I See It, 1949)
I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. [He was speaking of Quantum Mechanics and the breaking down of determinism.] My religiosity consists in a humble admiratation of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance — but for us, not for God.
[Albert Einstein, from "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press]
I cannot follow you Christians; for you try to crawl through your life upon your knees, while I stride through mine on my feet.
[Charles Bradlaugh]
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
[Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955]
I cannot say my yes to legends that have been clearly and fancifully created. If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter.
Bishop John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 237.
I cannot see one shadow or tittle of evidence that the great unknown underlying the phenomenon of the universe stands to us in the relation of a Father—loves us and cares for us as Christianity asserts. So with regard to the other great Christian dogmas, immortality of soul and future state of rewards and punishments, what possible objection can I—who am compelled perforce to believe in the immortality of what we call Matter and Force, and in a very unmistakable present state of rewards and punishments for our deeds—have to these doctrines? Give me a scintilla of evidence, and I am ready to jump at them.
Thomas Henry Huxley, in a letter to Charles Kingsley dated May 5th, 1863 Quoted in The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Gutenberg Encyclopedia (originally dated 1911)
I challenge anyone to present to me a more disingenuous religion than Christianity. Just where in hell do we find a system bent on filching scandulous amounts of money off the weak-minded? Where do we find more wealthy Pastors or Ministers talking out of both sides of their mouths while their pockets swell to obseen proportions? What religion does more to intellectually damage youth while getting rich off their ignorance?
C. Spellman
I combat those only who, knowing nothing of the future, prophesy an eternity of pain- those who sow the seeds of fear in the hearts of men- those only who poison all the springs of life, and seat a skeleton at every feast.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Stephen F. Roberts
I could certainly run a marvellous university here if only we didn't have to have all these damn students underfoot all the time.
(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)
I could prove God statistically.
[George Gallup]
I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
[Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta]
I credit that eight years of grammar school with nourishing me in a direction where I could trust myself and trust my instincts. They gave me the tools to reject my faith. They taught me to question and think for myself and to believe in my instincts to such an extent that I just said, 'This is a wonderful fairy tale they have going here, but it's not for me.'
[George Carlin, in the New York Times 20 August 1995, pg. 17. He attended Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, but left during his sophomore year in 1952 and never went back to school. Before that he attended a Catholic grammar school, Corpus Christi, which he called "an experimental school."]
I cringe at the thought of a Christian society. I'd much rather live in the dark ages than to dwell in such a setting.
Arron Isley (Writer)
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
[H.L. Mencken]
I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster.
[Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849]
I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
(Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Beatrice Hall [pseudonym: S.G. Tallentyre], 1907 (many times wrongfully attributed to Voltaire)
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
[Susan B. Anthony]
I do believe in the separation of church and state, but I don't believe in the separation of God and the state. God has a special place in his plan for our nation. And as the Senate goes, so goes the nation.
[Rev. Lloyd Ogilvie, official Chaplain to the U.S. Senate, who receives a salary at taxpayer expense for religious services]
I do have a problem with separation of church and state. I don't think there's anything wrong with the government having religious views and practices.
[Martin Mawyer, Pres. Christian Action Network]
I do not approve either the theology or the science of those who are prompt to invoke the supernatural to cover our ignorance of natural causes.
Asa Gray
I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion.
[H.G. Wells]
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
["Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, and published by Princeton University Press.]
I do not believe in revealed religion — I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without speculating on another….
[Lord Byron (1778-1824), Letter to Rev. Francis Hodgson, 1811]
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my church.
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.
[Thomas Edison]
I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.
[Lao Tse, founder of Taoism]
I do not consider it a sign of divine love to consign to hell people who live good lives but make an honest mistake in belief
[Moshe Shulman]
I do not detract from God. Everything that is, is from him, and because of him. But [nature] is not confused and without system, and so far as human knowledge has progressed it should be given a hearing. Only when it fails utterly should there be recourse to God.
Adelard of Bath
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.
[Galileo]
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
I do not like your Bible verse, It makes no sense, it is too terse, It is devoid of all context, What will your Holy Book say next? I do not like your Bible verse, it seems to go from bad to worse.
[Niall McAuley]
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
[Salman Rushdie, on David Frost show]
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 138.
I do not think it is possible to prove that belief in God is irrational. Zealous atheists may be disappointed in this, but there is no reason they should be. It is not the belief in God per se that is so offensive to the secular spirit. After all, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and Tom Paine retained belief in a supreme Creator/Lawgiver. What rightly offends secular humanists is the bigotry, obscurantism, prudery, and persecuting zeal that all too often accompany theistic belief, especially in its particular institutional manifestations.
Keith M. Parsons, God and the Burden of Proof, p. 145.
I DO want your money, because god wants your money!
[Reverend Larry, from Repo Man]
I don't agree with those who think that the conflict is simply between two religions, namely Christianity and Islam. . . To me, the key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational, logical minds.
Taslima Nasrin (in an interview in Free Inquiry magazine, winter 1998/1999, Vol. 19 No. 1)
I don't believe in destiny or the guiding hand of fate, I don't believe in forever or love as a mystical state, I don't believe in the stars or the planets or angels watching from above, But I believe there's a ghost of a chance we can find someone to love and make it last
[Rush, "Ghost of a Chance"]
I don't believe in god because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
[Clarence Darrow, speech, Toronto, 1930]
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.
[Andrew Carnegie]
I don't care anything about the separation of church and state
[Rev. Ron Griffin, pres. of Detroit Urban League, on Gov. Engler's plan to use churches to deliver state services. Oct 18, 1995, Detroit Free Press, article by Dawson Bell]
I don't find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. I believe religion is the root, and from the root fundamentalism grows as a poisonous stem. If we remove fundamentalism and keep religion, then one day or another fundamentalism will grow again. I need to say that because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems. But Islam itself oppresses women. Islam itself doesn't permit democracy and it violates human rights.
Taslima Nasrin (in an interview in Free Inquiry magazine, winter 1998/1999, Vol. 19 No. 1)
I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
[Jules Renard]
I don't know what stopped Jesus Christ
from turning every hungry stone into bread,
And I don't remember hearing how Moses reacted
when the innocent first born sons lay dead,
Well I guess God was a bit more demonstrative
back when he flamboyantly parted the sea,
Now everybody's praying, Don't prey on me."
[Bad Religion, "Don't Pray on Me",
on the Recipe for Hate album]
I don't know whether this world has a meaning which transcends it. But I do know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch - what resists me - that is what I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity, and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
[Albert Camus, from The Myth of Sisyphus]
I don't know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed it, and I don't know why I will do it again.
Matt Groening
I don't know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed it, and I don't know why I'll do it again.
Matt Groening
I don't really miss god but i sure miss santa claus!
[Courtney Love]
I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like and if you have babies, you have babies.
[Randall Terry, one of the people behind the current campaign to blockade health clinics and publicly harass and humiliate women]
i don't think evolution should be taught as a fact but as a theory that some people believe in. i don't really know about this though, i haven't thought about it really but there's no way it should be taught as the truth.
[Mark Goodwin, on talk.origins, 10/17/1994]
I don't want to see any religious people in public office because they're working for another boss.
[Frank Zappa]
I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.
Richard Dawkins
I don't want to start
Any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God's
Got a sick sense of humour
And when I die
I expect to find him laughing
[Depeche Mode, "Blasphemous Rumours"
(from "Some Great Reward", Mute CDSTUMM19)]
I donÕt want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
Woody Allen
I draw my warrant from the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to hold the slave in bondage.
[Rev. Thomas Witherspoon, Presbyterian, of Alabama]
I emphatically do not assert the general 'truth' of this philosophy of punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of such a grandiose notion would border on the nonsensical. […] Nonetheless, I will confess to a personal belief that a punctuational view may prove to map tempos of biological and geographic change more accurately and more often than any of its competitors - if only because complex systems in steady state are both common and highly resistant to change.
Stephen Jay Gould
I fear your Lordship has been reading religious publications of the sensational and morbid type.
[Donn Byrne, "Tale of the Gypsy Horse"]
I feel most ministers who claim they've heard God's voice are eating too much pizza before they go to bed at night, and it's really an intestinal disorder, not a revelation.
[Rev. Jerry Falwell]
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.
[Pearl S. Buck]
I feel that nothing so casts down the manly mind from it's height as the fondling of women and those bodily contacts which belong to the married state.
[St. Augustine, De Trinitate 7.7]
I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, It is a matter of faith, and above reason.
[John Locke]
I find it rather depressing that the most Right-wing crazy loon running for president, the most Right-wing crazy loon Supreme Court Justice and the most Right-wing crazy loon on the radio all happen to be black: Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas and Ken Hamblin.
I go to school, but I never learn what I want to know.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
I got enough guilt to start my own religion
[Tori Amos]
I had a student ask me, "Could the savior you believe in save Osama bin Laden?" Of course. We know the blood of Jesus Christ can save him, and then he must be executed.
Rev. Jerry Falwell
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
Hunter S. Thompson
I have a hammer! I can put things together! I can knock things apart! I can alter my environment at will and make an incredible din all the while! Ah, it's great to be male!
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
I have a problem with people who take the Constitution loosely and the Bible literally.
Bill Maher
I have a question that every law enforcement agent should think hard about. What does your racism get you? It looks like OJ Simpson got away with murder because of it.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
Hunter S. Thompson
I have an Easter challenge for Christians. My challenge is simply this: tell me what happened on Easter. I am not asking for proof. My straightforward request is merely that Christians tell me exactly what happened on the day that their most important doctrine was born.
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 178.
I have been looking for god for fifty years and I think if he had existed I should have discovered him.
[Thomas Hardy]
I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad, or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created that whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading mankind?
[
Arthur C. Clarke
, June 5, 1998, in the essay "Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids," pp 1532-3]
I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.
Thomas Jefferson
I have followed [the Church] in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism, or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it.
[Adolf Hitler, from Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction, pp. 239-40]
I have given myself a lot of trouble in this world with small result. I took my own life and the Church seriously, and the consequence is that I have wasted one and disturbed the other. The search for truth is not a trade by which a man can support himself; for a priest it is a supreme peril. For a long time now I have not really been a Catholic in the official sense of the word. I have strewn my intelligence and my activity to the four winds of an empty ideal…Roman Catholicism, as such, is bound to perish, and it deserves no regrets.
[Alfred Loisy, "My Duel with the Vatican"]
I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?"
With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.
Richard Dawkins
I have just seen and understood something that no one has ever seen and understood before. What more does a man need?
Stephen Jay Gould
I have known few homosexuals who did not practice their tendencies. Such people are sinning against God and will lead to the ultimate destruction of the family and our nation. I am unalterably opposed to such things, and will do everything I can to restrict the freedom of these people to spread their contagious infection to the youth of this nation.
[Pat Robertson]
I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel.
Thomas Henry Huxley, in a letter to Charles Kingsley dated May 5th, 1863 Quoted in The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Gutenberg Encyclopedia (originally dated 1911)
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 Alva Edison, "Columbian Magazine"]
I have not the slightest confidence in 'spiritual manifestations.'
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
I have noticed that the black community is more unified in defending President Clinton over this issue than any other I can recall. I guess it’s because a BJ here or there is the least of their concerns.
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.
[Denis Diderot]
I have only made but one prayer in my life: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
[Voltaire]
I have plenty of common sense! I just choose to ignore it.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
I have repeated whatever may rebound to the glory, and suppresed all that could tend to the disgrace, of our religion.
[Eusebius, early Church Father, in Praeparatio Evangelica, chapter 31, book 12]
I have repeatedly stressed that the selfish impulses of man constitute a much less historic danger than his integrative tendencies. To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertiveness incurs the penalties of society-he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand, becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his church, or party, or whatever the social holon to which he surrenders his identity.
[Arthur Koestler, "The Ghost in the Machine"]
I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.
[Georges Duhamel]
I haven't heard anyone saying that she's blackmailing anyone. I think she just wants to see if our freedom of religious expression is really protected or is the court supposed to cater to the whims of the masses who want to shop and open stores on Sunday or any other religious holiday.
[Tammy Rae Healy]
I honestly believe that the doctrine of hell was born in the glittering eyes of snakes that run in frightful coils watching for their prey. I believe it was born with the yelping, howling, growling and snarling of wild beasts… I despise it, I defy it, and I hate it.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
I honesty believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again governed by Christians . . . and Christian values. What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time.
[Ralph Reed, Executive Director of the Christian Coalition]
I hope I live to see the day, when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!
[Rev. Jerry Falwell, America Can Be Saved, (1979)]
I keep hearing that Jesus Christ is coming, but nobody knows his tour dates.
[Michael Lucas]
I know it isn't the fetus's fault, but the mother shouldn't have had an abortion if she didn't want the baby to go to hell.
[Jim Staal, net.fundie.idiot]
I know one man who was impotent who gave AIDS to his wife and the only thing they did was kiss.
[Pat Robertson]
I let my mind wander and it didn't come back.
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
I like maxims that don't encourage behavior modification.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
I like Serrano’s Piss Christ, for it represents what has come to surround Christianity since it has been corrupted by the political Right.
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians, Your christians are so unlike your christ
[Mahatma Gandhi]
I listen to feminists and all these radical gals — most of them are failures. They've blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men — that's their problem.
[Reverend Jerry Falwell]
I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
[Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism]
I might have become a Catholic if the Church were a little hipper. Like if the host were fudge, I'd be there for that. Body of Christ, with or without nuts.
[Rick Reynolds, atheist comedian, on religion]
I must confess that my disdain for the Christian religion stems not from my upbringing in it, but rather my first real hard look into it from a more enlightened perch.
Gershwin Hagenstoudt 1930 (German Scholar)
I neither affirmed nor denied descent with modification. I said I have no opinion.
David Berlinski in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 48.
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
John Stuart Mill
I once believed in god. I got better.
I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be. And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, "I'm sorry, but I never could read one of those things." "Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God," I said, "and, when God finds a minute, I'm sure he'll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand." She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed. She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing.
["Cat's Cradle", by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.]
I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
[Original Pledge of Allegiance (1892)]
I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Saviour, for whose Kingdom it stands, one Saviour, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.
[Dan Quayle]
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
[Francis Bellamy, 1892]
I pledge impertinence to the flag waving, of the unindicted co-conspirators of America, and to the republicans for which I can't stand, one abomination, underhanded fraud, indefensible, with Liberty and Justice… Forget it.
Matt Groening
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
[Frederick Douglass, escaped slave]
I predict/prophecy in Jesus name that: John F. Kennedy will publicly reappear, amaze the world, and is in fact the "beast" of the Revelation.
[John Prewett, net.fundie.idiot]
I put out these milk and cookies as a sacrifice. If Thou wishest me to eat them, please give me a sign by doing absolutely nothing. MMMMmmmm…
[Homer Simpson]
I really want to say that there are no major disagreements." But he added, "I think the tendency of American intellectuals to learn their evolution from him [Gould] is unfortunate, and that's putting it mildly.
Richard Dawkins
I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless.
[Peter Walker on alt.atheism]
I refuse to prove that I exist" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing." "Oh," says man, "but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't. Q.E.D." "Oh, I hadn't thought of that." says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
[Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"]
I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.
[Wilson Mizner]
I returned to the Holiday Inn—where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms—to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.
Hunter S. Thompson
I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
[Bertrand Russell]
I say that religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't believe in either.
[Clarence Darrow, interview, N.Y. Times, 19 April 1936]
I see a very dark cloud on America's horizon, and that cloud is coming from Rome.
[Abraham Lincoln]
I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such blasphemous nonsense!
[Shaw, "The Devil's Disciple"]
I see them on the corner Big black Bible in hand Shoutin' at the people to hear the word of the Lord, and it's this: "You're just a filthy sinner-man! You can't save yourself, but — Jesus can! And then you too can be an angel with a sword — Smite the unrighteous! Make Jesus your goal, Sell him your soul, Go throw your mind down the nearest hole." CHORUS: And the Lord Christ Jesus will Save you from the Devil and Sin, The Lord Marx Lenin will Save you from the Chairman of the Board, The Lord Smack Needle will Save you from the pains of life — But who will come and save you from your Lord?
[Leslie Fish, "Trinity"]
I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
[Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)]
I sit here happy to be alive and sure that some reason must exist for 'why me?' Or the earth might have been totally covered with water, and an octopus might now be telling its children why the eight-legged God of all things had made such a perfect world for cephalopods. Sure we fit. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. But the world wasn't made for us and it will endure without us.
Stephen Jay Gould
I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning.
[Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies]
I stand forth to challenge the wisdom of the world; to interrogate the "laws" of man and of "God"! I request reasons for your golden rule and ask the why and wherefore of your ten commands. Before none of your printed idols do I bend in acquiescence, and he who saith "thou shalt" to me is my mortal foe!
[Infernal Diatribe I:3-5, Satanic Bible]
I still went to church regularly, though, until I was eighteen years old. Then suddenly, the light bulb went on over my head. All the mindless mobidity and discipline was pretty sick - bleeding this, painful that and no meat on Friday. What is this shit?
[Frank Zappa]
I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring
[William Archer, Theology and War]
I suspect that, though Craig indulges in a bit of wishful thinking, playing taps for various critical approaches still quite far from death's door, he may well be correct that New Testament scholarship is more conservative than it once was. This has more than he admits to do with which denominations can afford to train the most students, hire more faculty, and send more members to the SBL.
Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"
I suspect the reason is that most people […] have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution.
I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
[Richard Dawkins, from the New Humanist, the Journal of the Rationalist Press Association, Vol 107 No 2]
I talk to God every day, and He's never mentioned you.
[movie, Ladyhawke]
I tell them I have worked 40 years to make the W.S. platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon.
[Susan B. Anthony, on the Women's Suffrage platform]
I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty
[John Waters]
I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes…
Jesus, Matthew 11:25
I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell's ass.
[Senator Barry Goldwater]
I think I'll believe in Gosh instead of God. If you don't believe in Gosh too, you'll be darned to heck."
I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful.
Richard Dawkins
I think life should be more like tv. I think all of life's problems ought to be solved in 30 minutes with simple homilies, don't you? I think weight and oral hygiene ought to be our biggest concerns. I think we should all have powerful, high-paying jobs, and everyone should drive fancy sports cars. All our desires should be instantly gratified. Women should always wear tight clothes, and men should carry powerful handguns. Life overall should be more glamorous, thrill-packed, and filled with applause, don't you think?
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
I think that any man who manages to become the most powerful person in the world should get all the BJs he wants.
I think that anyone who wants to shove stuff up their butt should be able to keep whatever it is they stick up there.
I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
[Oscar Wilde]
I think that in philosophical strictness at the level where one doubts the existence of material objects and holds that the world may have existed for only five minutes, I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.
[Bertrand Russell]
I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.
[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies"]
I think that it stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly organized system of prejudices and antagonism in existence. Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It presents many faces to the world, but everywhere it is systematic in its fight against freedom.
[H.G. Wells]
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.
Daniel C. Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea)
I think the sky is blue because it's a shift from black through purple to blue, and it has to do with where the light is. You know, the farther we get into darkness, and there's a shifting of color of light into the blueness, and I think as you go farther and farther away from the reflected light we have from the sun or the light that's bouncing off this earth, uh, the darker it gets … I think if you look at the color scale, you start at black, move it through purple, move it on out, it's the shifting of color. We mentioned before about the stars singing, and that's one of the effects of the shifting of colors.
[Pat Robertson, on a telecast of the 700 Club]
I think the thing to remember, though, the next time you hear someone who is really certain that he is on the side of the angels, is that the idea of angels was created by human beings, who are famous for being frequently untrustworthy and occasionally crazy.
[Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle, 10 June 1994]
I think there may be one or two steps in your logic that I have failed to grasp, Mister Stibbons," said the Archchancellor coldly. "I suppose you're not intending to shoot your own grandfather, by any chance?" - "Of course not!" snapped Ponder, "I don't even know what he looked like. He died before I was born." - "Ah-hah!
(Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent)
I think we ought to close Halloween down. Do you want your children to dress up as witches? The Druids used to dress up like this when they were doing human sacrifice… [Your children] are acting out Satanic rituals and participating in it, and don't even realize it.
Pat Robertson
I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I mean there's only any point in believing something if it's true.
[Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams]
I think when a person has been found guilty of rape he should be castrated. That would stop him pretty quick.
[Billy Graham, 1974]
I told [new Christian Coalition president] Don Hodel when he joined us, I said, 'My dear friend, I want to hold out to you the possibility of selecting the next president of the United States because I think that's what we have in this organization. And I believe we can indeed.
Pat Robertson, Sept 13., 1997
I told the priest, Don't count on any second coming, God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming.
[Concrete Blonde]
I turn on my television set. I see a young lady who goes under the guise of being a Christian, known all over the nation, dressed in skin-tight leather pants, shaking and wiggling her hips to the beat and rhythm of the music as the strobe lights beat their patterns across the stage and the band plays the contemporary rock sound which cannot be differentiated from songs by the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, or anyone else. And you may try to tell me this is of God and that it is leading people to Christ, but I know better.
[Jimmy Swaggart, hypocritical sexual pervert and TV preacher, self-described pornography addict, "Two points of view: 'Christian' rock and roll.", The Evangelist, 17(8): 49-50.]
I turned to speak to God/About the world's despair;/But to make bad matters worse/I found God wasn't there.
[Robert Frost (1874-1963)]
I understand my tests are popular reading in the teachers' lounge.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
I understand that fear is my friend, but not always. Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed. "
Hunter S. Thompson
I used to think it was terrible that life was so unfair. Then I thought 'wouldn't it be much worse if life really were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us occur because we actually deserve it.'
Marcus, Babylon 5.
I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape
[Desmond Morris, "The Naked Ape"]
I wake up every morning and I wish I were dead, and so does Jim.
[Tammy Fae Bakker]
I want nothing to do with religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized, on this earth, capable of becoming true man, master of his fate and captain of his soul. To attain this, I would put priests to work, also, and turn the temples into schools.
[Jawaharlal Nehru]
I want science to be taken seriously, because, after all, it's less ephemeral—it has a more eternal aspect than whatever the politics of the day might be, which, of course, gets the lead in the news.
Richard Dawkins
I want the man bearing the cross to be its only victim.
[Eugene Vintras (1807-1875)]
I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night.
[Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition Exec. Director]
I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good…Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism."
Randall Terry, quoted in The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Indiana, August 16, 1993
I was at Bible camp, learning how to be more judgmental.
[Mrs. Flanders (Homer Simpson's neighbor)]
I was driving home early Sunday morning, through Bakersfield Listening to gospel music on the public radio station When the preacher said "You'll always have the Lord by your side." I was so pleased to be informed of this That I ran twenty red lights in his honor. Thank you Jesus. Thank you Lord.
[The Rolling Stones, "Faraway Eyes"]
I was feeling sorry for you and thinking I was doing my Christian duty by making love to you.
[Republican Bob Packwood, quoted from his diary, speaking to someone other than his wife]
I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never heard of it when I started at a rather tender age; I was simply awed by dinosaurs.
Stephen Jay Gould
I was negotiating a contract to accept Jesus as my personal savior, but he refused to recognize my free sex clause.
[Al Medwin]
I was told that the Chinese said that they would would bury me by the Western lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.
[Bertrand Russell, Autobiography]
I was walking across a bridge one day, and i saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "stop! don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" He said, "Like what?" I said, "Well…are you religious or atheist?" He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?" He said, "Christian." I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?" He said, "Baptist!" I said, "Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?" He said, "Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off.
[Emo Phillips]
I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.
[John Stuart Mill]
I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.
Robert Ingersoll (The Ghosts)
I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system; since both are at present faultless, this must weigh against it.
[Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays]
I wonder how appropriate it is to try to 'argue someone into the kingdom.' Many apologists hotly deny any such charge, but I don't believe them. The tenor of almost all apologetics literature makes it plain that this is their intent.
Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again, p. 63.
I wonder that a soothsayer doesn't laugh whenever he sees another soothsayer.
[Marcus Tullius Cicero]
I would ask whose historicity was questioned in antiquity, when both pagan historians and Christian Fathers accepted pagan saviour gods as historical personages? (Herodotus says Attis was the son of a king of Lydia and that Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, was a ruler of Egypt. Clement of Alexandria regarded pagan saviour gods as 'mere men' and Firmicus Maternus called Osiris and Typhon 'without doubt' kings of Egypt). Can one expect much in the way of critical scepticism when, even in modern times, Wilhelm Till long passed as a real person?
G.A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996), p. 47.
I would defend the liberty of concenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
[
Arthur C. Clarke
]
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.
I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.
George Carlin
I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching His name to that book [the Bible].
Thomas Paine
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.
Thomas Jefferson (letter to Archibald Stuart, Dec. 23, 1791, on the encroachments of state governments)
I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
I would rather live with the woman I love in a world full of trouble, than to live in heaven with nobody but men.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, Liberty of Man, Woman and Child]
I would recommend that skeptics devote even more effort than they do now to understanding the reasons why so many people want or need to believe.
Murray Gell-Mann (Quark and the Jaguar)
I would shoot the bastards if I was allowed, because a woman can't represent Christ. Men and women are totally different, that's not my fault, and Jesus chose men for his disciples.
[Church of England vicar Rev. Anthony Kennedy, March 9,1994 regarding female CofE priests]
I would suggest the taxation of all property equally whether church or corporation.
[Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)]
I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.
[Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, in exile, 6/21/94]
I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints - The sinners are much more fun.
[Billy Joel, from "Only the Good Die Young"]
I'm a born-again atheist.
Gore Vidal
I'm a friendly enough sort of chap," Dawkins told me. "I'm not a hostile person to meet. But I think it's important to realize that when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
Richard Dawkins
I'm an atheist, and that's it. I belive there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.
[Katherine Hepburn]
I'm an evolutionist because I judge the evidence for the unity of life by common descent over billions of years to be overwhelming, not so that I can cheat on my wife or kick the cat with impunity. I live in no hope of heaven or fear of hell, but like most of my fellow Americans of all religious persuasions, I try to live a decent life. Folks like Tom DeLay just can't get it through their heads that a person can choose to live ethically because civilized life requires doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.
[Chet Raymo, science columnist for The Boston Globe, Sept. 5 1999 article on the anti-evolution decision by Kansas School Board]
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
[George Carlin]
I'm learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life … Procrastinating and rationalizing.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
I'm looking for loopholes.
[W.C. Fields, when caught reading the Bible]
I'm looking for something that can deliver a 50-pound payload of snow on a small feminine target. Can you suggest something? Hello…?
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
I'm not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
I'm presently incarcerated. Convicted of a crime I didn't even commit. Hah! Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry? Do they?
Matt Groening
I'm willing to bet that when we finally discover the root causes for most sexual problems facing people today, that Christianity will top the list.
["Psycho" Dave, Psycho0@ix.netcom.com]
I've always thought that, if we did not have supernatural explanations for all the things we might not understand right away, this is the way we would be, like the people on that planet. [ST:TNG "Who Watches the Watchers"] I was born into a supernatural world in which all my people -my family- usually said "That is because God willed it," or gave other supernatural explanations for whatever happened. When you confront those statements on their own, they just don't make sense. They are clearly wrong. You need a certain amount of proof to accept anything, and that proof was not forthcoming to support those statements.
[Gene Roddenberry]
I've been going to Bible classes. They're teaching me to be more judgmental.
Maud Flanders, The Simpsons
I've begun worshipping the Sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the Sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to God are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate.
George Carlin
Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.
Steve Allen (More Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
Idiots, the lame, the blind, the dumb, are men in whom the devils have established themselves: and all the physicians who heal these infirmities, as though they proceeded from natural causes, are ignorant blockheads….
[Martin Luther]
If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing
[Anatole France]
If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.
[Gegory Bateson]
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
If a person can join the salvation army corps and still be respected by his fellow-beings, he ought to be at liberty to enlist in the ranks of reason and common sense and not forfeit respect.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
If a plane crashes and 99 people die while 1 survives, it is called a miracle. Should the families of the 99 think so?
Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 154.
If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them. If slaves are freed, man must free them. If new truths are discovered, man must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are protected and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of man. The grand victories of the future must be won by man, and by man alone.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
If all people learned to think in the non-Aristotelian manner of quantum mechanics, the world would change so radically that most of what we call "stupidity" and even a great deal of what we consider "insanity" might disappear, and the "intractable" problems of war, poverty and injustice would suddenly seem a great deal closer to solution.
Alfred Korzybski
If any person shall Blaspheme the name of God, the Father, Sonne or Holie Ghost, with direct, expresse, Presumptious or high handed blasphemie, or shall curse God in the like manner, he shall be put to death. Lev. 24:15,16
[Massachusetts' "Body of Liberties" of 1641, Section 94]
If any spirit created the universe, it is malevolent, not benevolent.
Quentin Smith, "The Anthropic Coincidences, Evil and the Disconfirmation of Theism"
If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.
[Marcus Aurelius]
If anything is unconstitutional, it is government encouragement to pray in the public schools. Moreover, the proposed constitutional amendment to allow voluntary prayer is offensive on two counts. First, it violates explicitly the intended secular base of the Constitution. And far worse, it encourages the political use of religion in a way that allows elected officials to evade their real responsibilities and to claim for themselves a moral high ground that they too often have done nothing to earn.
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 165.
If as they say in lieu of abortion, sex education, Pope-ism and birth control, population is not a problem, then why do they give a shit about immigration?
If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color.
[Mark Schnitzius on alt.atheism]
If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!
[Clark Adams]
If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries…
[Leslie Stephen]
If BSA intends to issue invitations to children in public schools, they ought to 'Be Prepared' to abide by the admissions standards of public schools and stop discriminating on the basis of religious belief.
[Elliot Welsh, on BSA's denial of his nonreligious son]
If Christ does not appear to meet his 144,000 faithful shortly after midnight on February 6th or 7th, it means that my calculations, based on the Bible, must be revised.
[Margaret Rowen, Church of the Advanced Adventists, 1925]
If Christ rose at all, he rose on the very day on which he was buried. According to Matthew, a guard of Roman soldiers was placed at the entrance of the sepulchre to watch that no dead person came out, and that no living person went in. But Matthew admits that one night had passed before the guard was placed at the door of Roman militarism, with its unbending and inexorable discipline, does not need to be assured that the smartest corpse that was ever laid in a tomb would not be able to pass a Roman guard without being reduced to the kind of corpse that does not require a sealed stone and a squadron of soldiers to keep it from rising. If Christ rose at all, he rose before the soldiers walked sentry in front of his tomb; in other words, he rose on the very night of the very day he was placed in the tomb.
W.S. Ross, "Did Jesus Christ Rise from the Dead?" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 210.
If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be — a Christian.
[Mark Twain, "Notebook"]
If Christ, in fact, said "I came not to bring peace but a sword," it is the only prophecy in the New Testament that has been literally fulfilled.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
If churches want to play the game of politics, let them pay admission like everyone else
[George Carlin]
If Craig's view is to be consistent, he must accept the conclusion that, without creation, God is essentially non-temporal—i.e. there is no sense in which a time series can be ascribed to him.
Graham Oppy, "Reply to Professor Craig" (1995)
If either Phil Gramm or Al D’Amato were to have a sex change operation and breed, the spawn of such an ill imagined coupling would move mankind to what they presume the next level of evolution; a race of chinless bug-eyed frog like creatures who don’t give a damn about anything but other chinless bug-eyed frog-like creatures.
If everything must have a cause then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), pp. 6-7.
If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy.
[Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Summa Theologica]
If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.
Stephen Jay Gould
If God can do anything he can make a stone so heavy that even he can't lift it. Then there is something God cannot do, he cannot lift the stone. Therefore God does not exist.
[Lucretius, Roman poet]
If God didn’t want people screwing at 13 why did he make them sexually mature at 13? Is God stupid?
If god doesn't like the way I live, Let him tell me, not you.
[As seen on a button]
If God dropped acid, would he see people?
[Steven Wright]
If God existed as an all-powerful being, He would not need the money that faithful believers donate to their churches.
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
If God exists, what objection can he have to saying so?
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-riged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers.
Stephen Jay Gould
If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.
[Max Born]
If God is love, and if God is also omnipresent, then the Devil cannot exist. If the Devil exists, God cannot be love and also be omnipresent. Yet, an omnipresent God of love and the Devil are both said to exist. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure that there is something wrong here!
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologian]
If God is our Father (you thought), then Satan must be our Cousin. Why didn't anyone else understand these important things?
[Tool]
If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?
If God is the basis of moral values, then such values must be objective, and we are, therefore, faced with the following questions: (1) How do we come to be aware of these moral values, if they exist entirely independently of us? (2) Why do moral facts supervene on natural facts? (3) How can the existence of objective moral values be reconciled with the existence of different conceptions of what is right? These difficulties are not faced by the atheist.
Robin Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism, (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 85.
If God made us in His image we have certainly returned the compliment.
[Voltaire]
If god wanted people to believe in him, why'd he invent logic then?
[David Feherty, PGA Tour golfer]
If God were not a necessary Being of Himself, He might also seem to be made for the use and benefit of men.
[John Tillotson, Sermon]
If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which he has inflicted upon men, He would kill himself.
[Alexander Dumas]
If God's aim is to maximize acceptance of Him and intense suffering brings about acceptance, then why is there so relatively little suffering in some countries and times? Surely God could have indirectly brought about more suffering and increased acceptance. For example, in the US suffering is relatively low in comparison to many Third World countries. Surely God could have arranged things to increase suffering and increase acceptance of God in the US. For example, hurricanes, earthquakes, draughts, epidemics, and severe economic depression would cause much suffering and, if Craig is right, increase acceptance. An all powerful God surely could have brought these things about.
Michael Martin, "Human Suffering and the Acceptance of God"
If half of Americans were cannibals and half not, the media would be for moderate cannibalism.
If he [god] is wise, why did he not compose a coherent account of what he wanted mankind to do? No, the Bible is not such an account; nobody can agree in what it says. The very god who, according to those who believe in him, made every last electron spin in its orbit everywhere throughout the universe, still cannot write a clear, unmistakable volume of instructions to human beings who are supposed to follow his wishes, Instead, he allegedly gives us the Bible or Koran, or some other jumble of ridiculous and ancient superstitions…
[Fred Woodworth]
If I didn't know better, I would think that you were just making definitions up in an ad hoc manner to avoid coming to a conclusion which contradicted your a priori wishes.
[Greg Erwin]
If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go to hell.
[Jimmy Swaggart, 5/20/88]
If I get hit or run over by a truck It's not His fault, it's just my own bad luck
[PRAY TV]
If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said "No."
[Margaret "Stevie" Smith (1902-1971)]
If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.
[Napoleon Bonaparte]
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
[James Thurber]
If I have to resurrect you, I'll resurrect you, whether you like it or not!
[Paul to Jesus, The Last Temptation of Christ]
If I wanted a loving father, a faithful husband, an honorable neighbor, and a just citizen, I would seek him among the band of Atheists.
[John Tyndall, presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1874)]
If I were asked for a one-sentence soundbite on religion, I would say I was against it.
[Salman Rushdie, to Reuters News Service, 4/17/96]
If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstances. All forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past and can do so again. I cite the great civilizations of China and India.
[Theodore Dreiser, press interview, March 1941]
If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
Hunter S. Thompson
If it is good not to touch a woman, then it is bad to touch a woman always and in every case.
[Jerome, Epistle 48.14]
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory.
[Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)]
If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic. So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition [of theism].
Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism" God, Freedom, and Immortality, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 22.
If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
[Woody Allen]
If it were desirable upon the part of God to send his son to save the world from eternal perdition, why was it that, when he did arrive, so many nations were kept in ignorance of his mission? Even the Jews, God's chosen people, had no knowledge than an incarnate deity was to expire on the Cross. If the regeneration of the world had been the object of Christ, would it not have been better, instead of ascending to heaven, for him to have remained on earth, teaching practical truths, and showing by his own personal example how the world could be rescued from that moral and intellectual darkness and despair to which it had been reduced by the influence of a degrading theology?
Charles Watts, "The Death of Christ" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 217.
If its real to you, it’s money to us! Said the UFO Abduction counselor. And the Minister, the Preacher, the Mullah, the Rabbi and the Priest.
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
Thomas Carlyle
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
[Thomas Carlyle]
If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses
[Lenny Bruce]
If Jesus is the answer, then what was the question?
Jeffery Jay Lowder
If Jesus loves me, why doesn't he ever send me flowers?
If Jesus was a Jew, why did he have a Spanish name?
[Bill Maher on "Politically Incorrect"]
If Jesus were among us today, heÕd bitch-slap George Bush, Mel Gibson, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly for using Christ as political cannon-fodder.
Thurston Wells
If judged only by the results that challenge the laws of probabilities, then the power of prayer is nil.
[Judith Hayes, U.S. freethinker, author]
If life were to be found on a planet, then it would also have been contaminated by original sin and would require salvation.
[Piero Coda, theology professor in Rome, in a statement to the Vatican, as reported by Ecumenical News International]
If man had no knowledge except what he has got out of the Bible he would not know enough to make a shoe.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
[Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism]
If one is willing to make adjustments in the historical claims of the Bible, they can be correlated with the archaeological evidence if one is willing to take some liberties with the archaeological evidence.
[J. Maxwell Miller, Biblical archaeologist]
If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.
[A. Crowley]
If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss Bank.
[Woody Allen]
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
[Albert Einstein]
If poor children wish to gain any help from the GOP, they had best crawl back in the womb.
If priests had not been fond of mutton, lambs never would have been sacrified to god. Nothing was ever carried to the temple that the priest could not use, and it always happened that god wanted what his agents liked.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good.
[Morris Cohen]
If science is to progress, what we need is the ability to experiment, honestly in reporting the results— the results must be reported without somebody saying what they would like the results to have been— and finally— an important thing— the intelligence to interpret the results. An important point about this intelligence is that it should not be sure ahead of time what must be. It cannot be prejudiced, and say 'That is very unlikely; I don't like that'.
Richard Feynman (The Character of Physical Law)
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
Vannevar Bush (1890 - 1974) '
If someone as intrinsically repugnant as Newt Gingrich receives the best free federally subsidized health care in the world, why shouldn’t you? And more importantly, why, while he got his, did he do everything possible to deny you, yours?
If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Albert Einstein
If such a God did exist, he could not be a beneficient God, such as the Christians posit. What effrontery is it that talks about the mercy and goodness of a nature in which all animals devour animals, in which every mouth is a slaughter-house and every stomach a tomb!
E.M. McDonald, "Design Argument Fallacies" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 90.
If that man in the PTL is such a healer, why can't he make his wife's hairdo go down?
[Robin Williams]
If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 108.
If the atheist is 'dogmatic' for claiming that a god does not exist, is the theist also dogmatic for claiming that a god does exist? Of course not. Even in Rhodes' scenario, all that is necessary is that a particular god's existence logically imply something that we know is false within the .1% of knowledge that Rhodes says we have. It then logically follows — we have a deductive proof — that that particular god does not exist.
Jeffery Jay Lowder, "Is a Proof of the Non-Existence of a God Even Possible?"
If the basis of the conservative ideology is responsibility and accountability for ones actions, then how can they say that television, movies and music are responsible and accountable for our actions?
If the belief in god were natural, there would be no need to teach it. Children would possess it as well as adults, the layman as the priest, the heathean as much as the missionary. We don't have to teach the general elements of human nature; — the five senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. They are universal; so would religion be were it natural, but it is not. On the contrary, it is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are Atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so. Even as it is, they are great sceptics, until made sensible of the potent weapon by which religion has ever been propagated, namely, fear - - fear of the lash of public opinion here, and of jealous, vindictive God hereafter. No; there is no religion in human nature, nor human nature in religion. It is purely artificial, the result of education, while Atheism is natural, and, were the human mind not perverted and bewildered by the mysteries and follies of superstition, would be universal.
Ernestine L. Rose, "A Defence of Atheism" (1878, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 82.
If the Bible had said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would believe it.
[William Jennings Bryan]
If the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to GIRLS sports, such as hot oil wrestling, foxy boxing, and such and such.
[Homer Simpson]
If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?
[Anonymous]
If the Bible is telling the truth, then God is either untruthful or incompetent. If God is truthful, then the Bible is either untruthful or erroneous.
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologian]
If the book [the Bible] and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
If the conservative movement in America is mostly about getting the federal government off our backs, then why does the Republican platform promote constitutional amendments to force prayer in schools, force women to have children they do not want and make it a crime to express political dissent by burning a flag?
If the evidence supports the historical accuracy of the gospels, where is the need for faith? And if the historical reliability of the gospels is so obvious, why have so many scholars failed to appreciate the incontestable nature of the evidence?
Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 50.
If the factory pays taxes and the church does not, it follows that the church will some day own the factory.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
If the fundamentalists are right, then all the cool people are in Hell!
Jeffery Jay Lowder
If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.
[General Marquis De Lafayette (1789)]
If the lord had meant us to have faith, he'd have given us lobotomies.
[Zlatko]
If the New Testament accounts could support a range of interpretations, why did orthodox Christians in the second century insist on a literal view of resurrection and reject all others as heretical? . . . [W]hen we examine its practical effect on the Christian movement, we can see, paradoxically, that the doctrine of bodily resurrection also serves an essential political function: it legitimizes the authority of certain men who claim to exercise leadership over the churches as the successors of the apostle Peter. From the second century, the doctrine has served to validate the apostolic succession of bishops, the basis of papal authority to this day. Gnostic Christians who interpret resurrection in other ways have a lesser claim to authority: when they claim priority over the orthodox, they are denounced as heretics.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 7.
If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable.
Bishop John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 238.
If the view that the past universe is temporally infinite is necessarily a priori false, how can there be evidence which differentially supports the claim that the past universe is temporally finite? Won't anything count equally in favour of the claim, and nothing against it? There seems to be a general strategic problem in mixing necessary a priori argument and contingent a posteriori evidence when supporting a particular claim, at least ignoring secondary sources of evidence such as testimony. Craig appears to think that his arguments mutually support the premise that the universe began to exist (57); but on current theories of evidential support with which I am acquainted—e.g. Bayesian theories—that would not be the case. Perhaps there is a fix involving some kind of relevant entailment, but the matter is clearly not straightforward.
Graham Oppy, "Book Review: THEISM, ATHEISM, AND BIG BANG COSMOLOGY" Faith and Philosophy (1996)
If theology were a part of reasonably inquiry, there would be no objection to an atheist's being a professor of theology. That a man's being an atheist is an absolute bar to his occupying a chair of theology proves that theology is not an open-minded and reasonable inquiry. Someone may object that a professor should be interested in his subject and an atheist cannot be interested in theology. But a man who maintains that there is no god must think it a sensible and interesting question to ask whether there is a god; and in fact we find that many atheists are interested in theology.
Richard Robinson, "Religion and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) pp. 117-18.
If there be gods we cannot help them, but we can assist our fellow-men. We cannot love the inconceivable, but we can love wife and child and friend.
Robert Ingersoll (Why I am an agnostic)
If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.
[Edmond and Jules de Goncourt]
If there is a God, he is a malign thug.
[Mark Twain]
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
[Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus]
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
[Robert H. Jackson, Supreme Court opinion (West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette, 319 U.S. 624{1943})]
If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?
[Art Hoppe]
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
If there were a god, there would be no need for religion. If there were not a god, there would be no need for religion.
[Ron Barrier, Rbargodnow@aol.com]
If there were an afterlife, Isaac Asimov would have written a book about it by now.
If there were no ministers and no priests, how long would there be any churches?
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
If thinking freely for yourself is a sure ticket to hell, then the conversations in heaven must be awfully boring.
[San Francisco's infamous Dr. Weirde]
If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?
Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 27.
If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier — so long as I'm the dictator.
George W. Bush, Dec. 19, 2000
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers… Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
[Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925]
If we accept the logic of the Declaration, reverence for God is not just a matter of religious faith, it is the foundation of justice and citizenship in our republic.
[Alan Keyes, Rep. presidential candidate, 1995]
If we admit that some infinite being has controlled the destinies of persons and peoples, history becomes a most cruel and bloody farce. Age after age, the strong have trampled upon the weak; the crafty and heartless have ensnared and enslaved the simple and innocent, and nowhere, in all the annals of mankind, has any god succored the oppressed.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.
If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
[Judith Hayes]
If we ask, 'Where did the Universe come from?', our answer can only be: 'It doesn't come from anywhere' […] There isn't any 'where' from which it could come.
Peter A. Angeles, The Problem of God: A Short Introduction (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 67.
If we assume that the Bible alone reveals God's will we must acknowledge that there are many ethical issues the Bible does not discuss.
C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 42.
If we concede to the State power and wisdom to single out 'duly constituted religious' bodies as exclusive alternatives for compulsory secular instruction, it would be logical to also uphold the power and wisdom to choose the true faith among those 'duly constituted.' We start down a rough road when we begin to mix compulsory public education with compulsory godliness.
[Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, dissenting opinion in Zorach v. Clauson (343 US 306 — 1952)]
If we do not need to worship God six days in the week why do we need to worship him on the seventh?
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
If we have that basic core and we have identified people, this was the power of every machine that has ever been in politics. You know, the Tammany Halls and Hague and the Chicago machine and the Byrd machine in Virginia and all the rest of them. They have identified a core of people who have bought into their values whatever they were, and they worked the election and brought out people to vote. The other people were diffuse and fragmented and they lost and the people that had the core won.
Pat Robertson, Sept 13, 1997
If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education.
[William Jennings Bryan]
If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make believe.
[Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"]
If we should put god in the Constitution there would be no room left for man.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
If we trust the author, either of the Gospel or of the early tradition, then even a non-saying may be historically illuminating about the primary Jesus: this was what a primary source, perhaps even a close one, thought that he meant. But how do we distinguish between what Jesus did mean, what an early close acquaintance thought that he meant and what later Christians claimed that he had said?
Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 203.
If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must already have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxurt of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 316.
If wisdom and diamonds grew on the same tree we could soon tell how much men loved wisdom.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
If you are either already saved or damned, and this is determined even before you are born, and there is nothing you can do to change that, wouldn't that weigh heavily on one's attempt to live a meaningful life? Would it not preclude a meaningful life? And what of salvation by grace? If there is a god, and we cannot be saved by anything we do, and, since we would deserve damnation, we could not deserve any worse than we do already, what would be the point of performing any one action as opposed to any other? How do these xians get meaning in their lives? These are well-known theological problems which have never been satisfactorily resolved.
Doug Krueger, "That Colossal Wreck"
If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake.
Richard Dawkins
If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery.
Richard Feynman (The Character of Physical Law)
If you can forgive the man who wronged you, the neighbor who slandered you and help the poor about you, you need not be particular about making any professions of righteousness.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
If you decide to try and change the world for the better, prepare to be either nailed to a tree or shot in the head.
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]
If you doubt that crap personality is the driving force behind conservative politics, look back to your childhood. I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut that every one of your friends and acquaintances who was an asshole then, is a conservative today.
If you find yourself in an argument with a conservative who is defending George W. Bush’s intelligence, ask them to name an elected President they think George is smarter than. I have seen not a few huff and puff so hard to that they turned purple.
If you have a dark bushy mustache, shave it off NOW.
If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.
Richard Dawkins
If you hypothesize that there is a God, but that there is nothing sure and definite you can point to as a reliable pattern of things that God does, how does a state of affairs where a God does nothing, functions in no way, differ from a state of affairs where there is no God? And, if the situation is that there is a God, and this God does nothing that humans can surely identify as God-action - in contradistinction from other action, physical/chemical/biological/psychological/social — then how can any human being ever have warrant for affirming God?
[C. Lee Hubbell, The American Rationalist, Oct '94] ——— "The primary tool of science is skepticism, whose light shrivels unquestioning faith.
[Mike Huben]
If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a chance of being a prophet.
[Isaac Bashevis Singer]
If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.
[William A. Orton]
If you look up 'atheism' in a dictionary, you will probably find it defined as the belief that there is no God. Certainly many people understand atheism in this way. Yet many atheists do not, and this is not what the term means if one consider it from the point of view of its Greek roots. In Greek 'a' means 'without' or 'not' and 'theos' means 'god.' From this standpoint an atheist would simply be someone without a belief in God, not necessarily someone who believes that God does not exist. According to its Greek roots, then, atheism is a negative view, characterized by the absence of belief in God.
Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 463.
If you love god, burn a church
[Jello Biafra]
If you make less than $65,000 a year and vote Republican, you are a moron.
If you pray hard enough, you can make water run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course!
[Robert A. Heinlein]
If you talk to God, you're praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
[Thomas Szasz]
If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless and will therefore result to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called "education".
[Bertrand Russell]
If you thought before that science was certain— well, that is just an error on your part.
Richard Feynman (The Character of Physical Law)
If you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth , and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defence of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side.
Daniel C. Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea)
if you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.
Richard Dawkins
If you want to go back in time and see great literature deal with all this vindictive Rule of Law crap concerning the impeachment, go read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
[Dorothy Parker]
If you were the Son of God, and had unlimited powers like He, would you have allowed yourself to be put in that rather embarrassing situation in front of all those who believed in you…and then killed?
C. Spellman
If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT.
Frank Zappa
If you're looking for a little background reading on scientific creationism, it's best not to take the word scientific too seriously. A three-year database search of 4,000 scientific publications — focusing on the names of people associated with the Institute for Creation Research and on phrases and keywords such as 'creationism' — didn't turn up a single paper. A follow-up study of 68 journals found that only 18 of 135,000 total manuscript submissions concerned scientific creationism, and all 18 were rejected. Reasons cited included 'flawed arguments,' 'ramblings,' and 'a high-school theme quality'.
[Science 85 6(7):11, September 1985]
If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being.
[Jerry Falwell]
If, in any culture, children are taught, 'We are all equally
unworthy in the sight of God' -
"If, in any culture, children are taught, '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' -
"If children are given a message that amounts to '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' -
"If children are told, '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' -
"If children are instructed, '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', -
"If children are informed, '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."
[Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem,
Bantam Books, (New York, 1994), p. 295-296]
If, therefore, the Catholic Church also claims the right of dogmatic intolerance with regard to her teachings, it is unjust to reproach her for exercising this right…She regards dogmatic intolerance not alone as her contestable right, but also as a sacred duty…According to Romans 8:11, the secular authorities have the right to punish, especially grave crimes with death; consequently, 'heretics may be not only excommunicated, but also justly put to death.'
[The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911 Edition, Vol. 14, pp.776,768]
If, when we compare two versions of a story, the second known to be a retelling of the first, and find that the second has more of a miraculous element, we may reasonably conclude we have legendary (or midrashic or whatever) embellishment. The tale has grown in the telling. This sort of comparison is common in extrabiblical research and no one holds that it cannot properly indicate legend formation there. When biblical scholars apply the same method to the Bible it in no way implies a wholesale rejection of miracles.
Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again, p. 118.
If, when we perceive results similar to those that might be due to a wise man, we conclude that they have been produced by a being similar to a wise man, then, when we see results similar to those that might be due an idiot, shall we not conclude that they have been produced by an idiot?
E.M. McDonald, "Design Argument Fallacies" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 91.
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
Illusions die hard and it is painful to yield to the insight that a grown-up can be no man's disciple.
[Sheldon B. Kopp]
Imagine encouraging [a child] to participate in such 'twisted' rituals and worshiping of tortuous crucifixes and such like this from birth. No wonder we have so many hateful and sadistic people in our society.
[Brent Allsop 10-27-95 (news:alt.atheism)]
Imagine hanging the stones of a man , where they are forever getting themselves knocked, pinched, and bruised. Any decent mechanic would have put them in the exact center of the body, protected by an envelope twice as thick as a Presbyterian's skull. Moreover, consider certain parts of the female - always too large or too small. The elemental notion of standardization seems to have never presented itself to the celestial Edison.
HL Mencken
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
[H.L. Mencken]
Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly and warn the people of Canada…
[Isaac Asimov, Canadian Atheists Newsletter, 1994]
Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, Above us, only sky…
[John Lennon, "Imagine"]
Immaculate deceptions going on every day, still you follow the clowns who give the circus away
[The Almighty]
Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.
[H.L. Mencken]
Immortality is not a gift, Immortality is an achievement; And only those who strive mightily Shall possess it.
[Edgar Lee Masters 1869-1950]
In 1127, the Norse farmers of Greenland sent the King of Norway a live polar bear. He sent them back a bishop. By 1500, the only people living in Greenland were the Inuit seal hunters. All that remained of the Norse settlements were the ruins of their churches. Faced with a sudden cooling of the climate, the Norse people were more concerned with building churches and providing for bishops than changing their way of life to take account of the harsher climate. While they continued to graze their cattle on increasingly poor land, the Inuit remained flexible and adjusted their life style to suit the shifting conditions.
['Rigid' cultures caught out by climate change, article in the 5 March 1994 edition of New Scientist]
In a democracy, the power lies in the manipulation of public opinion, who controls information prevails.
In a footnote to the Supreme Court's 1961 Torcaso v. Watkins decisions, Justice Hugo Black wrote, 'Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God is Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others.' The Torcaso case dealt with religious tests for public office; it has nothing to do with public schools. The justice's comment is far from a finding that humanism is being taught in the schools.
Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), pp. 229-30.
In a GQ profile of Pat Buchanan, journalist John Judis asks the presidential candidate his views about teaching creationism in school. 'Look, my view is, I believe God created heaven and earth,' said Buchanan. 'I think this: What ought to be taught as fact is what is known as fact. I don't believe it is demonstrably true that we have descended from apes. I don't believe it. I do not believe all that.
[Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 27 November 1995]
In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.
John Reader
In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding.
[Albert Ellis, Ph.D]
In addition I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical universe.
[Ken Jenkins]
In addition, the New York Supreme Court, in a well known case (Miami Military Institute v Leff 129 Misc. 481, 220 N.Y.S. 799, 810) said of the principle of religious freedom that it, 'has always been regarded by the American people as the very heart of its national life.' This would be difficult to maintain in a democracy without constitutional separation of church and state.
[Anson Phelps Stokes, Church And State In The United States Vol I, p. 34]
In all ages hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
In an early class, one of the students asked me if I believed in God. I replied, 'I don't think so.' And then proceeded to wail on the theme, using material from this column of some weeks ago, in which I observed the perpetuation of insanity on this planet through the mediums of Arabs-vs-Jews, Catholics-vs-Protestants, Southern Baptists-vs-Everyone. I said I felt if 'God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them,' (Genesis 2:27, King James's italics, not mine) then we were God. And when Man (my cap, not King James's) in his most creative, his most loving, his most gentle and most human, then he is most God-like. The student said he would pray for my immortal soul. He also asked for my address, so he could send me some literature on the subject of God. I thanked him politely and told him I'd gotten all the literature I could handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas.
[Harlan Ellison, from "The Glass Teat", Article #29]
In any case, the argument against the persecution of opinion does not depend upon what the excuse for persecution may be. The argument is that we none of us know all truth, that the discovery of new truth is promoted by free discussion and rendered very difficult by suppression, and that, in the long run, human welfare is increased by the discovery of truth and hindered by action based on error.
Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 250.
In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions.
[Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Bantam Books, (New York, 1994), p. 296]
In candid moments, leading creationists will admit that the miraculous character of origin and destruction precludes a scientific understanding. Morris writes (and Judge Overton quotes): 'God was there when it happened. We were not there . . . . Therefore, we are completely limited to what God has seen fit to tell us, and this information is in His written Word.'
Stephen Jay Gould, "Creationism: Genesis vs. Geology" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 130.
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
In conservative Christianity you are told you are unacceptable. You are judged with regard to your relationship to God. Thus you can only be loved positionally, not essentially. And, contrary to any assumed ideal of Christian love, you cannot love others for their essence either. This is the horrible cost of the doctrine of original sin.
Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 1.
In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.
[Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Einfalle, Volume 10]
In fact they recapitulate the story of Christianity word for word, like the inevitable course of some unsightly disease: criminal ignorance, brutish stupidity, self-righteous bigotry, paranoid fear of outsiders. For the cultist, psychiatrists, the media, Government agencies have become Satan incarnate. Like the fundamental Christians, they have to be right.
[William S. Burroughs]
In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.
[Che Guevara]
In fact, no gods anywhere play chess. They prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight to Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
(Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.
[Dave Barry]
In God we rust.
[Gordon Charrick]
In his book, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, Philip Greven (1992), a professor of history at Rutgers University, says that the roots of America's unusally angry, violent, and crime-ridden society lie in the country's Judeo-Christian heritage. Greven examines cases of childhood punishment and the rationales for physical punishment among those with strong Protestant conviction. The latter usually boil down to the belief that it is necessary for parents to break the will of their children to gain their respect and obedience. In reality, he says physical assault only breeds rage and hostility, with negative outcomes.
Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 126.
In January, [Dan Quayle] spoke at a training conference of religious-right activists in Fort Lauderdale, whose theme was 'Reclaiming America,' and before the event began he stood at attention as the crowd of more than two thousand rose, faced a flag with a cross on it, and, with hands on hearts, recited in unison, 'I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Saviour, for whose Kingdom it stands, one Saviour, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.
["Christian Soldiers", New Yorker magazine, July 18, 1994]
In many ways James Dobson is the ultimate stealth campaigner. He is a person who likes power, who likes to be a king maker. I think you could make a strong case that if you had a deadlocked Republican convention, if you were a candidate you'd be more interested in getting the support of James Dobson than the support of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson combined.
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, quoted in Gil Alexander-Moegerle, James Dobson's War on America (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997), p. 44.
In modern Europe, as in ancient Greece, it would seem that even inanimate objects have sometimes been punished for their misdeeds. After the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1685, the Protestant chapel at La Rochelle was condemned to be demolished, but the bell, perhaps out of regard for its value, was spared. However, to expiate the crime of having rung heretics to prayers, it was sentenced to be first whipped, and then buried and disinterred, by way of symbolizing its new birth at passing into Catholic hands. Thereafter it was catechized, and obliged to recant and promise that it would never again relapse into sin. Having made this ample and honourable amends, the bell was reconciled, baptized, and given, or rather sold, to the parish of St. Bartholomew. But when the governer sent in the bill for the bell to the parish authorities, they declined to settle it, alleging that the bell, as a recent convert to Catholicism, desired to take advantage of the law lately passed by the king, which allowed all new converts a delay of three years in paying their debts.
[Sir James G. Frazer, Folklore In The Old Testament]
In my field of evolutionary biology, the most prominent urban legend -another 'truth' known by 'everyone'-holds that evolution may well be the way of the world, but one has to accept the idea with a dose of faith because the process occurs far too slowly to yield any observable result in a human life-time.
Stephen Jay Gould
In my opinion, we don't devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
[Robert Ingersoll]
In Nature's infinite book of secrecy, a little I can read.
William Shakespeare
In physics terms, creation ex nihilo appears to violate both the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics is equivalent to the principle of conservation of energy: the total energy of a closed system is constant; any energy change must be compensated by a corresponding inflow or outflow from the system. Einstein showed that mass and energy are equivalent, by E = mc^2. So, if the universe started from 'nothing,' energy conservation would seem to have been violated by the creation of matter. Some energy from outside is apparently required.
Victor J. Stenger
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
[Galileo Galilei]
In reality, science provides no evidence for the existence of God and probably never will. Nothing in current cosmology demands that the universe was purposefully created. The most economical hypothesis, consistent with all astronomical observations and the established theoretical structure of modern physics and cosmology is that the universe is absent of any pre-existing design or plan.
Victor J. Stenger, "Big Bang Ripples No Message from God"
In recent times, the bulk of eminent phyicists and a nymber of eminent biologists have made pronouncements stating that recent advances in science have disproved the older materialism, and have tended to reestablish the truths of religion. The statements of the scientists have as a rule been somewhat tentative and indefinite, but the theologians have seized upon them and extended them, while the newspapers in turn have reported the more sensational accounts of the theologians, so that the general public has derived the impression that physics confirms practically the whole of the Book of Genesis. I do not myself think that the moral to be drawn from modern science is at all what the general public has thus been led to suppose. In the first place, the men of science have not said nearly as much as they are thought to have said, and in the second place what they have said in the way of support for traditional religious beliefs has been said by them not in their cautious, scientific capacity, but rather in their capacity of good citizens, anxious to defend virtue and property.
Bertrand Russell, "Science and Religion" (1931) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 167.
In regards to Oral Roberts' claim that God told him that he would die unless he received $20 million by March, God's lawyers have stated that their client has not spoken with Roberts for several years. Off the record, God has stated that 'if I had wanted to ice the little toad, I would have done it a long time ago.
[Dennis Miller, SNL News]
In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the Ònull hypothesis,Ó and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.
R.A. Fisher
In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.
[Mark Twain]
In religious debate or expression the government is not a prime participant, for the Framers deemed religious establishment antithetical to the freedom of all. The Free Exercise Clause embraces a freedom of conscience and worship that has close parallels in the speech provisions of the First Amendment, but the Establishment Clause is a specific prohibition on forms of state intervention in religious affairs with no precise counterpart in the speech provisions. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1, 92-93, and n. 127 (1976) (per curiam). The explanation lies in the lesson of history that was and is the inspiration for the Establishment Clause, the lesson that in the hands of government what might begin as a tolerant expression of religious views may end in a policy to indoctrinate and coerce. A state-created orthodoxy puts at grave risk that freedom of belief and conscience which are the sole assurance that religious faith is real, not imposed.
[Justice Kennedy, opinion of the court in Lee v. Weisman]
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, 1987 CSICOP keynote address]
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
Paul Dirac (1902 - 1984)
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
Paul Dirac
In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs.
Sir Francis Darwin (1848 - 1925), Eugenics Review, April 1914
In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
[Stephen J. Gould]
In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research. By temperament and training, the research worker is the antithesis of the pundit. What he is actively and constantly aware of is his ignorance, not his knowledge; the insufficiency of his concepts, of the terms and phrases in which he tries to excogitate his problems: not their final and exhaustive sufficiency. He is, therefore, usually only a good teacher for the few who wish to use their mind as a workshop, rather than a warehouse.
R.A. Fisher
In some sects members are told to commit violent acts because the only way they can hasten redemption or achieve salvation is to eliminate the nonbelievers.
[Dr. Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University, Scotland]
In some ways the case of Edward H. Winter is a prototypical miracle of modern medicine. … He would probably have died of a heart attack in May 1988, when he was 82, if a nurse at St. Francis-St. George Hospital had not revived him through electric shock. … A few months before his heart attack, he watched the slow, agonizing death of his wife of 55 years, who had suffered brain damage after shock resuscitation from a heart attack of her own, and he resolved that nothing like that would happen to him. … When his time came, he told his children, they should simply let him die. He told his doctor the same thing. … Two days after he was revived, he suffered a debilitating stroke. … He is now partly paralyzed and largely confined to his bed in a nursing home, and although he can still speak, he can utter only a few words before he begins to cry, in despair. … But for the hospital's intervention, he has charged, he could have died, and in dignity. … His medical bills now total about $100,000 and are still rising, and his life savings are just about depleted. … His doctors see scant chance for physical improvement. They say he could live for years. … The hospital argues any damages Winter has suffered resulted from 'an act of God' over which the hospital had no control.
[David Margolick, New York Times, Press Democrat, 18 March 1990]
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.
[Clarence Darrow, The Sign, May 1938]
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.
Clarence Darrow, 1938
In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him.
[Jethro Tull, "Aqualung"]
In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.
[Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), p. 173]
In the brain of every religious person there is a god shaped vacuum.
[Jeremy Konopka on alt.atheism]
In the end all your knees will bow to Jesus Christ whether you want to or not.
[Kevin Tebedo, Director of Colorado for Family Values to an audience composed of various religions (Citizens Project Newsletter, August 1993)
In the fundamentalist view, unbelievers have only two relevant attributes: They are potential converts and sources of temptation. As objects of evangelism, they are called 'crops to be harvested,' 'sheep to be found,' and 'fish to be netted.' Because of the danger of worldly influence (much like a contagious disease), relationships with 'them' must be handled gingerly. Contacts must be superficial, geared toward evangelism only, and cut short if there is not a positive response. Since Christians are already full of truth, there is no need for them to listen, nothing for them to learn, and much for them to lose by admitting alternative views into their consciousness.
Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), pp. 76-77.
In the infancy of new religions, the wise and learned commonly esteem the matter too inconsiderable to deserve their attention or regard. And when afterwards they would willingly detect the cheat, in order to undeceive the deluded multitude, the season is now past, and the records and witnesses, which might clear up the matter, have perished beyond recovery.
[David Hume, "Of Miracles"]
In the light of their doctrinal dualism and the intransigence, sometimes amounting to ferocity, with which its spirit was applied, Christians might have been expected to press their differences home with every device and force available. Moreover, if they are measured by their bishops (and a better yardstick is not easily thought of), close to half the population who called themselves church members toward mid-century must have belonged to some allegiance other than the one that ultimately prevailed: in other words, they were Arian, donatist, or Meletian. Sectarian rivalry was thus a very real thing, a spur to great exertions. Egypt especially, being split three ways, echoed to the shouts of partisans, the din of violence, and laments for those robbed, stripped naked, flogged, imprisoned, exiled, sent to the quarries and coppermines, conscripted into the army, tortured, decapitated, strangled, or stoned or beaten to death. The express object was to make converts.
[Ramsay MacMullen, "Christianizing the Roman Empire", p. 93]
In the Middle East, the Bronze Age people of Canaan—the ancient region between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean that roughly corresponds to Israel—also failed to adapt to the drying out of their lands around 2200 BC(E). In their case, says Arlene Rosen of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, it was their beliefs that were their undoing. 'In Canaan, people believed that environmental disasters were caused by a deity unhappy with the people," she says. Like the Mayans, the Canaanites could have coped with the new conditions by introducing new irrigation systems for their crops. Instead, they attributed the shift in climate to the wrath of the gods, built more temples and prayed for better times. Within a short time, the cities and towns were abandoned and the people became nomadic herders.
['Rigid' cultures caught out by climate change, article in the 5 March 1994 edition of New Scientist]
In the November7th or November 14th issue of Science magazine, a number of investigators wanted to test the Darwinian hypothesis that you folks say is never tested, and the way in which they did this was to take the receptor protein for the human growth hormone — it's a receptor to which the human growth hormoe fits in precisely — and they did a terrible genetic disservice. They mutated — they cut out an essential amino acid right in the middle of the receptor, called tryptophan. With that gone, just like that mousetrap, it wouldn't have been expected to work. They then allowed a natural selection process to take place to see whether the cells under their own observation could mutate the receptor gene sufficiently to bind the receptor, and after seven generations, lo and behold, there it was. It illustrates beautifully the ability of natural selection to respond to mutations in proteins to co-evolve.
Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 25.
In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukka" and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy Hanukka!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!
[Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"]
In the olden times the church, by violating the order of nature, proved the existence of her God. At that time miracles were performed with the most astonishing ease. They became so common that the church ordered her priests to desist. And now this same church — the people having found some little sense — admits, not only, that she cannot perform a miracle but insists that the absence of miracle, the steady, unbroken march of cause and effect, proves the existence of a power superior to nature. The fact is, however, that the indissoluble chain of cause and effect proves exactly the contrary.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
In the popular imagination, the Big Bang is a great explosion; at one time there was nothing, then matter erupted into previously empty space. However, the Big Bang is the beginning of spacetime itself, not an event in time.
Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
In the purest religion … there can be no way of avoiding anthropomorphism.
E. Bolaji Idowu, African Traditional Religions: A Definition (London: SCM Press, 1973), p. 59.
In the realm of science, all attempts to find any evidence of supernatural beings, of metaphysical conceptions, as God, immortality, infinity, etc., thus have failed, and if we are honest, we must confess that in science there exists no God, no immortality, no soul or mind as distinct from the body.
[Charles P. Steinmetz, American inventor and engineer, American Freeman, July 1941]
In the year before the schism, 25,000 communicants owned 208,000 slaves - over 9 percent of the total slave population - and 1,200 Methodist clergymen were themselves slaveholders. If anyone needed a barometer to measure the southern Methodist's official commitment to bondage he had only to consider the fact that every minister elevated to the rank of bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, between 1846 and the Civil War was a slaveholder
[Forrest G. Woods, on the division of the Methodist Episcopalian Church of 1844, in The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonia Era to the Twentieth Century, p.309]
In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled…; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree. The … Christian churches still demand assent to doctrines which no one seriously believes in. The most obvious case is the immortality of the soul.
[Orwell]
Incest is a voluntary act on the woman's part.
[Charles Rice, Professor of Law, Notre Dame University, in a pamphlet published by the American Life League]
Increasing knowledge lessens the sphere of the supernatural…
[Edward A. Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas]
Indeed, Mr. Jefferson, what could be invented to debase the ancient Christianism, which Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and Christian factions, above all the Catholics, have not fraudulently imposed upon the public? Miracles after miracles have rolled down in torrents, wave succeeding wave in the Catholic church, from the Council of Nicea, and long before, to this day.
[John Adams, to Jefferson, 3 December 1813]
Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character,
[W.T. Root, Prof. of Psychology at Univ. of Pittsburg, after examining 1,916 prisoners]
Infidel: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.
[Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), American author]
Infidels have been among the most indefatigable workers in every reform.
[B.F. Underwood, "Freethought Judged by Its Fruits" (1876)]
Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice.
[Robert Green Ingersoll]
Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.
[Madrak, in Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny]
Inspiration: A peculiar effect of divine flatulence emitted by the Holy Spirit which hisses into the ears of a few chosen of God….
[Voltaire]
Instead of school busing and prayer in schools, which are both controversial, why not a joint solution? Prayer in buses. Just drive these kids around all day and let them pray their fuckn' empty little heads off.
George Carlin
Integrity and honesty, not objectivity and certainty, are the highest virtues to which the theological enterprise can aspire. From this perspective, all human claims to possess objectivity, certainty, or infallibility are revealed as nothing but the weak and pitiable pleas of frantically insecure people who seek to live in a illusion because reality has proved to be too difficult. Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry. Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long-range future of anyone.
[Bishop John Shelby Spong, Episcopal (Anglican) Bishop of Newark, NY, in Resurrection: Myth or Reality? pg. 99]
Intellectual ambiguity can be very uncomfortable. It is always easier to be sure of something. A religion that neatly provides all the answers saves you the frustration and anxiety that inevitably accompany a stuggle with difficult questions. Fundamentalism is especially dogmatic and detailed in describing a grand scheme. The Bible is offered as the inerrant word of God, revealing the path of history, a plan of salvation, and predictions about the future. Reasons and justifications are given. And for questions that still remain, there is the ultimate comfort that comes with trusting that a benign father God had everything under control.
Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 54.
Intolerance is a beautiful thing…There are people that are politically correct that want to say the cardinal sin of the hour is intolerance and I think that is a bunch of junk.
[Randall Terry, Operation Rescue]
Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
[Steve Eley]
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
[Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), English biologist and advocate of Darwin's natural selection theory]
Is a church too small and too poor to pay taxes? That means that not enough people want the church seriously enough to pay for its upkeep. Then, why should such a church exist? Why should atheists, agnostics and non-churchgoers be forced to maintain such a useless, unwanted church by granting it tax exemption?
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
Is God fair? The Christians say that God damns forever anyone who is skeptical about truth of bunkistic religion as revealed unto the holy haranguers. What this means is that a God, if any, punishes a man for using his reason. If there is a God in existence, reasons should be available for his existence. Assuming that such a precious thing as a man's eternal future depends on his belief in a God, then the materials for that belief should be overwhelming and not at all doubtful. Yet here is a man whose reason makes it impossible for him to believe in a God. He sees no evidence of such an entity. He finds all the arguments weak and worthless. He doubts and he denies. Then is a God fair in visiting upon such a skeptic the penalty for his inevitable intellectual attitude? The intelligent man refuses to believe fairy tales. Can a God blame him? If so, then a God is not as fair as an ordinarily decent man. And fairness, we think, is more important than piety.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
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
Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any "miraculous" cures from faith-healing, beyond the body's own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose' of fraud and error in science is made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
Is it just me, or does anyone else read `bible humpers' every time someone writes `bible thumpers?'
[Joel M. Snyder]
Is it necessary to invoke the hand of the Almighty in something like understanding cell division or understanding an internal combustion engine? … If not, why is it necessary in understanding the history of life?
Eugenie Scott in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 27.
Is it not wonderful that the creator of all worlds, infinite in power and wisdom, could not hold his own against the gods of wood and stone? Is it not strange that after he had appeared to his chosen people, delivered them from slavery, feed them by miracles, opened the sea for a path, led them by cloud and fire, and overthrown their pursuers, they still preferred a calf of their own making?" (Exod. 32:1-8) "…a God who gave his entire time for 40 years to the work of converting three millions of people, and succeeded in getting only two men, and not a single woman, decent enough to enter the promised land?" (Num. 14:29-30)
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
Is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?
[Nietzsche]
Is there any limit to the depth of the evil that lies behind the fact that for centuries religion has treated 'freethinker' as a perjorative term?
Allen W. Wood (philosophy professor at Stanford), in Unsettling Obligations, Essays on Reason, Reality and the Ethics of Belief, p.71 (CSLI Pub., 2002).
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
[Douglas Adams]
It (modern philosophy) certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated.
[John Dewey]
It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
[Mark Twain]
It belongs to American liberty to separate entirely from the political government the institution which has its object the support and diffusion of religion.
[Prof. Francis Lieber (1802-1872), American constitutional authorities, as quoted in Anson Phelps Stokes, Church And State In The United States Vol I, p. 34-35]
It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an exercise for your kill-file.
[Bertil Jonell]
It can therefore be said that, from the viewpoint of the doctrine of the faith, there are no difficulites in explaining the origin of man, in regard to the body, by means of the theory of evolution.
[Pope John Paul II, April 16, 1986]
It cannot be too often repeated, that truth scorns the assistance of miracle.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
It could be a torture chamber or a dungeon or a hideous pit or anything!"
- "It's just a student's bedroom, sergeant."
- "You see?
(Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms)
It could be argued that the greatest confidence trick in the history of philosophy is the attempt to make the various arguments for the existence of God support each other by using the same term for the entity who existence each is supposed to establish. In fact, almost all of them bear on entities of apparently quite different kinds, ranging from a Creator to a moral Lawgiver. The proofs must, therefore, be supplemented with a further proof or set of proofs that shows these apparently different entities to be the same if the combination trick is to work. Otherwise the arguments must be taken separately, in which case they either establish or fail to establish the existence of a number of remarkable but unrelated entities.
Michael Scriven, "God and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 112.
It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is— if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.
Richard Feynman (The Character of Physical Law)
It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.
[L. Sprague de Camp]
It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science
Richard Dawkins
It has been contended for many years that the Ten Commandments are the foundations of all ideas of justice and law. Nothing can be more stupidly false. Thousands of years before Moses, the Egyptians had a code far better.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
It has been discovered that the man who was lost in thought was not a church member.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions. I believe it was Magellan who said, "The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the Church." On the prow of his ship were disobedience, defiance, scorn, and success.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, quoted in The Great Quotations]
It is a common saying that thought is free. A man can never be hindered from thinking whatever he chooses so long as he conceals what he thinks. The working of his mind is limited only by the bounds of his experience and the power of his imagination. But this natural liberty of private thinking is of little value. It is unsatisfactory and even painful to the thinker himself, if he is not permitted to communicate his thoughts to others, and it is obviously of no value to his neighbors. Moreover it is extremely difficult to hide thoughts that have any power over the mind. If a man's thinking leads him to call in question ideas and customs which regulate the behaviour of those about him, to reject the beliefs which they hold, to see better ways of life than those they follow, it is almost impossible for him, if he is convinced of the truth of his own reasoning, not to betray by silence, chance words, or general attitude that he is different from them and does not share their opinions. Some have preferred, like Socrates, some would prefer today, to face death rather than conceal their thoughts. Thus freedom of thought, in any valuable sense, includes freedom of speech.
[J.B. Bury, "A History of Freedom of Thought", 1913]
It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of it's own reason.
[Mary Wollstonecraft]
It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
Konrad Lorenz (1903 - 1989)
It is a matter of persisting. At a certain point on his path the absurd man is tempted. History is not lacking in either religions or prophets, even without gods. He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn't fully understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands. He is assured that this is the sin of pride, but he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in store, but he has not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that he is losing immortal life, but that seems to him an idle consideration. An attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels — his irreparable innocence. This is what allows him everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live /solely/ with what he knows, to accommodate himself with what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without /appeal/.
[Camus, "An Absurd Reasoning"]
It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.
Richard Dawkins
It is a waste of words to talk about God and what he knows and what he does. No man knows that God does anything, that God knows anything, or that there is a God.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
It is all very well to copy what you see, but it is much better to draw only what you still see in your memory. This is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. Then you only reproduce what has struck you, that is to say the essential, and so your memories and your fantasy are freed from the tyranny which nature holds over them.
Edgar Degas
It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe..
Richard Dawkins
It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.
Thomas Jefferson, (letter to Rev. James Madison, July 19, 1788)
It is an absurd fiction that the churches are useful. They are nothing more than propaganda centers for superstitious faiths and doctrines. Church members have a right to believe in and propagate their various doctrines. But they should pay every item of the cost, of this propaganda, including fair taxation for all church property.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.
Richard Dawkins
It is an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations with all their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.
[Gloria Steinem]
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]
It is apparent that Darwin lost his faith in the years 1836-39, much of it clearly prior to the reading of Malthus. In order not to hurt the feelings of his friends and of his wife, Darwin often used deistic language in his publications, but much in his Notebooks indicates that by this time he had become a 'materialist' (more or less = atheist).
Ernst Mayr
It is best to read the weather forcast before praying for rain.
[Mark Twain]
It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.
[Mark Twain]
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
[Voltaire]
It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon that book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
It is contrary to the truth and completely unfounded for the Moral Majority to continue to condemn Humanism as 'amoral' and 'the most dangerous religion in the world.' It mistakes certain moral advances approved by Humanists for the equivalent of moral breakdown. The Moral Majority's own morality is absolutistic in that it believes it alone possesses God's truth, and that there is no room for the discussion or dissent, which is the essence of democracy. This self-righteous Moral Majority — which we are happy to know is actually a minority — greatly needs to improve its own moral values, as evident in its crude and false denunciations of organizations and individuals.
Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Seventh ed., New York: Continuum, 1990), p. xi.
It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are.
[Ovid, "Ars Amatoria"]
It is curious that not only the physicists, but even the theologians, seem to find something new in the arguments from modern physics. Physicists, perhaps can scarcely be expected to know the history of theology, but the theologians ought to be aware that the modern arguments have all had their counterparts at earlier times.
Bertrand Russell, "Science and Religion" (1931) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 178.
It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.
[Samuel Butler]
It is difficult to believe in a religion that places such a high premium on chastity and virginity.
[Madonna]
It is difficult to imagine evolutionists signing a comparable statement, that they will never deviate from the literal text of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The non-scientific nature of creation-science is evident for all to see, as is also its religious nature.
Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1996) p. 360.
It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
R. Serling
It is easier to believe that a man is honest who says the Bible is the word of God than to believe that he is bright.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Thomas Jefferson
It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
Richard Dawkins
It is fear that first brought gods into the world.
[Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon]
It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.
Richard Dawkins
It is hard to say whether the doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery.
[Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society, 1757]
It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind.
HL Mencken
It is important to distinguish between the moral witness of religious people who speak out strongly about an issue that offends their moral conscience, and the use of religion as a strategic means to advance the fortunes of a particular party or candidate.
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, "Is God a Republican?" The American Prospect September-October 1996.
It is important to recognize that, in maintaining that irreducibly random processes exist, contemporary physics does not propose that those processes are lawless or unordered. Instead, it is claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are probabilistic. A probabilistic law is a statement asserting that, in a particular type of situation, a particular type of outcome will occur with a particular probability.
Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 87.
It is impossible to devise a scientific experiment to describe the creation process, or even to ascertain whether such a process can take place. The Creator does not create at the whim of a scientist.
Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism, (General edition, second edition, El Cajon, CA: Master, 1985), p. 5.
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.
[H.L. Mencken]
It is in the book of man, not the book of god, that we must look for examples of heroism, love, pity, justice, truth, honor, humanity.
[M.M. Mangasarian, The Bible Unveiled]
It is in the temporal affairs of mankind, not in the delusions of religious faiths, that man's actual well being and happiness on this earth is attainable.
[Culbert L. Olson, "Secularism and Social Progress". 1961]
It is indeed better (as no one ever could deny) that men should be led to worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; but it does not follow that because the former course produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected. For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching, or might follow out in act what they had already learned in word.
[St. Augustine, Treatise on the Correction of the Donatists (417), p.214]
It is interesting that every time God gives direct orders to anyone, it is always "Thou shalt kill.
[Newsweek magazine]
It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.
[Harriet Martineau]
It is necessary for men to be deceived in religion.
[Marcus Terentius Varro]
It is necessary to distinguish between the virtue and the vice of obedience.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
It is normally possible to be much more certain who your children are than who your brothers are. And you can be more certain still who you yourself are!
Richard Dawkins
It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief.
[George Bernard Shaw]
It is not guilt or innocence, or even justice itself that drives our prosecutorial criminal justice system, it is the political advantage gained by winning.
It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1950
It is not the slavish remnant of a religious worldview to admit that the person who has gone and looked is more of an authority than one who has not. It is not just convention which dictates that years of surveying, or years in the archive or laboratory give you a better title to be listened to on your subject than years spent ignoring the issue.
Simon Blackburn
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
[H.L. Mencken]
It is often said, mainly by the "no-contests", that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
Richard Dawkins
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
[Voltaire]
It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
[H.L. Mencken]
It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.
Richard Feynman (What Do You Care What Other People Think?)
It is part of the irony of life that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are called for in human beings towards those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from using that power. How great a place in most men this sentiment fills, even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire. We daily see how much their gratitude to Heaven appeares to be stimulated by the contemplation of fellow-creatures to whom God has not been so merciful as he has to themselves.
John Stuart Mill. 1869. The Subjection of Women. pp. 150-151. (Stefan Collini, ed.)
It is plain enough that men and women care for God. This is too apparent to be disputed, unless men and women are hypocrites. What is not so plain is that God cares for men and women.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so