'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 Gr�nbaum 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 don�t 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, he�d 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 �null hypothesis,� 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, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
[Bertrand Russell]
It is possible to pay another man's debts on his behalf, but it is not possible to make a guilty man innocent by suffering in his place.
[Carl Lofmark, What is the Bible?]
It is possible to pay another man's debts on his behalf, but it is not possible to make a guilty man innocent by suffering in his place.
[Carl Lofmark, What is the Bible?]
It is probably safe to say that since the late 1960s, nearly every major religious group in the country has tried to get some offending TV material altered or banned. So has every racial minority group and almost every important national-ethnic group.
[Max Gunther, in TV Guide article, February 9, 1974]
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
[Giordano Bruno (1548-burned at the stake,1600)]
It is quite unlawful to demand, defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, or speech, of writing or worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man.
[Pope Leo XIII, "Great Encyclical Letters",16]
It is regrettable that a Dostoyevski did not live near this most interesting of all decadents—I mean someone who would have known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike.
[Nietzsche, on Jesus Christ]
It is said that whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long.
(Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)
It is scandalous that any modern, intelligent, well- educated person should believe in Christianity.
[Delos B. McKown, Ph.D., U.S. professor, philosopher, author, Former clergyman]
It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.
[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies"]
It is telling that Craig wants to justify his use of the appeal to consensus. And in doing so, he appeals to a false analogy. In a court of Law, or in the certtification of doctors, lawyers, etc., we may have to go with the verdict of the majority since we have not the leisure to master the subject ourselves. This, in turn, is because we do not have all the time in the world before we must return a verdict, choose a surgeon, etc. We have to make a choice, and the voice of the consensus tips the balance. But it only seems to us that we must take the word of the mass in biblical discussions if we think that here, too, the decision is a matter of practical, even life-or-death choice, and this is not the case in an intellectual consideration of complex issues.
Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"
It is the creationists who blasphemously are claiming that God is cheating us in a stupid way.
[J. W. Nienhuys]
It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-biased media and the homosexuals who want to destroy all Christians
[Pat Robertson, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sept. 14, 1993]
It is the duty of every true Deist to vindicate the moral justice of God against the evils of the Bible.
Thomas Paine
It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.
Charles Pierce
It is the position of some theists that their right to freedom OF religion is abridged when they are not allowed to violate the Rationalists right to freedom FROM religion.
[James T. Green, jgreen@trumpet.calpoly.edu]
It is the things for which there is no evidence that are believed with passion. "Nobody feels any passion about the multiplication table or about the existence of Cape Horn, because these matters are not doubtful. "But in matters of theology or political theory, where a rational man will hold that at best there is a slight balance of probability on one side or the other, people argue with passio and support their opinions by physical slavery imposed by armies and mental slavery imposed by schools.
Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 106.
It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a FACT, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution.
[R. C. Lewontin "Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth" Bioscience 31, 559 (1981) reprinted in EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATIONISM]
It is true, of course, that the phrase 'separation of church and state' does not appear in the Constitution. But it was inevitable that some convenient term should come into existence to verbalize a principle so clearly and widely held by the American people…. [T]he right to a fair trial is generally accepted to be a constitutional principle; yet the term "fair trial" is not found in the Constitution. To bring the point even closer home, who would deny that "religious liberty" is a constitutional principle? Yet that phrase too is not in the Constitution. The universal acceptance which all these terms, including "separation of church and state," have received in America would seem to confirm rather than disparage their reality as basic American democratic principles.
Leo Pfeffer, Church, State, and Freedom (Beacon Press: Boston, 1967).
It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no reason whatsoever for supposing it to be true.
[Bertrand Russell]
It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.
[Ilka Chase]
It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.
[Denis Diderot]
It is well said that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," and I am confirmed every day in my intense conviction that the church as the church is the enemy of freedom. While protesting loudly its faith in the Truth with a capital T, "the truth shall make us free," it fights at every step every effort to learn the truth and publish it and be guided by it.
[Rupert Hughes. "Why I Quit Going to Church", 1924]
It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
[Helen Keller]
It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
W. K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 282.
It is your god-given right to destroy any man or woman calling themselves doctors who willingly slaughter innocent children.
[Keith Tucci, Exec. Dir, Operation Rescue]
It is, therefore, our unequivocal conclusion that creationism, with its accounts of the origin of life by supernatural means, is not science.
["Science and Creationism", National Academy Press, 1984]
It isn't God I have a problem with! It's those damn Christian interpretations of him!
Lloyd Stanley 1954 (Spoken to a Christian who was heckling him at a freedom of religion conference)
It isn’t Christianity that is the defining aspect of American history, it’s racism.
It makes a big difference if we think of God as a person or as a force. One way you get Christianity, the other you get Star Wars.
[Jayne Kulikauskas]
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, through out the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and invisibly working…We see nothing of theses slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages.
Stephen Jay Gould
It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.
Richard Dawkins
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
Arthur C. Clarke.
It needs but to glance over the world and to contemplate the doings of Christians everywhere to be amazed at the ineffectiveness of current theology. Or it needs only to look back over past centuries and the iniquities alike of populace, nobles, kings, and popes to perceive an almost incomprehensible futility of the beliefs everywhere held and perpetually insisted upon.
[Herbert Spencer, "Facts and Comments", 1901]
It never ceases to amaze me at how many religions depend upon circumsized penises.
[Dawn Henderson]
It rains on the just and the unjust," but rarely just enough on either.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.
Richard Dawkins
It remains one of the most baffling yet affecting phenomena in modern religious life: A beam of light or a spot of dirt in an otherwise ordinary place is perceived as the image of the Virgin Mary, and suddenly thousands of pilgrims descend on the site, turning it into a makeshift shrine. …In previous years, it has been a vision in the sky, a glint off a car bumper, a face in a tortilla, a tear on an icon. …But while church leaders are often loath to debunk a visionary experience, not wanting to damage the faith of thousands, they are also leery of letting such events get out of hand. If someone who claims to have communicated with the divine begins spreading teachings that are contrary to church dogma, bishops have not hesitated to step in.
[David Firestone, Newsday, Press Democrat, 23 December 1990]
It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
[Marquis de Sade]
It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we're dumb, then god is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side.
[Frank Zappa]
It seems getting BJs makes for good presidents. Perhaps it should be a requirement of office. In fact, maybe we should strap a pair of kneepads on Monica and after she’s done with Cowboy George we can send her over to the Middle East.
It seems obvious to me that the notion of God has never been anything but a kind of ideal projection, a reflection upward of the human personality, and that theology never has been and never can be anything but a more and more purified mythology.
[Alfred F. Loisy, "My Duel with the Vatican"]
It seems quite unlikely that all the instances of intense suffering occurring daily in our world are intimately related to the occurrence of a greater good or the prevention of evils at least as bad; and even more unlikely, should they somehow all be so related, that an omnipotent, omniscient being could not have achieved at least some of those goods (or prevented some of those evils) without permitting the instances of intense suffering that are supposedly related to them. In the light of our experience and knowledge of the variety and scale of human and animal suffering in our world, the idea that none of this suffering could have been prevented by an omnipotent being without thereby losing a greater good or permitting an evil at least as bad seems an extraordinarily absurd idea, quite beyond our belief.
William L. Rowe, "The Problem of Evil & Some Varieties of Atheism" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 5.
It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us. Chance and historical contingency give the world of life most of its glory and fascination.
Stephen Jay Gould
It seems to follow that there is no general reason to expect evolution to be progressive—even in the weak, value-neutral sense. There will be times when increased size of some organ is favoured and other times when decreased size is favoured. Most of the time, average-sized individuals will be favoured in the population and both extremes will be penalised. During these times the population exhibits evolutionary stasis (ie, no change) with respect to the factor being measured. If we had a complete fossil record and looked for trends in some particular dimension, such as leg length, we would expect to see periods of no change alternating with fitful continuations or reversals in direction—like a weathervane in changeable, gusty weather."
Richard Dawkins
It seems to me that it could simply be denied that it is appropriate to describe the universe as an entity which 'pops into existence' or which 'begins to exist' even if it is true that the universe is temporally finite. Suppose we think of the universe as a distribution of properties over an at-least-four-dimensional finite manifold. (So we shall be B-series theorists and substantivalists.) Among the questions we need to answer, there are the following: (i) does the manifold in question have any boundaries?; (ii) if the manifold does have boundaries, are these boundaries open or closed?; (iii) if the universe does have boundaries, does time extend all the way to these boundaries (or is it a local phenomenon, restricted to some sub-portion of the manifold)? Suppose—to consider just one epistemically possible option—that the universe is bounded and closed, but that time is a local phenomenon. Then it could surely turn out to be the case that there is nothing which begins to exist which does not have a cause, and yet that the universe—which is not itself an entity in time—does not begin to exist (and hence does not need a cause to explain how it 'pops into existence'). Even in a temporally finite universe, there needn't be any uncaused events—for the time-series might be appropriately modelled by an open interval on the real number line.
Graham Oppy, "Reply to Professor Craig" (1995)
It seems to me that one of the prime jobs of every educated man on this earth is to denounce charlatans. New ones are always popping up, and the common run of idiots are always succumbing to them. There is little if any difference between one and another.
HL Mencken
It should be made clear that in order to live a Christian life, any Christian must be able to discriminate and hate, because that's what the bible says.
[Bernhard Kuiper, Colorado Springs pastor]
It should be noted that it could be argued that there is something repugnant about the idea that one might make use of Rescher's version of Pascal's Wager argument in the service of apologetics. The reason for this claim is that, in order to use the argument as a tool of apologetics, we do not need to suppose that it is a good argument in the second of the two senses distinguished earlier in this paper. If the point is just to get people to believe in God, then it doesn't matter whether it is overall most reasonable for there people to believe in God—and so we could, quite cynically, make full use of the Wager argument against not terribly bright people in full knowledge of the fact that the argument is defective (i.e. in full knowledge of the fact that it is not reasonable to accept all of the premises of the argument). However, if we care about what it is most rational for people to believe (in the light of the evidence which they currently possess, and in light of the cognitive abilities which they enjoy), then it would be irresponsible (and indeed immoral) for us to use the Wager argument on the sorts of people in whom it could reasonably be expected to bring about belief. (If we think that there are independent means of showing that God exists, then we should appeal to those means. If we think there are no such independent arguments, then perhaps we should question our own belief that God exists.)
Graham Oppy, "On Rescher On Pascal's Wager" (1990)
It should be noted that many non-theists would object to the idea that their position can be encapsulated in the slogan that 'being arises out of absolute non-being'.
Graham Oppy, "Professor William Craig's Criticisms of Critiques of Kalam Cosmological Arguments By Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, And Adolf Grünbaum" (1995)
It should surprise no one that the great mainstream of biblical scholars hold views friendly to traditional Christianity, for the simple reason that most biblical scholars are and always have been believing Christians, even if not fundamentalists. It is only the pious arrogance of Craig's evangelicalism (which denies the name "Christian" to anyone without a personal tete-a-tete with Jesus) that allows him to implicitly depict New Testament scholars as a bunch of newly-chastened skeptics with their tails between their legs. Even Bultmann, a devout Lutheran, was much less skeptical than Baur and Strauss.
Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"
It takes the shingles from the widow's cottage to put paint on the house of God.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.
[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies"]
It was a Christian university dedicated to the Christian education of Christians, and this purpose still dominated the campus. It was there like a dense fog shrouding low-lying land on still summer mornings - never a real hindrance to progress but frequently a nuisance to vision. It seemed to be heaviest around the Administration Building.
[Ferrol Sams, "The Whisper Of The River"]
It was all very well going about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact was that the disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.
(Terry Pratchett, Colour of Magic)
It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don't need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they're progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they'll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable.
(Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)
It was once proposed that all religions persuasions should be free and their worship publicly exercised. We Catholics have rejected this article as contrary to Roman Catholic canon law.
[Pope Pius VII, 1808]
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
Hunter S. Thompson
It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented the things of heaven and the redeeming drops of blood: but even these sweet and dismal poisons they took from the body and the earth!
[Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra]
It was the sort of thing you expected in the Street of Alchemists. The neighbours preferred explosions, which were at least identifiable and soon over. They were better than the smells, which crept up on you.
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. 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, 1954, from "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press]
It wasn't a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but there's the weather for you. For every mad scientist who's had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is complete and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who've sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime.
(Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it are among its worst and least pleasant examples.
It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.
[Abraham Lincoln, from "What Great Men Think Of Religion" by Ira Cardiff]
It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible.
[George W. Foote]
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
George Wald
It would be a pretty good bet that the gods of a world like this probably do not play chess and indeed this is the case. In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven't got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religions is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
(Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.
[Sigmund Freud]
It would require higher authority than that of Christ and his biographers to convince any classical scholar that he escaped from the tomb after the Roman guard had been set. That every soldier on the vigil slept at his post is one of the most incredible of the incredible statements we are expected to believe in order to be 'saved.'" W.S. Ross, "Did Jesus Christ Rise from the Dead?
An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 211.
It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?
(Terry Pratchett, Mort)
It's all very well to say he [Pat Robertson] can't be nominated or elected, though even that remains to be seen. What does it say, meanwhile, about the American people and the system by which they choose their leaders, that a former faith healer, a man who boasted that his religious appeals could change the course of hurricanes, should have become perhaps a decisive factor in the presidential nomination of a major party?
[Tom Wicker, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, 18 February 1988]
It's 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's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?
Richard Dawkins
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
[Calvin, "Calvin and Hobes" strip by Bill Waterson]
It's not listed in the Bible, but my spiritual gift, my specific calling from God, is to be a television talk-show host.
[James Bakker]
It's one thing to put your faith in a religion founded by a real person who claimed divine revelation, but it's something else entirely to have, as the scripture of your religion, a storyline that you know was made up by a very nonprophetic human being.
Orson Scott Card, on the "Jedi" religion
It's only work if somebody makes you do it
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damage [sic] baby even ten years later when she may be happily married.
[Phyllis Schlafly]
It's your god. They're your rules. You go to hell.
It’s a bright beautiful world to see, but if you would like to experience it as a conservative, put on a welding helmet.
It’s easy to rattle off the names of great liberals: Jesus, Buddha, Copernicus, DaVinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, Voltaire, Locke, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Darwin, Dickens, Hugo, Melville, Lincoln, Twain, Picasso, Einstein, Darrow, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And great conservatives? Hmmm. Cotton Mather and Ronald Reagan is about it I guess.
It’s really weird when conservatives enjoin us to all have a national discussion about blowjobs but refuse to participate in a similar discussion concerning race.
Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.
Justice Black describing the Establishment Clause of the 1st Ammendment
Its no use! Everybody gets good enemies except me.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
James Dobson and Focus on the Family represent the greatest threat to constitutional liberties in our time.
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. 17
Jefferson's Danbury letter has been cited favorably by the Supreme Court many times. In its 1879 Reynolds vs. U.S. decision the high court said Jefferson's observations 'may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the [First] Amendment.' In the court's 1947 Everson v. Board of Education decision, Justice Hugo Black wrote, 'In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state.' It is only in recent times that separation has come under attack by judges in the federal court system who oppose separation of church and state.
Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 221
Jesus Christ never commanded toleration as a motive for His disciples, and toleration is the antithesis of the Christian message.
["The Southern Baptist Convention and Freemasonry" by James L. Holly, Page 30]
Jesus Christ: A common exclamation indicating surprise, disgust, anger or bewilderment.
[Chaz Bufe, The American Heretic's Dictionary]
Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.
[Patti Smith]
Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine.
[Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). "Thus Spake Zarathustra"]
Jesus is just a word I use to swear with.
[Richard Harris]
Jesus loves the little zygotes All the zygotes in the world Jesus gives them birth defects Missing fingers, crooked necks Jesus loves the little zygotes of the world
[Frank Zindler]
Jesus loves you but I'm his favorite.
Bumper sticker
Jesus rose from the dead and the apostles came unto him saying "How's Elvis?"
Jesus said, 'Love your neighbors.' Well, I do love them. I love to kill them.
["Nasty Nick," Croatian Policeman]
Jesus was a crackpot.
[Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, San Francisco Chronicle 12/17/85]
Jesus was a Jew, yes, but only on his mother's side.
[Stanley Ralph Ross]
Jesus was mentioned in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews….The Jewish historian certainly knew something about Jesus, and there is a paragraph on him in the Antiquities. But Josephus' works were preserved by Christian scribes, who could not resist the temptation to revise the text and thus make Josephus proclaim that Jesus was 'the Messiah'; that he taught 'the truth'; and that after death he was 'restored to life'. Failing a fluke discovery, we shall never know what Josephus actually wrote.
[E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus ISBN 0-713-99059-7]
Jesus! How much more of this cheap-jack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if he's lonely and depressed down there in San Clemente? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark—on Richard Nixon's life after resignation
Hunter S. Thompson
Jim Bakker spells his name with 2 k's because 3 would be too obvious.
[Bill Maher, host of Politically Incorrect]
Joe McCarthy was finally forced to stop his witch hunt because he had to answer to the Senate; fascist little shit Ken Starr answers to no one.
John Wesley said that if you give up the witchcraft, you must give up the Bible. He is right. The choice is easy for me.
[Rupert Hughes]
Just as Philo, learned in Greek speculation, had felt a need to rephrase Judaism in forms acceptable to the logic-loving Greeks, so John, having lived for two generations in a Hellenistic environment, sought to give a Greek philosophical tinge to the mystic Jewish doctrine that the Wisdom of God was a living being, and to the Christian doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah. Consciously or not, he continued Paul's work of detaching Christianity from Judaism. Christ was no longer presented as a Jew, living more or less under the Jewish Law; he was make to address the Jews as "you," and to speak of their Law as "yours"; he was not a Messiah sent "to save the lost sheep of Israel," he was the coeternal Son of God; not merely the future judge of mankind, but the primeval creator of the universe. In this perspective the Jewish life of the man Jesus could be put into the background, faded almost as in Gnostic heresy; and the god Christ was assimilated to the religious and philosophical traditions of the Hellenistic mind. Now the pagan world— even the anti-Semitic world—could accept him as its own.
[Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization]
Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases.
[Thomas Carlyle, English writer]
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
[Clarence Darrow]
Justifying space exploration because we get non-stick frying pans is like justifying music because it is good exercise for the violinists right arm.
Richard Dawkins
Justifying the claim that something does not exist is not quite the same as proving or having arguments that it doesn't, but it is what we are talking about. That is, we need not have a proof that God does not exist in order to justify atheism. Atheism is obligatory in the absence of any evidence for God's existence.
Michael Scriven, "God and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 105.
Keep your faith in God, but keep your powder dry.
[Oliver Cromwell]
Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man … , keep alive for yourselves.
[Moses, relaying God's orders to his people, Numbers 31:17-18]
Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are God.
[Jean Rostand (1894-1977) French biologist, writer]
Kill them all. God will select those who should go to heaven and those who should go to hell.
[Abbot Arnold de Citeaux, 1205]
Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that?
[Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin 'Time' magazine, 31st Jan 1994]
Laying up treasures in heaven never kept a man out of the poor-house.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
Leave it to a girl to take the fun out of sex discrimination.
Bill Watterson, Calvin in "Calvin and Hobbes"
Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separated.
[Ulysses S. Grant, speech to the Army of the Tennessee, Des Moines,Iowa, 1875]
Legitimate truth is the product of evidence, not of our willingness to believe.
[#11 Timotheus]
Lemon v. Kurtzman, is not only that government may not be overtly hostile to religion, but also that it may not place its prestige, coercive authority, or resources behind a single religious faith or behind religious belief in general, compelling nonadherents to support the practices or proselytizing of favored religious organizations and conveying the message that those who do not contribute gladly are less than full members of the community.
[U.S. Supreme Court, Texas Monthly v. Bullock]
Leon Lederman, the physicist and Nobel laureate, once half-jokingly remarked that the real goal of physics was to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on a T-shirt. In that spirit, Dawkins offered up his own T-shirt slogan for the ongoing evolution revolution:
Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.
Richard Dawkins
Let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good…. If a Christian voted for Clinton, he sinned against God. It's that simple…. 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. We want theocracy. Theocracy means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules.
[Randall Terry, Head of Operation Rescue, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Aug 15, 1993]
Let Bhagwans be Bhagwans.
[Washington Post]
Let Catholic writers take care when defending the cause of the proletariat and the poor not to use language calculated to inspire among the people aversion to the upper classes of society.
[Pope Pius X, letter to the bishops of Italy, 18 December 1903]
Let me confess at once that I find something profoundly impious, almost blasphemous, about setting limits of any sort on the power of God to bring things about in any manner he chooses. If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures? A god whose creation is so imperfect that he must be continually adjusting it to make it work properly seems to me a god of relatively low order, hardly worthy of any worship.
[Martin Gardner, The Ambidextrous Universe pg.136]
Let me try to make crystal clear what is established beyond reasonable doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about evolutionary mechanisms.
[Theodosius Dobzhansky "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher vol.35 (March 1973) reprinted in EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATIONISM, J. Peter Zetterberg ed., ORYX Press, Phoenix AZ 1983]
Let me try to make crystal clear what is established beyond reasonable doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about evolutionary mechanisms.
[Theodosius Dobzhansky "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher vol.35 (March 1973) reprinted in EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATIONISM, J. Peter Zetterberg ed., ORYX Press, Phoenix AZ 1983] ———- "Are we courting you? Maybe we are, but what's wrong with that? You are the glue that holds America together.
[Bob Dole, to a rally of the Christian Coalition]
Let me use their own terminology against them. They aborted a child in the 200th trimester.
[Dennis Miller]
Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you thinks he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of the world is folly with God.
Paul, 1 Corinthians 3:18-19 "The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
Paul, 1 Corinthians 2:14
Let us condemn to hellfire all those who disagree with us.
[militant religionists everywhere]
Let us have faith that van Inwagen's god does not exist, and, if it does, our duty is to resist it with all of the energy and courage we can muster.
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.
Let us start a new religion with one commandment, 'Enjoy thyself.'
[Israel Zangwill]
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
Richard Dawkins
Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
Richard Dawkins
Let's "focus on what is, I believe, the major weakness of the argument based on the analogy between God and the loving parent. What happens when a loving parent intentionally permits her child to suffer intensely for the sake of a distant good that cannot otherwise be realized? In such instances the parent attends directly to the child throughout its period of suffering, comforts the child to the best of her ability, expresses her concern and love for the child in ways that are unmistakably clear to the child, why it is necessary for her to permit the suffering even though it is in her power to prevent it. In short, during these periods of intentionally permitted intense suffering, the child is consciously aware of the direct presence, love, and concern for the parent, and receives special assurances from the parent that, if not why, the suffering (or the parent's permission of it) is necessary for some distant good.
William L. Rowe, "The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 276.
Libertarians are just radical Right-wingers who have not one care for anything or anyone other than themselves. They are mostly asocial computer nerds who have spent the major portion of their lives sitting in their bedrooms wishing someone liked them.
Life can be beautiful, profound, and awe-inspiring, even without an irate god threatening us with eternal torment.
Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.
Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.
[Butch Hancock]
Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear wherever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the earth.
[Harold Urey, Time magazine, 24 November 1952]
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It�s the transition that�s troublesome.
Isaac Asimov
Life is sacred? Who said so, God? Hey, if you read history you'll realize that God is one of the leading causes of death…has been for thousands of years. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, all taking turns killing each other because God told them it was a good idea.
George Carlin
Life is simply the reification of the process of living.
Ernst Mayr
Life's disappointments are harder to take when you don't know any swear words.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
Benjamin Franklin
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male)."
1. The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith.'
Richard Dawkins
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.
Richard Dawkins
Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts — there is just too much misery and cruelty for that. On the other hand, I respect and envy the people who get inspiration from their religions.
[Benjamin Spock]
Lisa: Why are you dedicating your life to blasphemy?
Homer: Don't worry, sweetheart. If I'm wrong, I'll recant on my deathbed.
The Simpsons
Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes.
[Nietzsche]
Logical thinking empowers the mind in a way that no other kind of thinking can. It frees the highly educated from the habit of presuming every claim to be true until proven false. It enables average Americans to stand up against the forces of political correctness, see through the chicanery, and make independent decisions for themselves. And it is the bulwark against intellectual servitude for the underprivleged.
Marilyn vos Savant, The Power of Logical Thinking, (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), p. xix.
Look at the God idea from any angle, and it is foolish, it doesn't make sense, but extravagantly proposes more mysteries than it assumes to explain. For instance, is it sensible that a real God would leave mankind in such confusion and debate about his character and his laws? There have been many alleged revelations of God. There have, indeed, been many Gods as there have been many Bibles. And in different ages and different lands an endless game of guessing and disputing has gone on. Men have argued blindly about God. They still argue — just as blindly. And if there is a God, we must conclude that he has willfully left men in the dark. He has not wanted men to know about him. Assuming his existence, then it would follow that he would have perfect ability to give a complete and universal explanation of himself, so that all men could see and know without further uncertainty. A real God could exhibit himself clearly to all men and have all men following his will to the last letter without a doubt or a slip. But when we examine even cursorily the many contradictory revelations of God, the many theories and arguments, the many and diverse principles of piety, we perceive that all this talk about God his been merely the natural floundering of human ignorance. There has been no reality in the God idea which men could discover and agree upon. The spectacle has been exactly what we should expect when men deal with theories of something which does not exist. Hidden Gods — no Gods — all we see is man's poor guesswork.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.
Stephen Jay Gould
Lots of men who would not associate with infidels for fear of contaminating their characters are not yet out of jail.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
Louisiana's [1981] creationism law, which requires creationism to be taught wherever the theory of evolution is explained, is unconstitutional, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled yesterday…. 'The act's intended effect is to discredit evolution by counterbalancing its teaching at every turn with the teaching of creationism, a religious belief,' the U.S. Court of Appeals said.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 9 July 1985 (AP)]
Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun.
Matt Groening
Love is like racing across the frozen tundra on a snowmobile which flips over, trapping you underneath. At night, the ice-weasels come.
Matt Groening
Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
[Mark Twain]
Madison observed in criticizing religious presidential proclamations, the practice of sponsoring religious messages tends, over time, -to narrow the recommendation to the standard of the predominant sect.- Madison's -Detached Memoranda,- 3 Wm. & Mary Q. 534, 561 (E. Fleet ed. 1946)"]
[Justice Souter, concurring opinion in Lee Vs. Weisman]
Making fun of born-again christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
[P.J. O'Rourke]
Man always deceives himself when he abandons experience to follow imaginary systems. He is the work of Nature. He exists in Nature. He is submitted to her laws. He cannot deliver himself from them. He cannot step beyond them even in thought.
[Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, "The System of Nature"]
Man created God in his own image.
Man created God, not God, man
[Guiseppi Garibaldi]
Man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.
Stephen Jay Gould
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
[Bertrand Russell]
Man is a dog's ideal of what God should be.
[Andre Malraux]
Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.
Mark Twain
Man is a Religious Animal. Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion — several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.
[Letters from the Earth, Mark Twain]
Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no intensity of though and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave.
[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian"]
Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacrilizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.
[Mircea Eliade]
Man must learn to rely upon himself. Reading bibles will not protect him from the blasts of winter, but houses, fires. and clothing will. To prevent famine, one plow is worth a million sermons, and even patent medicines will cure more diseases than all the prayers uttered since the beginning of the world.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Man should cease to expect aid from on high. By this time he should know that heaven has no ear to hear, and no hand to help. The present is the necessary child of all the past. There has been no chance, and there can be no interference.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Man, as a curious accident in a backwater, is intelligible: his mixture of virtues and vices is such as might be expected to result from a fortuitous origin. But only abysmal self-complacency can see in Man a reason which Omniscience could consider adequate as a motive for the Creator. The Copernican revolution will not have done its work until it has taught men more modesty than is to be found among those who think Man sufficient evidence of Cosmic Purpose.
Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 222.
Manila. Cardinal Jaime Sin yesterday ordered Roman Catholics who vote in next month's Philippine national elections to reject Communists and candidates who advocate divorce or abortion. …Sin, who distributed copies of the letter at a press conference, insisted that church and state are separate in the Philippines.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 23 April 1987 (Los Angeles Times)]
Many good souls protest against a destructive criticism of Christianity and demand a substitute. I do not feel any obligation to substitute a new god for the old ones. I should gladly let them all go. I do not approve of cancer, and yet I do not feel that I have no right to attack a quack who promises a false cure until I have no real cure to propose. As someone said: he who helps destroy the boll-weevil has done as constructive work as he who plants the seed.
[Rupert Hughes, "Why I Quit Going to Church"]
Many men go into the ministry not only for the power trip involved, but also so that they will never have to be interrupted or contradicted.
[Frank Zindler, Dial An Atheist, 1990, p. 170]
Many New Testament scholars have observed that the conception of the resurrection body implied in 1 Corinthians 15 clashes so violently with that presupposed in the gospels that the latter must be dismissed as secondary embellishments, especially as 1 Corinthians predates the gospels.
Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"
Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view.
[Ben Kenobi]
Many of those people involved in Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many were homosexuals — the two things seem to go together
[Pat Robertson, ADL report on Religious Right, page 131]
Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
[Bertrand Russell]
Many persons who claim that they are "clothed with righteousness" do not seem to have got very good fits.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.
(Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
Many years ago Christian pioneers had to fight savage Indians. Today missionaries of these former cultures are being sent via the public schools to heathenize our children.
[Phylis Schlafly's Eagle Forum]
Many, many Christians claim a personal relationship with Jesus. I do not know whether this helps their bowling scores.
[Russell Turpin, turpin@cs.utexas.edu]
Marge, have you ever actually sat down and read this thing? Technically, we're not even allowed to go to the bathroom.
[Priest on "The Simpson's"]
Mark's declaration that Jesus came from the dispersion (nazareth), meaning the worldwide community of Jews outside Judaea (equivalent to diaspora), was misinterpreted by Matthew and Luke to mean that he came from a city called Nazareth [to fulfill prophesy]. In fact the term nazarite, or nazoraios, had nothing to do with any city of Nazareth, since no such place existed until the fifth century CE when one was built by a Christian Emperor to whom the nonexistence of Jesus' alleged hometown was an embarrassment. (Although the site of Nazareth was occupied in the first century, there is no evidence of any village named Nazareth earlier than the fifth century….)
[William Harwood, Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus (Prometheus), p. 260]
Marriage Ceremony: An incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the law being dragged into the affairs of your family.
[O. C. Ogilvie]
Martyrdom is the only way in which a person with no ability can become great.
[George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)]
Martyrs have been sincere. And so have tyrants. Wise men have been sincere. And so have fools.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
Mathematics is as little a science as grammar is a language.
Ernst Mayr
May theists be shaved with Ockham's Razor!
Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested...
Hunter S. Thompson
McDonald's has announced plans to open a restaurant at Lourdes, the French grotto that Catholics believe is a site of miraculous healing. The fast- food restaurant will open in November or December. The grotto of Lourdes, visited by 5.5 million people a year, is said to be where St. Bernardette had a vision of the Virgin Mary in the middle of the 19th century.
[Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 March 1991]
Medicine makes people ill, mathematics makes them sad, and theology makes them sinful.
Martin Luther
Men become civilized not in proportion to their willingness to believe but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
[H. L. Menchen]
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal (Pensees, 1670)
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
[Robert Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"]
Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.
Hippocrates
Men whose lives are doubtful want a strong government and a hot religion.
[Elbert Hubbard]
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
[Denis Diderot, "Dithyrambe sur la fete de rois"]
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
[H.L. Mencken, "Prejudices"]
Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot?
[Thomas Pynchon]
Mine is a euphoria that is a long time in the waiting. It is to my delight that I should be able to share with you the incomparable joy of seeing the Church, of which I am now formally a member of, go to ashes. It must have been God himself who is behind this heroic conflagration! Even He has more respect for real religions than do these Christians.
Sherman Harborough- 1863 (After watching a Christian church burn to the ground during the Civil War. Harborough was a former Christian Pastor turned Deist)
Mine is not a celestial state" with idle hymns of praise
[Eddie Vedder, "Angel"]
Ministers say that they teach charity. That is natural. They live on hand-outs. All beggars teach that others should give.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself.
[Michel Eyquen Montaigne (1533-1592) "Essays" Book 1, Ch. 39]
Miracles do not happen.
[Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, last words of preface to 1883 edition]
Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her.
[Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)]
Miss Wormwood, could we arrange our seats in a little circle and have a little discussion? Specifically, I'd like to debate whether cannibalism ought to be grounds for leniency in murders since it is less wasteful.
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.
[Oscar Wilde]
Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.
[Charles Dickens]
Modern experience has shown that usury inevitably leads to subservience. And God did not want his that for his people but rather intend for them to rule… He directed very fifty years years that all debt would be cancelled, all property be redistributed, and the cycle begin again… Not withstanding the sneers of many in the banking community, it may be that God's way is the only one open to us - a year of jubillee to straighten us out.
[Pat Robertson, The Secret Kingdom, 1992]
Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards. … in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on. … How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles.
Richard Dawkins
Mom and dad say I should make my life an example of the principles I believe in. But every time I do, they tell me to stop it.
[Calvin & Hobbes]
Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race — the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.
[Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger]
Montgomery, Alabama. A white Republican state senator running for Congress wrote a speech in which he argued that slavery is justified by the Bible and was good for African Americans. … 'People who are bitter and hateful about slavery are obviously bitter and hateful against God and his word, because they reject what God says and embrace what mere humans say concerning slavery,' Charles Davidson wrote.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 10 May 1996 (Associated Press)]
Moral indignation - jealousy with a halo.
[H.G. Wells]
Moral: A peerless maxim enumerated by God in his Holy Bible, such as that of Deut. 23:1, if your testicles are crushed or your male member missing, you must never enter a sanctuary of the Lord.
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologian]
Morality becomes hypocrisy if it means accepting mothers suffering or dying in connection with unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions—and unwanted children living in misery.
[Gro Harlem Brundtland, at the Cairo population conference]
More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.
R.A. Fisher
More ominously, some antiabortion activists have vandalized and even bombed abortion facilities. There has been a remarkable, although not-much-remarked-upon, rise in the incidence of such antiabortion violence. Since 1977 extremists in the United States have bombed or set fire to at least 117 clinics and threatened 250 others. They have invaded some 231 clinics and vandalized 224 others.
[Laurence H. Tribe, Abortion, W.W. Norton & Co., 1990, page 172]
More than half the college students polled in three states, including California, said they are creationists who believe that God created Adam and Eve, while about one-third believe in aliens, Big Foot and the lost city of Atlantis. …The poll results, released yesterday by Texas researchers, also indicated that students who believe in creationism are less likely to read books, tend to be more politically conservative and have a lower grade-point average than students who dispute that God created Earth in six days. …Last fall, about 1000 students attending colleges in Texas, Connecticut and California filled out detailed questionnaire on their beliefs. …In Texas, 71 percent of students said they believe in the story of Adam and Eve, while 51 percent in Connecticut and 47 percent in California said they believed in the biblical first couple. An average of 44 percent of the students in the three states said the story of Noah's Ark is true. About one-third of all the students surveyed believed that Big Foot, a hairy man- like creature reputed to live in the mountains of northwest America, actually exists. An equal number believed in the lost city of Atlantis, a legendary island of advanced civilization that supposedly sank into the ocean. Thirty percent of the students responding to the survey said aliens from outer space visited Earth in ancient times. Overall, 37 percent said they believed in ghosts, and 39 percent said it is possible to communicate with the dead.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 3 November 1986 (UPI)]
Moreover, as regards those moral issues which are treated in the Bible, significant problems of interpretation often arise.
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.
Moses: A prophet inspired of God who gave him a holy and righteous law, which he was obliged to change later on, seeing that it had become worthless…. He was the meekest of men, as he himself tells us.
[Voltaire (1694-1778)]
Most alchemists were nervous, in any case; it came from not knowing what the crucible of bubbling stuff they were experimenting with was going to do next.
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
Most humans feel what Paul Kurtz has called the "transcendent temptation," the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning…. Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it; about facing the existential vacuum in all its horrible majesty; and constructing a life of compassion and exuberance on its brink without relying on the dubious shelter of faith.
[Tom Flynn, "The Difference a Word Makes",Free Inquiry]
Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
R.K. Merton
Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Most of it is crap, but in every pile of crap is a gem of stupidity that will have you on the floor in laughter.
[psycho@ace.comi (Preacher)]
Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe, from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man.
[George Gaylord Simpson]
Most of these gods were revengeful, savage, lustful, and ignorant. As they generally depended upon their priests for information, their ignorance can hardly excite our astonishment.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
[Fred Allen]
Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature."
…but the dominance hierarchy itself is not something that natural selection favors or disfavors. What natural selection favors or disfavors is the individual behavior of which the dominance hierarchy is a manifestation. I would put war and overpopulation in that category.
Richard Dawkins
Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.
Richard Dawkins
Most often atheists advance the idea that morality is subjective, whilst theists cling to its being objective. These positions are contingent, in that it is logically possible for atheists to think ethics objective (indeed, the EK claims to demonstrate precisely this without invoking theism, although theism is said to be compatible with the argument) and in that it is logically possible for theists to believe that the deity or deities in question did not devise a moral law.
Niclas Berggren, "On the Nature of Morality" (1998)
Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it.
Richard Dawkins
Most religions do not make men better, only warier.
[Elias Canetti]
Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there�s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.
Terry Pratchett
Most studies show that conventional religion is not an effective force for moral behavior or against criminal activity.
["The Psychology of Religion", by Bernard Spilka, Ralph Hood, and Richard Gorsuch, standard psychology text]
Most theologians admit that to eliminate anthropomorphism suggests that anthropomorphism is more even than its matrix. Rather, religion looks like anthropomorphism, part and parcel.
Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 185.
Mr. Behe has of course compared, like it or not, compared the extraordinary complexity of the human cell to the mousetrap. He said if we look at that mousetrap, it was created by a human. In fact, Mr. Miller improved on it, as you saw earlier tonight. Therefore, if that's complicated, then indeed the cell must also have been designed by an intelligence. And as I thought about it tonight, it's a little bit — we were all talking about nature analogies — it's a little bit like looking at a mole build a molehill. You say, That's very interesting. Then we walk out in the woods the next day and we notice a big mountain off in the distance. And we say, Good grief, that's enormously large. A really big mole must have built that. The truth of the matter is, it's not logical. We should be looking for different forces that result in different things. Your mousetrap was built by human hands because its components are inanimate objects. Cellular life is living, vibrant, breathing, changing matter. You're not just comparing apples to oranges, you are comparing plastic apples to organic oranges, and I think therefore this analogy fails.
Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 50.
Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before.
The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus:
In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.
(Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)
Much of the discussion on the existence of race reminds me of the obituary in Time Magazine (January 11, 1963) of Arthur O. Lovejoy. When the late Professor Lovejoy was asked at a government investigation if he believed in God, he promptly rattled off thirty-three definitions of God and asked the questioner which one he had in mind. But of course it really didn't matter to the questioner. To avow a belief in the existence of God simply assured one's participation in the socio-cultural system, in which everyone knows that God exists out there but we humans are just too ignorant to perceive or define Him accurately.
[pp. 55-56 of "On the Nonexistence of Human Races", Frank B. Livingstone, in The Concept of Race, ed. by Ashley Montagu, (Collier-Macmillan, London), 1964.]
My aim is to argue that the universe can come into existence without intervention, and that there is no need to invoke the idea of a Supreme Being in one of its numerous manifestations.
[Peter William Atkins, preface to The Creation]
My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.
[Garrison Keillor]
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
[George Santayana 1863-1952]
My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: KEEP HIM OR HER AS FAR AWAY FROM A CHURCH AS YOU CAN.
[Frank Zappa]
My earlier views at the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.
[Abraham Lincoln, letter to Judge J.S. Wakefield, after the death of Willie Lincoln]
My faith is strong I don't need proofs, but every time a new fact comes along it simply confirms my faith.
Palmer Joss in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 172.
My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in his might and seized the scourge to drive out of the temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profpoundly than ever before that it was for this that he had to shed his blood on the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…".
[Adolf Hitler, speech, April 12 1922, published in "New Order"]
My heart's desire is to lift women out of all these dangerous, degrading superstitions, and to this end will I labor my remaining days on earth.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "" (1896, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.
My husband is not a Christian but is a religious man, I think.
[Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, in Toward The Mystery]
My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it.
[Thomas Edison, "Do We Live Again?"]
My only wish is. . . to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own procession and admission, are "half animal, half angel" into persons, into whole persons.
Ludwig Feuerbach (Lectures on the Essence of Religion)
My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 24.
My parents, though they had never formally left the ancestral Roman Catholic church, held no religious beliefs. Though they were no longer fiercely anti-religious (as I suspect my paternal grandfather was, along with so many of the scientists of his generation), all positive dogma was for them a superstition of the past. They never took me to church. And though as part of my general education I was, soon after I had begun to read for pleasure, given a child's Bible, it disappeared mysteriously when I got too interested in it…. By the age of fifteen, I had convinced myself that nobody could give a reasonable explanation of what he meant by the word 'God' and that it was therefore as meaningless to assert a belief as to assert a disbelief in God. Though this, in a general way, has remained my position ever since, I have always avoided unnecessarily to offend other people holding religious belief by displaying my lack of such belief, or even stating my lack of belief, if I was not challenged.
[From Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, edited by Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar (University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 40-41. F.A. Hayek is considered the foremost defender of capitalism in the 20th century]
My reason taught me that I could not have made one of my own qualities- they were forced upon me by Nature; that my language, religion, and habits were forced upon me by Society; and that I was entirely the child of Nature and Society; that Nature gave the qualities and Society directed them. Thus was I forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught by man.
[Robert Owen (1771-1858)]
My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.
[James Watt, in "The Washington Post", 24 May 1981]
Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.
[Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: 126]
Name me a conservative idea that is newer than five thousand years?
Natural selection can only produce adaptation to immediately surrounding (and changing) environments. No feature of such local adaptation should yield any expectation of general progress (however such a vague term be defined).
Stephen Jay Gould
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.
R.A. Fisher
Natural selection is not evolution.
R.A. Fisher
Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these `higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.
Stephen Jay Gould
Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.
William Provine
Nature abhors a moron.
HL Mencken
Nature free at once and rid of her haughty lords is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods.
Lucretius
Nature tells man to consult reason, and to take it for his guide: religion teaches him that his reason is corrupted, that it is only a treacherous guide, given by a deceitful God to lead his creatures astray. Nature tells man to enlighten himself, to search after truth, to instruct himself in his duties: religion enjoins him to examine nothing, to remain in ignorance, to fear truth.
[Paul Henry Thiry d'Holbach, "Systeme de la Nature" (1770)]
Nearly 25 percent of the nation's 1,411 television stations now have full- time religious programming, according to the 1989 Directory of Religious Broadcasting. That reflects a 30 percent jump over 1988. This doesn't count the three religious television networks, including Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, or the hundreds of stations that carry some religious programming. Of the nation's 10,546 radio stations, 1,485 or 14 percent, are Christian stations — a 7 percent increase over 1988. Dwarfing the impact of U.S. radio stations is the worldwide network of evangelical ministries that preaches to Third World countries via shortwave radio. From high in the Andes mountains in Quito, Ecuador, HCJB World Radio — which stands for Heralding Christ Jesus' Blessings — uses its combined 1-million-watt shortwave power of several transmitter stations to broadcast 24 hours a day to 80 percent of the globe.
[Annie Nakao, San Francisco Examiner, 23 July 1989]
Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. All these myths have in common that they depend upon the deliberate intentions of some kind of supernatural being.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 316.
Negative existential hypotheses in natural language can be supported by the failure of proofs of their contradictories, but positive existential hypotheses are not made plausible by the failure of disproofs of their denials.
Michael Scriven, "God and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 113.
Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church and state.'
[Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947)]
Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.
[Sigmund Freud, letter to Charles Singer]
Neither the fact that the prayer is denominationally neutral nor the fact that its observance on the part of the students is voluntary can serve to free it from the limitations of the Establishment Clause.
[U.S. Supreme Court, Engle v. Vitale (1962)]
Never attribute to Devil-worshipping conspiracies what opportunism, emotional instability, and religious bigotry are sufficient to explain.
[Shawn Carlson, Ph.D.]
Never before have I encountered such corrupt and foul-minded perversity! Have you ever considered a career in the Church?
[Black Adder II]
Never lose sight of the connection between supermarket tabloids, professional wrestling, evangelism and supply side economics.
Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection." I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incrudulity." Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.
Richard Dawkins
Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out any quicker than the Christmas spirit.
[Kin Hubbard]
Nine times out of ten the man who declares that God is tender to the sparrow that falls is not the man to buy a winter's coal for a poor widow.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible.
Steve Allen (More Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
No church has all the truth, and no school either. So-called religion merely shows where the search after truth ended. But truth is the infinite reality, and it will always be for man to find.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
No country or people who are slaves to dogma and the dogmatic mentality can progress, and unhappily our country and people have become extraordinarily dogmatic and little-minded.
[Jawaharlal Nehru - a Biography vol. I , Sarvepalli Gopal]
No creed can be stretched to the size of truth; no church can be made as large as man.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
No deity will save us, we must save ourselves. Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful.
[Humanist Manifesto II, Prometheus Books, 1973]
No doubt a sizeable majority of Americans believe in the concept of a Creator or, at least, are not opposed to the concept and see nothing wrong with teaching school children about the idea. The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote. Whether the proponents of Act 590 constitute the majority or the minority is quite irrelevant under a constitutional system of government. No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others.
[U.S. District Court Judge William R. Overton, overturning Arkansas Act 590, requiring public schools to teach Creation Science]
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.
Richard Dawkins
No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't die young!
Richard Dawkins
No efficiency. No accountability. I tell you, Hobbes, it's a lousy way to run a universe.
[Calvin & Hobbes comic]
No god ever gave any man anything, nor ever answered any prayer at any time -nor ever will.
[Madelyn O'Hair, "An Atheist Epic"]
No Gods — No Masters.
Margaret Sanger, "" (1914, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.
No great work of art was ever produced in a town in which half the citizens of the town turned out in nightshirts and sidearms to terrorize the other half. And no great work of art was ever produced in a town which yielded itself at intervals to debauches of religious frenzy, with some preposterous mountebank of an evangelist roaring objurgations from his platform at every idea and ideal upon which the civilization of the modern world is based. Try to imagine a Shakespeare beset by fundamentalism, or a Goethe trying to work with the Ku Klux Klan roaring under his door.
HL Mencken
No kingdom has shed more blood than the kingdom of Christ.
[Montiesque]
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
[George Bernard Shaw]
No man ever got an answer to prayer that he could show to another person.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
No man ever knew Providence to interpose when his neighbor's hens are scratching up his garden.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
No man ever yet tore down his altar and found a God behind it.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
No man has the right to have his own religion.
[Bishop Hughes, "Official Journal of Bishops", Jan. 26 1852]
No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.
Hunter S. Thompson
No man was ever yet canonized for minding his own business.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
No matter how old we become, we can still call them [i.e., the super- dominant beings] 'Holy Mother' and 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them (or their agents, who often adopt similar titles for themselves).
[Desmond Morris, "Religious Displays," Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour, 1977, Abrams, New York]
No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe them.
[Ernest Renan, 1863]
No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax—This won't hurt.
Hunter S. Thompson
No myth of miraculous creation is so marvelous as the face of man's evolution.
[Robert Briffault (1876-1948) Rational Education,1930]
No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.
[Saki, H.H. Munro (1870-1916), Scottish author]
No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.
H.L. Mencken
No one has an idea really of where we should draw the line. What about the Bible? Every nut who kills people has a Bible lying around. If you're looking for violent rape imagery, the Bible's right there in your hotel room. If you just want to look up ways to screw people up, there it is, and you're justified because God told you to. You have Shakespeare and you have Sophocles—what are we going to do, lose Oedipus Rex if someone pokes an eye out?
[Penn Jillette, from Reason magazine, on censorship of violent TV shows]
No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence.
[Ann Landers, advice columnist]
No one in the whole world wants war more than George W. Bush.
No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
HL Mencken
No one would have remembered the good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions. He had money as well.
[Margaret Thatcher]
No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or nonattendance.
[U.S. Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, Majority opinion Everson v. Board of Education 330 U.S. 1 (1947)]
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
Karl Popper
No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
Stephen Jay Gould
No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition then Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.
[George Bernard Shaw]
No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 245.
No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.
[Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947)]
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.
[David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748]
No theory is too false, no fable too absurd, no superstition too degrading for acceptance when it has become embedded in common belief. Men will submit themselves to torture and to death, mothers will immolate [burn] their children at the bidding of beliefs they thus accept.
Henry George
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
Edward Abbey
No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.
[Republican Presidential Nominee George Bush]
No, I don't think people really give a shit about that [meeting one's maker] unless they're completely bamboozled by religious superstition - to live your life in planning for this good time you're going to have in the sky.
[Frank Zappa]
No, no, no — you don't argue with concepts. You have to claim Dogma, and therefore leave no room for rational thought.
[Kevin J. Anderson, Flashback]
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
[Sigmund Freud, "The Future of an Illusion"]
Nobody ever told us you had to be religious.
[Nancy Grambo, whose son Buzz Grambo was kicked out of the BSA Southern Maryland Troop 427, for his lack of religious belief]
Nobody has ever taken notable pains to locate the legendary heaven; but probably that is because nobody ever thought seriously of going to a heaven.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Nor is 'naturalism' the issue when the historian employs the principle of analogy. As F.H. Bradley showed in The Presuppositions of Critical History, no historical inference is possible unless the historian assumes a basic analogy of past experience with present. If we do not grant this, nothing will seem amiss in believing reports that A turned into a werewolf or that B changed lead into gold. 'Hey, just because we don't see it happening today doesn't prove it never did!' One could as easily accept the historicity of Jack and the Beanstalk on the same basis, as long as one's sole criterion of historical probability is 'anything goes!'
Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"
Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and fle sh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another. "A clearer case of a horrible event in nature, a natural evil, has never been presented to me. It seemed to me self-evident that the natural law that animals must savagely kill and devour each other in order to survive was an evil natural law and that the obtaining of this law was sufficient evidence that God did not exist. If I held a certain epistemological theory about "basic beliefs", I might conclude from this experience that my intuition that there is no God co-existing with this horror was a "basic belief" and thus that I am epistemically entitled to be an atheist without needing to justify this intuition.
Quentin Smith, "An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws"
Not only does the application to horrors of such generic and global reasons for Divine permission of evils fail to solve the second problem of evil; it makes it worse by adding generic prima facie reasons to doubt whether human life would be a great good to individual human beings in possible worlds where such Divine motives were operative. For, taken in isolation and made to bear the weight of the whole explanation, such reasons-why draw a picture of Divine indifference or even hostility to the human plight. Would the fact that God permitted horrors because they were constitutive means to His end of global perfection, or that He tolerated them because He could obtain that global end anyway, make the participant's life more tolerable, more worth living for him/her? Given radical human vulnerability to horrendous evils, the ease with which humans participate in them, whether as victim or perpetrator, would not the thought that God visits horrors on anyone who caused them, simply because s/he deserves it, provide one more reason to expect human life to be a nightmare?
Marilyn McCord Adams, "Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God" http://www.faithquest.com/philosophers/adams/horevil.html
Not only is God dead, but just try to find a plumber on weekends.
[Woody Allen]
Not only might one-quarter to one-half of the weight be lost in planing, whereas with iron only a minute fraction was lost in this way, but half of the weight of timber in a wooden ship was wasted, its only use being to hold the other half in position. Even so, a wooden ship had great stresses as a structure. The absolute limit of its length was 300 feet, and it was liable to "hogging" and "sagging" in addition to being unable to withstand the local strain of the screw propeller
["The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870-1914", pp. 13-14, by Sidney Pollard and Paul Robertson, as cited by Robert Moore in "The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark", on the physical impossibility of Noah's 450 foot-long wooden ark]
Not only were a good many of the revolutionary leaders more deist than Christian, the acutal number of church members was rather small. Perhaps as few as five percent of the populace were church members in 1776
[Lynn R. Buzzard, Exec Dir of Christian Legal Society, as quoted in They Haven't Got a Prayer, Elgin IL: David C. Cook, 1982, p. 81]
Not until they find a pubic hair on a chad will we get anywhere in this 2000 post election.
Nothing [Bush] does can be challenged on moral grounds, however unethical or evil it might appear, because all of his actions are directed by God. He can twist the truth, oppress the poor, exalt the rich, despoil the earth, ignore the law—and murder children—without the slightest compunction, the briefest moment of doubt or self-reflection, because he believes, he truly believes, that God squats in his brainpan and tells him what to do.
Chris Floyd, CounterPunch, 7/30/03
Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.
[Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
Nothing can exceed the mendacity of the religious press. I have had some little experience with political editors, and am forced to say, that until I read the religious papers, I did not know what malicious and slimy falsehoods could be constructed from ordinary words. The ingenuity with which the real and apparent meaning can be tortured out of language is simply amazing. The average religious editor is intolerant and insolent… and always accounts for the brave and generous actions of unbelievers by low, base, and unworthy motives.
["The Ghosts", Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p.260]
Nothing could be more anti-Biblical than letting women vote.
[Editorial, Harper's Magazine, November 1853]
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
[Democritus]
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Stephen Jay Gould
Nothing is more depressing and more illogical than agressive Christianity.
[Gerald Vann]
Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit.
[Rudolf Arnheim]
Nothing is so pleasing to these gods as the butchery of unbelievers. Nothing so enrages them, even now, as to have someone deny their existence.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Nothing makes me sadder than the peer pressure that enforces conformity and erases wonder…Countless others had the light of intellectual wonder extinguished because a thoughtless and swaggering fellow student called them nerds on the playground.
Stephen Jay Gould
Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.
Harrison Ford (1942 - ), as Indiana Jones
Nothing short of a great Civil War of Values rages today throughout North America. Two sides with vastly differing and incompatible worldviews are locked in a bitter conflict that permeates every level of society. Bloody battles are being fought on a thousand fronts…. Open any daily newspaper and you'll find accounts of the latest Gettysburg, Waterloo, Normandy, or Stalingrad … someday soon, I believe, a winner will emerge and the loser will fade from memory.
James Dobson, quoted in Gil Alexander-Moegerle, James Dobson's War on America (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997), p. 17.
Now that he did so well in Iowa, The Reverend Pat Robertson doesn't want to be called a 'former television evangelist' anymore. He told NBC's Tom Brokaw in no uncertain terms that such a 'slur' was the height of 'religious bigotry. And he's right. Who'd want their sister to marry a television evangelist? But how shall we ace newsmen describe him instead? I've given the matter a great deal of thought, and I think the fairest to all concerned is 'former hemorrhoid healer.' This refers, of course, to the former hemorrhoid healer's celebrated, videotaped sermon to his congregation back in 1981, when he cried: 'Satan has gone! God has just healed somebody! A hernia has been healed! Several people are being healed of hemorrhoids and varicose veins! People with flat feet! God is doing just great things to you!' … 'Former hurricane deflector' struck me as macho, and most voters would probably like a president who could deflect hurricanes. But Hurricane Gloria, which he deflected back in 1985 to save his broadcasting station in Virginia Beach, slammed into Long Island and Boston instead, doing $320 million worth of damage.
[Arthur Hoppe, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 February 1988]
Now the religious right is joining the war against children, saying Halloween is a satanic plot. A Costa Mesa Christian group, Citizens for Excellence in Education, says the witch's broomstick is a phallic symbol of pagan worship. Yet another reason not to clean the house. The group says a 'spiritual battle' is raging on this night as covens of witches and other pagan religions call forth their demon spirits.' Even kids know demons are make-believe. It's unreal adults you have to worry about.
[Rob Morse, San Francisco Chronicle, 31 October 1993]
Now we know the other side advocates intelligent design as a primary characteristic of intelligent design when it is squared with the fossil record. The fossil record — and I can give you specific examples — is characertized best by sequences of appearances and disappearances. Now think what that means. What that means is that the characteristic that best describes the intelligent designer who would have designed this fossil record is incompetent because everything the intelligent designer designed, with about one percent exceptions, has immediately become extinct. Intelligent design has no explanation for the successive character in the fossil record, evolution has a perfect explanation, and that is the appearance of new forms and the extinction of others.
Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 22.
Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.
Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism" God, Freedom, and Immortality, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 64.
Now, primitive man is neither a metaphysician nor an idealist. He does not concern himself with the origin and destiny of the universe, nor even with its nature, except so far as his necessities compel him to form some conclusions as to the nature of the forces around him. His gods are in no sense a creation of an "idealising faculty," they are the most concrete matter-of-fact expressions. It is not even a question of morality. He does not say, "Let us make gods in the interest of morality and the higher life"; it is the sheer pressure of facts upon an uninformed mind that leads him to believe in those extra-natural beings, whose anger he is bound to placate.
[Chapman Cohen]
Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing. . .he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does one see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised…
[I.R.]
nullifidian n. & a. (Person) having no religious faith or belief,
[f. med. L nullifidius fr L nullus none + fides faith; see IAN]
O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it…
[Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"]
O senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm and yet will make Gods by the dozen!
[Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)]
Obedience. A religion of slaves. A religion of intellectual death. I like it. Don't ask questions, don't think, obey the Word of the Lord — as it has been conveniently brought to you by a man in a Rolls with a heavy Rolex on his wrist. I like that job! Where can I sign up?
[Oleg Kiselev]
Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).
Stephen Jay Gould
Obviously, a man's judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and make him something less than a man.
[Arthur Hays Sulzberger]
Ocean: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made for man — who has no gills.
[Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
Of all the issues, the environment is a dilly. That teaching kids to fight pollution, to care about their environment and to save whales is cause for some of the most rabid denigration going on in the political debate. No other issue better illustrates that innate quality of conservatism, the nature of the Beast.
Of all the strange "crimes" that humanity has legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy" is the most amazing - with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for second and third place.
[Robert Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"]
Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
Of course I know these are myths, but what else do I have to comfort me at this late hour?
Bernard Irwington 1838-1915 (Spoken to a Pastor, who was reading him the bible, as he lay on his deathbed. Irwington had been a Pastor himself for many years.)
Of course, all this quibbling would be moot if, in fact, the Jedi religion actually worked�if people could tap into the Force and do the miracles that the Jedi routinely perform.
Orson Scott Card, on the "Jedi" religion
Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
Of course, Jastrow's comment is exaggerated at best; theologians hardly predicted the Big Bang. If our universe turns out to be closed, hence with an end, this does not mean apocalyptic visions of the end of the world were on target. And even if a beginning for the universe is a successful prediction of one version of theism, this is still not that impressive. After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The Big Bang becomes strong support for God only with an argument showing that such a beginning requires a Creator.
Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
Of course, the United States was not originally intended to be a Christian nation. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and most of the founding fathers were skeptics or Deists; they specifically intended a secular government with an "unbreachable wall" between church and state; they even wrote into the treaty with the Moslem nation of Tripoli a clear statement that, unlike European countries, the "United States is not, in any sense, a Christian nation." (So clearly understood was the principle of separation of church and state in those days that the treaty passed Congress without any debate on that clause, and President John Adams signed it at once, without any fear that it might jeopardize his political future.)
Robert A. Wilson (Sex and Drugs, 1973)
Of course, we cannot guarantee our Bibles against normal wear or abuse.
[Oxford University Press]
Of greater significance was the reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Church, the traditional bastion of Russian nationalism and the tsarist regime, which now became associated with the cult of Stalin and resumed its role as a state church.
[Alan Bullock, "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, ISBN 0-394-58601-8), chapter, "Stalin's New Order," pp 906-907, on Stalin's wartime reconciliation with the church, showing that the the "atheism" of the communist party had nothing to do with the treatment accorded religions or the religious during Stalin's regime]
Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven
[Mark Twain]
Of the three Popes, John the Twenty-third was the first victim; he fled and was brought back a prisoner; the most scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest.
[Gibbons, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]
Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances,… and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.
[St. Augustine]
Oh great, but not necessarily superior, being who dwells beyond this plane of existence and who is accessible only through prayer, meditation, or crystals, we salute you without thereby acknowledging that you are entitled to greater respect than that accorded any other endangered species. We hope to pass through your plane of existence at some point on our psychic journey to the same exalted status as marine mammals or even snail darters. Moreover, to the extent your design for the universe coincides with the U.S. Constitution and includes low-cost access to cable, we ask you to provide us our minimum daily requirement of essential vitamins and nutrients consistent with FDA guidelines, and when judging us be duly mindful or our status as victim, which providesfull justification for what might appear on superficial examination to befelonious. In the same vein, we will endeavor to excuse and forgive those whohave transgressed against us, with the possible exception of our parents, teachers, policemen and clergy about whom we have just resurrected disturbing memories. We ask all this in the name of your prophet —————. [Here on alternating weeks substitute names drawn from the consensus of the class. Some suggestions for early in the year: L. Ron Hubbard, Ayatollah Khomeini, Jimmy Carter, Patricia Ireland, Mike Wallace.]
[John F. Bramfeld, a lawyer in Urbana, Ill., as printed in "Wall Street Journal" Pg A-18 Thurs, Jan 12, 1995, contemplating what would happen to school prayer after it was filtered through the apparatus of politically correct educrats.]
Oh Lord please don't burn us don't kill or toast your flock Don't put us on the barbeque or simmer us in stock, Don't bake or baste or boil us or stir-fry us in a wok.
[Monty Python]
Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races… very handy.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Oh, come on. Revelation was a mushroom dream that belonged in the Apocrypha. The New Testament is basically about what happened when God got religion.
(Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)
Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! One thing at least is certain—This life flies; One thing is certain and the rest is lies; The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.
[Omar Khayyam (11th century) "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"]
On a June day nearly 300 years ago, two young women were hanged in Salem village, and by the end of the summer, colonists had executed 13 women and seven men convicted of being witches.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 13 April 1988 (AP)]
On most interpretations of the theistic God, He desires His creatures to love Him. However, the mystery of evil conflicts with this desire. It is difficult for rational humans to love God when they do not understand why there is so much evil. If the reasons for evil are beyond humans ken, God could at least make THIS abundantly clear. Why does He not do so? Moreover, why does not an all-powerful God have the power to raise human intelligence so humans can understand why there is so much evil? If there is reason for not doing this, then why is THIS not made clear? There is mystery on top of mystery here which seems to conflict explicitly with God's desire to be loved.
Michael Martin, "Third Statement" The Fernandes-Martin Debate
On nights such as these the gods, as has already been pointed out, play games other than chess with the fates of mortals and the thrones of kings. It is important to remember that they always cheat, right up to the end…
(Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies like the crashing of this bus [full of children from a Roman Catholic school and for no apparent reason but with wholesale loss of life] are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good [italics in original] fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
[Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, 1995, BasicBooks, New York; ISBN 0-465-01606-5]
On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation…
[Charles Darwin]
On the other hand, the Bible contains much that is relevant today, like Noah taking 40 days to find a place to park.
[Curtis McDougall]
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
Woody Allen
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), letter to Lady Pollock]
Once a ruler becomes religious, it [becomes] impossible for you to debate with him. Once someone rules in the name of religion, your lives become hell.
[Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, at the General People's Congress in Tripoli in October, 1989]
Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that
each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.
[Gore Vidal, from Secular Humanist Bulletin (Summer 1995)]
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth.
[Zarathustra, in Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", First Part]
Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So, they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener…. So they set up a barbed wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol it with bloodhounds… But no shrieks even suggest that some intruder intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves." At last the Skeptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even no gardener at all?
[Anthony Flew]
One can believe God capable of anything without believing that he did everything anybody may say he did. One can believe in the possibility of miracles without believing that every reported miracle must in fact have happened.
Robert M. Price, "By This Time He Stinketh"
One can easily forget the greatest and most sustained genocide ever to befall the human race when we are so constantly bombarded with images of the Jewish Holocaust. Let us not also forget the oceans of blood spilled in the name of Christ over so many centuries.
Joshua Rebenstol
One can say that the appeal to [church] tradition, unless it is accompanied by an explanation of how the relevant religious bodies or ecclesiastical authorities know, is weak.
C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 43.
One day, if he could master GCSE maths and reliably pick up a soldering iron by the end that wasn't hot, he was going to be a Big Man in computers.
(Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind)
One does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this.
[Fredrich Nietzsche]
One final snag in the 'Bible only' view is this: the Bible itself teaches that moral truths are revealed outside the Scriptures.
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.
One Galileo in two thousand years is enough.
[Pope Pius XII]
One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, Speech, New York City, 1 May 1881]
One is not free to become a Christian. One must be sick enough for it.
[Nietzsche]
One man's religion is another man's belly laugh.
Robert A. Heinlein.
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
[Robert Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"]
One might be asked "How can you prove that a god does not exist?" One can only reply that it is scarcely necessary to disprove what has never been proved.
[David A. Spitz]
One of my favorite fantasies is that next Sunday not one woman, in any country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they cease to be.
[Sonia Johnson]
One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He's good, nobody can touch Him.
[John Gardner, NYT Book Review, Jan 1983]
One of the conditions (for escaping the stake) was that of stating all they knew of other heretics and apostates, which proved an exceedingly fruitful source of information as, under the general terror, there was little hesitation in denouncing not only friends and acquaintances, but the nearest and dearest kindred — parents and children, and brothers and sisters.
[Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition of Spain]
One of the demands put upon the priests and holy-men is that they should provide impressive rituals. Nearly all religions include ceremonial procedures during which the followers of a particular deity can indulge in complex group activities. This is essential as a demonstration of the power of the gods—that they can dominate and command submissive behaviour from large numbers of people at one and the same time—and it is also a method of strengthening the social bonding in relation to the common belief. Since the gods are super-parents and super-leaders, they must necessarily have large houses in which to 'meet' with their followers. Anyone flying low over human settlements in a spacecraft and ignorant of our ways would notice immediately that in many of the villages and towns and cities there were one or two homes much bigger than the rest. Towering over the other houses, these large buildings must surely be the abodes of some enormous individuals, many times the size of the rest of the population. These—the houses of the gods—the temples, the churches and the cathedrals—are buildings apparently made for giants, and a space visitor would be surprised to find on closer examination that these giants are never at home. Their followers repeatedly visit them and bow down before them, but they themselves are invisible. Only their bell-like cries can be heard across the land. Man is indeed an imaginative species.
[Desmond Morris, "Religious Displays," Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour, 1977, Abrams, New York, page 152.]
One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.
Mortimer Adler, "Chapter 22: Religion and Religious Groups in America," The Annals of America: Great Issues in American Life, Vol. II, Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1968, p. 420.)
<One of the key figures of the Arab conquests is Khalid ibn al-Walid, the chief general of Abu Bakr. After fulfilling orders by restoring the status quo at the death of the Prophet, he decided for himself the problem of what to do next by embarking on a programme of military expansion. The real beginning of the Arab conquests is the Battle of 'Aqraba' in 633 in eastern Najd. The victory proved to the Arabs the capacity of the Medinese Government and the advisability of submitting to it. Thereafter a series of expeditions radiated in all directions
[Bernard Lewis, "The Arabs in History"]
One of the more ironic aspects in the current upsurge in creationism is that is coincides almost exactly with the first major activity in evolutionary theory in nearly fifty years. (1982 jm) Evolution itself has been attracting a great deal of attention from a wide assortment of biologists, and current healthy controversy in which evolutionary biology is now embroiled has spilled over into the media even without the added cachet of creationist attacks. Superficially, it looks as if we know less now about how evolution works than we did, say, even ten years ago. This is because, as recently at a decade ago, there was something approaching unanimity in the evolutionary ranks. Today, though chaos is too strong a word, there is definitely dissent in the ranks. Few biologists agree as completely and complacently as they did a short time ago. Creationists have seen this and are quick to react. Their basic conclusion is that evolutionary biologists can't even agree among themselves, so who would want their dangerous and ill-supported notions taught as "fact" in public schools?
What this charge amounts to, of course, is that evolutionary biologists— geneticists, developmental biologists, systemasists, and paleontologists stand guilty… of doing science. On the contrary, research in evolutionary biology today is actually a textbook case of how it is that science is supposed to operate….
The Monkey Business, Niles Eldredge, 1982, p. 52
One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it - they also believed the world was flat.
[Mark Twain]
One of the reasons why people like me who deal with the creation/evolution issue all the time get very frustrated with, say, Institute for Creation Research people and so forth, is because they are constantly saying X didn't happen. And then it takes a great deal longer to explain why X did happen, gaps in the fossil record or whatever.
Eugenie Scott in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 19.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge — even to ourselves — that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)
[Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,"]
One of the sponsors of the creche was asked about his interest in viewing it while it stood on Scarsdale's Boniface Circle during the christmas season. To my surprise as the questioner, it turned out the he never bothered to go look at the creche at all, let alone to admire or draw inspiration from it. But on reflection, it should not have been so surprising. The creche was not there for him to see or to appreciate for its intrinsic spiritual value in his religious universe. it was there for others, who professed other religions or none, so that the clout of his religious group should be made manifest- above all to any in the sharply divided village who would have preferred that it not be there.
[Faith And Freedom, Religious Liberty In America, Marvin E. Frankel, retired Federal Judge, p. 61]
One point that should be made is that although we may be able to show that life as we know it could not possibly exist in any of the alternate universes, there is no proof that other forms of life with mind or intelligence could not exist. In fact, theists themselves believe that since God existed prior to our universe, it is thus possible for a life form with mind or intelligence to exist apart from the physical constants of our particular universe. Therefore, they should concede the possibility that some other combination of physical constants could, over time, produce a universe that contains mind or intelligence, even if it is in a form quite different from any life that exists on our planet. Schlesinger's claim that only the particular combination of physical constants in our universe is of a special kind is totally unsupported. There is no reason whatever to believe it.
Theodore Drange, "The Fine-Tuning Argument" (1998)
One real world is enough.
[George Santayana]
One religion is as true as another.
[Robert Burton (1577-1640), The Anatomy of Melancholy]
One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
[H.L. Mencken]
One should not go into church if one wants to breathe pure air.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism.
Steve Allen (Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
One thing I can give George W. Bush, he is at least smarter than anyone who voted for him.
One would like to believe that people who think of themselves as devout Christians would also behave in a manner that is in according with Christian ethics. But pastorally and existentially, I know that this is not the case — and never has been.
[John Neuhaus, in San Jose Mercury News, Sept. 1993]
Only by the most tortured exegesis and in the most tenuous theologizing can anything resembling an anti-abortion position be ripped from the scripture…. If there are good reasons for opposing abortion on demand, and there may be, then these must be found outside the Bible.
[Delos B. McKown, "What Does the Bible Say About Abortion?", Free Inquiry]
Only under two suppositions does prayer- that custom of earlier ages that has not yet completely died out- make any sense: it would have to be possible to induce or convert the divinity to a certain course of action, and the person praying would himself have to know best what he needed, what was truly desirable for him. Both presuppositions, assumed true and established by custom in all other religions, are however denied precisely by Christianity; if it nonetheless adheres to prayer in the face of its belief in an omniscient and all-provident rationality in God which renders prayer at bottom senseless and, indeed, blasphemous- in this it once again demonstrates its admirable serpent cunning; for a clear commandment 'Thou Shalt Not Pray' would have led Christians into unchristianity through boredom.
[Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow, passage 74]
Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.
[Sir Julian Huxley]
Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.
[Richard Le Gallienne]
Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you'd want them to treat you. The religious right wants to tell people how to live.
Gov. Jesse Ventura
Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples' weakness, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate.
[Mike Hermann (hermann@cs.ubc.ca)]
Organized religion is responsible for the brainwashing of millions of young children too young to know the difference between reality and the fantasies of millions.
Save Yourself. Drop Christianity.
Orthodoxy cannot afford to put out the fires of hell.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness… It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast
[Mark Twain, Reflections on Religion, 1906]
Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade— a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth.
[Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack]
Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.
[US Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, speech to the Christian Coalition, Sept. 1993, as reported in ADL Report, 1994]
Our duty to the god of christianity is to bury him.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Our Father or Mother, who are either in heaven, nirvana, Mecca or Salt Lake City, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, providing thy will is that America is always the big winner over foreign heathen. Give us this day our daily white bread, black bread, Italian bread, Jewish rye, English muffins, or tacos, and a quarter-pounder with cheese and large fries to go. And lead us not into temptation, or into school buses that take us to neighborhoods where the kids are different. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, especially for people who still use words like "thine.
[Mark Russell, humorist]
Our goal has been achieved. The Religious Right is solidly in place, and religious conservatives in America are now in for the duration.
[Jerry Falwell]
Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
[T.S. Eliot, Milton, 1947]
Our news is not presented, it is marketed.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968), Strength to Love, 1963
Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts…
Ernst Mayr
Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.
Richard Dawkins
Out of all the Saints sent by God, I think I am the most successful one already as it now stands. When it comes to our age, we must have an automatic theocracy to rule the world. So, we cannot separate the political field from the religious. My dream is to organize a Christian political party including the Protestant denominations, Catholic and all the religious sects. We can embrace the religious world in one arm and the political world in the other. The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the world. I have met many famous so-called famous Senators and Congressmen, but to my eyes they are just nothing; they are weak and helpless before God. If the U.S. continues its corruption, and we find among the Senators and Congressmen no one really usable for our purposes we can make Senators and Congressmen out of our members.
[Rev. Sun Myong Moon, in MASTER SPEAKS, 5/17/73, detailing his anti-democratic plans for the USA]
Over the years I realized the god I prayed to was the god I invented. When I was talking to him, I was talking to myself. He had no understanding or qualities that I did not have. When I realized god was an extension of my imagination, I stopped praying to him.
[Howard Kreisner, host of "The American Atheist Hour"]
Over the years I've met a handful of people who regularly talk with God, but they usually do so only when they're off their medications.
Harley Sorensen
Pacifism - The American belief that Jesus Christ, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King were all pieces of human shit. God Bless you and God Bless America.
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, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 99.
Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the $740,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe.
Richard Dawkins
Paris vaut une messe.
[Paris is worth a mass]
[Henry of Navare, who gained control of Paris just by converting to Catholicism and renouncing his Protestant affiliations]
Part of my message is that we're not central to the purpose of the Cosmos. What happened to me makes us all seem very small.
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 420.
Particulars are established by attempting to verify each item, either by the confirmation of independent sources or by comparative evidence.
Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 60.
Pass the pub that wrecks your body And the church, all they want is your money
[Morrisey]
Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.
Abraham Lincoln
Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
[H.L. Mencken]
Pat Robertson, who once claimed to have diverted a hurricane from its path, yesterday had his presidential campaign disrupted by a second-rate snowstorm. A dark-horse contender for the Republican nomination, Robertson was forced to cancel several stops on a scheduled 18-city barnstorming tour of southern Iowa when weather grounded the helicopter he had planned to use.
[Jerry Roberts, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 February 1988]
People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true.
[Bertrand Russell]
People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns on it.
(Terry Pratchett, Mort)
People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries, and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians— meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the linguistically naive.
Robert A. Wilson (Quantum Psychology, 1990)
People have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn't it be better to depend on blind matter (…) than by a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent. Only to finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example preventing others from committing crimes.
[Baron d'Holbach, "Systeme de la Nature" (1770)]
People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
[Samuel Butler (1835-1902), English author. Samuel Butler's Notebooks (1951, p. 310)]
People in general are equally horrified to see the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
Samuel Butler [English Author]
People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail.
Richard Feynman (The Character of Physical Law)
People used to think that to mix religion with business spoiled the religion, now they think it spoils the business.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
(Terry Pratchett, …)
People who are bitter and hateful about slavery are obviously bitter and hateful against God and his word, because they reject what God says and embrace what mere humans say concerning slavery. This humanistic thinking is what the abolitionists embraced.
[Alabama State Senator Charles Davidson, citing biblical defenses of slavery, 1996]
People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.
[George Santayana]
People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
People who rely most on God rely least on themselves.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human being become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of respectability at a commensurate speed.
[Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", p. 101]
People, wake up Figure it out Religious fanatics Around and about The Court House, The State House, The Congress, The White House Criminal saints With a "Heavenly Mission" — A nation enraptured By pure superstition.
["When The Lie's So Big" Frank Zappa, "Broadway The Hard Way"]
Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise.
Ivan Pavlov (1849 - 1936)
perhaps as many as ninety percent of the Americans were unchurched in 1790
[Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, p. 82]
Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God is himself mad.
[R.D. Laing]
Perhaps religion might be dismissed as unimportant if it were merely theoretical. If it were merely theoretical. It is difficult, however, if not impossible to separate theory and practice. Religion, to be sure, is full of inconsistencies between theory and practice; but there is and has always been sternly and largely a disposition of religion to enforce its theory in the conduct of life; religion has meant not simply dogmatism in abstract thinking but intolerance in legal and social action. Religion interferes with life and, being false, it necessarily interferes very much to the detriment of the sound human interests of life.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian business man.
[H.L. Mencken]
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
George Santayana.
Perhaps there was an organization in Phineas' day known as the N.A.A.C.P. (National Association for the Advancement of Canaanite People) who took exception with this teaching of segregation. Perhaps there were pulpits proclaiming a more tolerant and socially accepted view and government agency crusading for 'affirmative action.' We really do not know; but we do know from the Bible story in Numbers chapter 25 that the Israel people began to disobey God's law, accept integration, cultural exchange and a type of interracial marriage, and thus were struck collectively by a plague. Phineas was the man who courageously fought against the racial treason even to the point of bloodshed, and he too was honored by God.
[Pastor Pete Peters, THE BIBLE: Handbook For Survivalists, Racists, Tax Protestors, Militants And Right-Wing Extremists, ND, Scriptures For America, La Porte, Colorado, pp. 4-5]
Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant religion.
Sir Thomas Browne
Perspective: Every year, gun toting and drunk driving Americans kill three times as many innocent American civilians (each), than Scumbagga bin Laden has in one year, once.
Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.
Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1988), p. 161.
Phnom Penh. A Texas evangelist fled Cambodia on Saturday [26 November] after a mob, angry over his failure to perform faith-healing miracles, rioted outside his hotel. …Only the arrival of 20 armed police on Friday night kept the crowd from storming the luxury Hotel Cambodiana, where the Rev. Mike Evans and his entourage were staying after arriving for a scheduled five-day visit here Wednesday. …The preacher's appearance had been heralded on radio and television stations. 'Blind eyes will open, the paralyzed will walk,' promised the promotional announcements. Thousands of Cambodians, including sick, blind and paralyzed people from remote areas, came to the capital to attend his meetings. …Evans, 47, is pastor of Church on the Move in Euless, Texas, and is head of Mike Evans Ministries Inc., a Euless- based group that organizes Christian crusades in developing countries and inner-city neighborhoods. Evans sought unsuccessfully in 1987 to replace Jim Bakker as host of the PTL, a popular televised ministry, after Bakker was involved in a sex scandal.
[San Francisco Examiner, 27 November 1994 (AP)]
Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists—- especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God.
Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
Piety could do nothing better than imitate morality.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Please understand, Political Correctness is primarily a propaganda tool to define liberals as intolerant Nazis.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars�mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination�stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern�of which I am a part�perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Richard Feynman
Politics must be founded on the solid faith of God almighty
[Alan Keyes, Rep. presidential candidate, at Christian Coalition "Road to Victory" convention]
Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any Whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.
[Adam Smith, on the death of David Hume. In the published version of Smith's introductory letter to Hume's autobiography, these words are tempered to exclude the Whining Christian.]
Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction — in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. xviii-xix.
Power corrupts; Absolute power corrupts absolutely; God is all-powerful. Draw your own conclusions
Pray, and all your sins are hooked upon the sky. Pray, and the heathen lie will disappear. Prayers, they hide the saddest views, Believing the strangest things, Loving the alien.
[David Bowie]
Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
[Ambrose Bierce]
Prayer has no place in the public schools, just like facts have no place in organized religion.
[School Superintendent on "The Simpsons"]
Prayer is a hook that never caught any fish. It is a gun that never brought down any game.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Prayer is begging from a pauper.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Prayer is like a pump in an empty well, it makes lots of noise, but brings no water.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Prayers never bring anything… They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas
[W. C. Fields]
Praying is like a rocking chair— it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere.
[Gypsy Rose Lee]
Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.
[Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel), 1904-1991]
President Bush, saying faith has fostered democratic change around the world, told the National Religious Broadcasters yesterday that "one cannot be America's president without a belief in God."
[San Francisco Chronicle, 30 January 1990 (UPI)]
Priest and God have formed some of the worst combinations in history.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Priestesses should be burnt at the stake because they are assuming powers they have no right to. In the medieval world that was called sorcery. The way of dealing with sorcerers was to burn them at the stake. It's illegal now but if I had my way that is what would happen to them. In medieval times, I would burn the bloody bitches.
[Church of England vicar Rev. Anthony Kennedy, March 9,1994 as reported in the Times, regarding female CofE priests]
Priests and preachers have tricked, terrified and exploited mankind. They have lied for glory of God." They have collected immense financial tribute for "the glory of God." Whatever may be said about the character of individuals among the clergy, the character of the profession as a whole has been distinctly and drastically anti-human. And of course the most sincere among the clergy have been the most dangerous, for they have been willing to go to the most extreme lengths of intolerance for "the glory of God.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Priests will pardon thieves but not philosophers.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Primus in orbe deos facit timor. (Fear created the first gods in the world.)
[Caecilius Statius (220-168 B.C.), Thebais]
Prisons are built with stones of Law,
Brothels with bricks of Religion."
[William Blake, "The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell"]
Progreso, Texas. Hundreds of people a day have visited an auto parts store to view what they believe is the Virgin Mary's image on a bathroom floor. … The image — varying shades of gray that store owner Reynaldo Trevino said were once one color — appeared December 3 on the cement floor of the shower stall in the rear of his Progreso Auto Supply. … Some days more than 1,000 visit. About 100 per hour stopped at the store Tuesday morning. … Some knelt to pray by the shower stall, next to a toilet. Others made the sign of the cross or touched the image they saw. … They see the Virgin's image in the varying shades of gray cement.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 20 December 1990 (AP)]
Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs—unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.
Hunter S. Thompson
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelics drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides, telescopes are unnatural.
[Timothy Leary, "The Politics of Ecstasy"]
Putting a different spin on Flag Day, a 7-year-old atheist Wednesday urged public-school students to refuse to recite the 'Pledge of Allegiance' until the words 'under God' are excised. …'When kids are forced to say, 'under God,' it makes them think that atheists are bad people,' Ricky Sherman said at a news conference, reading a statement he wrote on composition paper in large block letters. …'Atheists are good people,' he said. 'We just know that God is make believe.'
[Press Democrat, 15 June 1989 (AP)]
Quantum events have a way of just happening, without any cause, as when a radioactive atom decays at a random time. Even the quantum vacuum is not an inert void, but is boiling with quantum fluctuations. In our macroscopic world, we are used to energy conservation, but in the quantum realm this holds only on average. Energy fluctuations out of nothing create short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs, which is why the vacuum is not emptiness but a sea of transient particles. An uncaused beginning, even out of nothing, for spacetime is no great leap of the imagination.
Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
Quantum mechanics is so counter-intuitive, physicists have never been able to come up with a comfortable picture of how it works.
Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
Qumran lies directly within the orbit of Jesus' early activity. His first public appearance occurred in this region. It is a striking fact that the place where Jesus received the ritual baptismal bath in the Jordan at the hands of John, was only 5 km from the monastic settlement of Qumran. There is of course a reason for this. John the Baptist was a schaliach, an apostle of the sect of Qumran…John led a community of Essene moderates. After his baptism one should similarly count Jesus as a member of one of these communities, and refer to him as a Nazarene. This later led to the falsely translated and irrational description of him as 'Jesus of Nazareth', a place which was not even in existence at the time of Jesus. Later a sign was said to have been fixed to the Cross, giving charge against him as membership of this sect: "Jesus, Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum—Jesus, Nazarene, King of the Jews.
["The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the Resurrection" by Holger Kersten & Elmer R. Gruber p. 239]
radical antiabortion groups like Operation Rescue and Rescue America have to be dealt with as domestic terrorists as deadly as the ones who blew up the World Trade Center and as fanatic as the cultists in Waco.
[John Laws]
Ralph Reed likes to quote Alexis de Tocqueville on religion's central place in American democratic society. The quotations are not always accurate, but he is right about one important thing. Tocqueville, like Benjamin Franklin, believed that religion is essential to the health of republican liberty. However, Reed apparently closed the pages of Democracy in America too soon. Had he read further, he would not have missed Tocqueville's point that it is dangerous for religion to tie itself to political institutions and to topical political controversy.
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 21.
Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.
[Federico Fellini, c.1981 60 Minutes interview by Harry Reasoner]
Reality continues to ruin my life.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Reality is a curve. That's not the problem. The problem is that there isn't as much as there should be. According to some of the more mystical texts in the stacks of the library of Unseen University - (…) - at least nine-tenths of all the original reality ever created lies outside the multiverse, and since the multiverse by definition includes absolutely everything that is anything, this puts a bit of a strain on things.
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Philip K. Dick.
Reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error and error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruption of Christianity could not have been purged away.
Thomas Jefferson
Reason is not one tool of thought among many, it is the entire toolbox. To advocate that reason be discarded in some circumstances is to advocate that thinking be discarded- which leaves one in the position of attempting to do a job after throwing away the required instrument.
George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 110.
Reason is the Devil's greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom … Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism… She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets.
[Martin Luther, Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142-148]
Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but — more frequently than not — struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.
[Martin Luther]
Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and … know nothing but the word of God.
[Martin Luther]
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
[Iain M Banks]
Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.
[Martin Luther]
Reason, Observation and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science — have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.
Robert Green Ingersoll
Recently I was reading somewhere or other [about] an Italian curio-dealer who attempted to sell a 17th century crucifix to J.P. Morgan. [I]nside it was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion.
[George Orwell]
Recruits! Before the altar and the servant of God you have given me your oath of allegiance… You have sworn fidelity to me, you are the children of my guard, you are my soldiers, you have surrendered yourself to me, body and soul. // Only one enemy can exist for you — my enemy. With the present Socialist machinations, it may happen that I shall order you to shoot down your own relatives, your brothers, or even your parents — which God forbid — and then you are bound in duty implicitly to obey my orders.
[German Kaiser Wilhelm II, speech, 1891]
Regularity in Nature is not proof of the control of Nature by a Divine intelligence; it is rather the reverse. If something- call it matter, or ether, or x - exists, it must operate in accordance with its innate qualities; and so long as this x remains uncontrolled, its manifestations will continue unchallenged- in other words, there will be "order". The same causes, the same results. That is the manifest signs of a natural "order" that knows nothing of God.
[Chapman Cohen]
Relationships of love and friendship "require significant commonality of purposes, values, sympathies, ways of thinking and acting, and the like. The major problem faced by the moral-inscrutability-of-God version of defensive skepticism is that it seems to preclude our being able to enter into such relationships with God, thereby undercutting the very purpose for which God created us according to theism, namely to enter into a communal relation of love with God.
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. 210.
Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Rennaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.
[P.W. Atkins, "The Limitless Power of Science" essay in "Nature's Imagination", John Cornwell, ed.; 1995 Oxford University Press, p.125]
Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.
[Mark Twain]
Religion divides us, while it is our human characteristics that bind us to each other.
[Sir Hermann Bondi, interview in Free Inquiry magazine]
Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.
[Madelyn O'Hair]
Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
[Anatole France]
Religion has no place in public schools the way facts have no place in organized religion.
Superintendant Chalmers, The Simpsons
Religion is a disease. It is born of fear; it compensates through hate in the guise of authority, revelation. Religion, enthroned in a powerful social organization, can become incredibly sadistic. No religion has been more cruel than the Christian.
Dr. George A. Dorsey
Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice.
[Georges Bizet, letter to Edmond Galabert, 1866]
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
[William James (1842-1910) American philosopher and psychologist]
Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental ability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an organized institution that has always been a stumbling block to progress.
[Emma Goldman, "What I Believe"]
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing - fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand.
[Bertrand Russell, 6/3/27]
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
[Sigmund Freud, "Future of an Illusion"]
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration- courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth.
[H.L. Mencken, "Autobiographical Notes" (1925)]
Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother of a chicken.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Religion is now the first obstacle to women's advancement. Religion pulls human beings backwards, it goes against science and progressiveness. Religion engulfs people with a fear of the supernatural. It bars people from laughing and never allows people to exercise their choice.
Taslima Nasrin (from her newspaper column, reported in Free Inquiry, Fall, 1994, Vol 14, No. 4, p9)
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
[Susan Sontag (1933)]
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Seneca the Younger (4? B.C. - 65 A.D.)
Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the "imaginary friend" and the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The word "delusion" also carries negative connotations, and religion has plenty of those.
Richard Dawkins
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
[Bertrand Russell]
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
Bertrand Russell
Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the open. Both have their proper sphere and they should realize that they are allies.
[John Haldane, "Science and Life: Essays of a Rationalist"]
Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.
[Oscar Wilde]
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurences it cannot understand.
[Karl Marx]
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
[Alfred North Whitehead]
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.
[Karl Marx, Introduction, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, Deutsch-Franzoesische Yahrbuecher, 1844]
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
[Napoleon Bonaparte]
Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine.
[Austin O'Malley]
Religion stills a thinking mind.
[Greg Erwin]
Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
Religion, n: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the Nature of the Unknowable.
[Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
Religion, religion. Oh, there's a fine line
between Saturday night and Sunday morning…
Where's the church, who took the steeple,
Religion's in the hands of some crazy ass people,
Television preachers with bad hair and dimples,
The God's honest truth is, it's not that simple."
["Fruitcakes", Jimmy Buffett]
Religion, society and state from none of these do women get their proper honour. It is religion which has created an unparalleled disparity between men and women.
Taslima Nasrin
Religion, throughout the greater part of its history, has been a form of "holy" terrorism. It still aims its terrors at men, but modern realism and the spread of popular enlightenment has progressively robbed those terrors of their old-fashioned effectiveness. Wherever men take religion very seriously — wherever there is devout belief — there is also the inseparable feeling of fear.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Religion; humanity's greatest folly, greatest curse.
[Kevin Harris]
Religion: just say 'no'.
[Tim Smith]
Religion…can exercise a severe crippling and inhibiting effect upon the human mind, by fostering irrational anxiety and guilt, and by hampering the free play of the intellect".
[Dr J C Flugel]
Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.
[Ambrose Bierce, "Collected Works" (1912)]
Religions are like farts. Yours is good, but everyone else's stinks.
[Picket Fences]
Religions change; beer and wine remain
[Harvey Allen]
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
[The Oscariana of Oscar Fingall O'Flaherty Will Wilde
[1856-1900] for George Bernard Shaw]
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
Oscar Wilde
Religions do make claims about the universe—the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.
Richard Dawkins
Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.
[Raymond Queneau, "A Model History"]
Religious Cult: The church down the street from yours.
[B.C. cartoon, 30 April 1994]
Religious Displays, as distinct from religious beliefs, are submissive acts performed towards dominant individuals called gods. The acts themselves include various forms of body-lowering, such as kneeling, bowing, kowtowing, salaaming and prostrating; also chanting and rituals of debasement and sacrifice; the offering of gifts to the gods and the making of symbolic gestures of allegiance. The function of these actions is to appease the super-dominant beings and thereby obtains favours or avoid punishments. There is nothing unusual about this behaviour in itself. Subordinates throughout the animal world subject themselves to their most powerful companions in a similar way. But the strange feature of these human submissive actions, as we encounter them today, is that they are performed towards a dominant figure, or figures, who are never present in person. Instead they are represented by images and artifacts and operate entirely through agents called holy-men or priests. These middle-men enjoy a position of social influence and respect because some of the power of the gods rubs off on them. It is therefore extremely important to the holy-men to keep the worshippers permanently obedient to the super- dominant figures, and they do this in several ways.
[Desmond Morris, Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour, 1977, Abrams, New York, pages 148-9]
Religious experiences are like those induced by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, and sleep deprivation: They tell no uniform or coherent story, and there is no plausible theory to account for discrepancies among them.
Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 159.
Religious experiences in one culture often conflict with those in another. One cannot accept all of them as veridical, yet there does not seem to be any way to separate the veridical experiences from the rest.
Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 159.
Religious fundamentalists alone are a huge popular grouping in the United States, which resembles pre-industrial societies in that regard. This is a culture in which three-fourths of the population believe in religious miracles, half believe in the devil, 83 percent believe that the Bible is the 'actual' or the inspired word of God, 39 percent believe in the Biblical prediction of Armageddon and 'accept it with a certain fatalism,' a mere 9 percent accept Darwinian evolution while 44 percent believe that 'God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years,' and so on. The 'God and Country rally' that opened the national Republican convention is one remarkable illustration, which aroused no little amazement in conservative circles in Europe.
[Noam Chomsky, "'Mandate for Change,' or Business as Usual," Z Magazine, February 1993, pp. 32-33]
Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.
[Sigmund Freud: "The Future of an Illusion" 1927, p.34]
Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the "no-contests."
Richard Dawkins
Religious reasons do not excuse violence: they accuse religion.
Remember that millions of Christians still base their belief in a God upon the words of the Bible, which is a collection of the most flabbergasting fictions ever imagined — by men, too, who had lawless but very poor and crude imagination. Ingersoll and numerous other critics have shot the Christian holy book full of holes. It is worthless and proves nothing concerning the existence of a God. The idea of a God is worthless and unprovable.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Remember, atheism is not a worldview itself. Atheism is defined by the view it does not have— theism.
Doug Krueger, "That Colossal Wreck"
Remember, the German people are the chosen of God. On me the German Emperor, the spirit of God has descended. I am His sword, His weapon, and His vice-regent.
[Kaiser Wilhelm II, 4 August 1914]
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's; and unto human beings, what?
[Stanislaw J. Lec]
Republican legislation cutting programs for children show conservatives to be far more concerned with potential children than they are with the real thing.
Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson, a former TV evangelist, once said he believed only devout Christians and Jews were qualified to lead the government, the New York Times reported yesterday. Robertson also maintained that government is subservient to the will of God and that democracy is 'next best' to 'government controlled by God,' the newspaper said…. The Times story cited several articles written by Robertson in which he said God had spoken to him, directed his actions or heeded his prayer to steer away a hurricane. The article also said Robertson had a conversation with Satan in 1960 at the time of his religious conversion. 'I heard Satan say, "Jesus is playing you for a sucker, Robertson."'
[San Francisco Chronicle, 28 December 1987 (UPI)]
Republican presidential hopeful Pat Robertson said yesterday that a quarter of America's autoworkers use illegal drugs, contributing to declining productivity. The remark was criticized by a labor leader as 'stupid'.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 4 November 1987 (AP)]
Rescue teams battled yesterday to answer the desperate screams of mud-caked survivors of a volcano that killed as many as 20,000 people. …A man stood buried up to his neck by mud and water, his legs pinned down by a body four feet below the surface. …Another man, his foot crushed by rubble, lay for more than 24 hours on top of the bodies of his three children — but he survived along with his pregnant wife. 'It was a miracle,' Jose Martinez, a 49-year-old truck driver, said from his hospital bed in Bogota. 'For those of us who survived, it was a miracle.'
[San Francisco Chronicle, 16 November 1985 (Reuters)]
Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?
Hunter S. Thompson
Roman sources that mention him [Jesus] are all dependent on Christian reports. Jesus' trial did not make headlines in Rome, and the archives there had no record of it. If archives were kept in Jerusalem, they were destroyed when revolt broke out in 66 CE or during the subsequent war. That war also devastated Galilee. Whatever records there may have been did not survive. When he was executed, Jesus was no more important to the outside world than the two brigands or insurgents executed with him — whose name we do not know.
E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 49.
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., 1860]
Roughly, science is what we know and philosophy is what we don't know.
Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 219.
Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.
[Abbie Hoffman]
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
[Ambrose Bierce]
Saints fly only in the eyes of their disciples.
[Hindu proverb]
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent.
[George Orwell]
Salvation through slavery is worthless. Salvation from slavery is inestimable.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Same religion that saves - Damns You
[Sepultura]
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
[H.L. Mencken]
Saying your prayers could be a health hazard according to a report in the Medical Journal of Australia. Dr. Margaret T. Taylor traced a case of lead poisoning to the rosary beads an eight-year-old girl was in the habit of kissing. Dr. Taylor suggested that lead poisoning from the same source could account for anemia among nuns and other members of the Catholic faith.
[Cleveland Press, as quoted in True Facts]
School vouchers as proposed by Reagan and Bush do not represent free market competition. The reason is fairly simple. The source of the money is not the consumers. The vouchers are paid for by tax dollars. School vouchers are an attempt to breach the separation of church and state by allowing individuals who are not constrained by the prohibition against Congress passing laws respecting religion to spend tax dollars for the benefit of the religion of their choice. I have no objection to parents sending their children to the school of their choice. The problem with public funding of schools is that it is an inherently collectivist system. The restraints that have been placed on what public schools must teach and what they are prohibited from teaching protect us to a limited extend from the full magnitude of the damage that they have the potential to do if used as a propaganda tool. I have never granted that anyone else rightfully has the freedom to choose how my money will be spent. The only difference between that and slavery is that the masters do not have the authority to beat, sell, or kill me if I choose not to work. Send your children to schools that brainwash them any way that you wish. But do not insist on paying for it with money taken from me by taxation.
[D. Dale Gulledge (ddg@cci.com)]
Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Science built the Academy, superstition the inquisition.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.
[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not A Christian"]
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
[John Burroughs (1837-1921) American naturalist, The Light of Day]
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof
[Ashley Montague]
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes]
Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of human intellectual tradition.
Stephen Jay Gould
Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
Henri Poincar
Science is expanding, and with it our vision of the universe. although this new and constantly changing view may not always give us comfort, it does have the virtue of truth according to our most effective resources for acquiring knowledge. No philosophy, moral outlook, or religion can be inconsistent with the findings of science and hope to endure among educated people.
Heinz R. Pagels
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.
Richard Powers
Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the later only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
Thomas H. Huxley (1825 - 1895)
Science is of value because it can produce something.
Richard Feynman on "The Value of Science" (What Do You Care What Other People Think?)
Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.
Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944), Attributed in Robert L. Weber "More Random Walks in Science", 1982
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
Science is the human search for a natural explanation of what the universe is: how it is constructed, how it came to be.
Niles Eldredge
Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.
Carl Gustav Jung
Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all--the apathy of human beings.
Helen Keller
Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.
[Sir Karl Popper]
Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.
Richard Dawkins
Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions
Vera Rubin
Science tells us what we can know but what we can know is little and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive of many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.
[Bertrand Russell]
Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious, surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Walt Whitman
SCIENCE: A way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it is wrong. There is a lot more Science than you think.
(Terry Pratchett, Wings)
Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.
Richard Dawkins
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
Richard Dawkins
Scientific claims must be testable; we must, in principal, be able to envision a set of observations that would render them false. Miracles cannot be judged by this criterion.
Stephen Jay Gould
Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of that of children. This means that the children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of about Evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about Christ's ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier's and Wright's. Worse than that, they are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.
[J.B.S. Haldane]
Scientific hypotheses are always tentative; they are designed to be held only so long as they conform to the evidence. Proponents of the theistic hypothesis, on the other hand, are already sure that their hypothesis is correct; the only seek evidence to buttress a foregone conclusion.
Keith Parsons, "Is There a Case for Christian Theism?"
Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.
Ernst Mayr
Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.
[Albert Einstein, 1936, responding to a child who wrote and asked if scientists pray. Source: "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", Edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann]
Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
Richard Dawkins
Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
[Ambrose Bierce]
Section 49-6-1012. No teacher or administrator in a local education agency shall teach the theory of evolution except as a scientific theory. Any teacher or administrator teaching such theory as fact commits insubordination, as defined in Section 49-5-5 01(s)(6), and shall be dismissed or suspended as provided in Section 49-5-511.
[Tennessee Bill HB2972 (House), SB 3229 (Senate), introducted by Tennesse Rep. Zene Whitson, considered by the House Education Committee, and the K-12 Subcommittee of the Senate Education Committee, on February 21, 1996]
Secular humanism does not have the essential attributes of a religion: belief in a deity, the wish for some sort of afterlife, "sacred" dogma or texts, or an absolutist moral creed. Instead, it expresses a philosophical and ethical point of view, and it draws upon the scientific method in formulationg its naturalistic view of the nature.
[Paul Kurtz & Tim Madigan, "Eupraxophy and Secular Humanism", Free Inquiry]
Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people.
[Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933]
See god? That is the easiest thing in the world. He always appears to me in the bottom of the tenth glass of beer… and sometimes as a beautiful, young, female nude.
[theologian Franz Bibfeldt on the reality of visions]
Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.
(Terry Pratchett, Pyramids)
Selling eternal life is an unbeatable business, with no customers ever asking for their money back after the goods are not delivered.
Victor J. Stenger
Send me money, send me green, Heaven you will meet, Make a contribution and you'll get a better seat…
[Metallica]
Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.
[Grover Cleveland, 1905]
Sensible men no longer belive in miracles; they were invented by priests to humbug the peasants.
[King Alfonso]
Seventy-two American winners of the Nobel Prize in science urged the Supreme Court yesterday to strike down a Louisiana law requiring public schools teaching evolution to also teach creationism. …Creation-science is linked closely to a literal interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis, teaching that Earth and most of its life forms came into existence suddenly about 6000 years ago. …The case before the high court is Edwards v. Aguillard,85-1513.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 19 August 1986 (AP)]
Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions.
[Phyllis Schlafly]
Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest.
[Jimmy Swaggart, TV preacher, self-described pornography addict who paid prostitutes to commit "pornographic acts", hypocrite]
Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll is morally superior to Hate, Alcohol and Lock & Load any way you look at it.
She manifested an entire want of instruction as to the nature and effect of an oath, of all religious training, and utter ignorance of the existence of a Supreme Being, "the rewarder of truth and avenger of falsehoods.
[Supreme Court of Alabama, 1882, disqualifying an 11-year old girls's testimony at her rape trial. The rapist went free.]
Shelley was familiar with tyranny and intolerance. In 1811, while yet an undergraduate, he'd had the 'The Necessity of Atheism' published at Worthing in Sussex. It appeared for sale in the bookshop window of Munday and Slater's for just twenty minutes. The brevity of the sale was due, unfortunately, not to an exhaustion of the edition, but the appearance upon the scene of a clerical wowser yclept John Walker. The good Rev., strolling by the bookstore, saw the essay upon display, and exhibiting correct Christian indignation, upbraided the two miserable sinners. The pamphlets were removed and burned in true Hitlerian fashion - except for one that Slater kept, and which is the surviving copy.
[Joseph Sapere]
Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa.
William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p. 36.
Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. (If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.)
[Voltaire, "ÐpOEtres, XCVI"]
Silence filled the University in the same way that air fills a hole. Night spread across the Disk like plum jam, or possibly blackberry preserve. But there would be a morning. There would always be another morning.
(Terry Pratchett, Sourcery)
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful—just stupid.)
[Robert A. Heinlein]
Since experiences of God are good grounds for the existence of God, are not experiences of the absence of God good grounds for the nonexistence of God? After all, many people have tried to experience God and have failed. Cannot these experiences of the absence of God be used by atheists to counter the theistic argument based on experience of the presence of God?
Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 159.
Since Jefferson coined the phrase 'wall of separation between church and state' in 1802, a full 145 years before the Soviet provision was written, it is obviously incorrect to suggest that the Soviets pioneered the separation principle. If anything, the Soviets stole the concept from the United States. In any case, what the Soviet constitution said about religious freedom has no bearing on U.S. constitutional provisions. The Soviet document also guaranteed free speech (at least on paper), but no one has labeled freedom of expression a Communist idea.
Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), pp. 222-23.
Since September it's just gotten colder and colder. There's less daylight now, I've noticed too. This can only mean one thing - the sun is going out. In a few more months the Earth will be a dark and lifeless ball of ice. Dad says the sun isnt going out. He says its colder because the earth's orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon.
Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Since the Bible and the church are obviously mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust them to tell us where we are going?
[Anonymous]
Since the masses of the people are inconsistent, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.
[Polybius (204?-122? B.C.)]
Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were of course exterminated.
[Voltaire]
Since theological propositions are scientifically meaningless, those of us of pragmatic disposition simply won't buy such dubious merchandise. […] Maybe — remotely — there might be something in such promotions, as there might be something in the talking dogs and the stocks in Arabian tapioca mines that W.C. Fields once sold in his comedies, but we suspect that we recognize a con game in operation. At least, we want to hear the dog talk or see the tapioca ore before we buy into such deals.
[Robert Anton Wilson]
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists — whether through design or stupidity, I do not know — as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. The punctuations occur at the level of species; directional trends (on the staircase model) are rife at the higher level of transitions within major groups.
Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 124.
Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.
[Astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace's response to Napoleon's inquiry as to why he did not mention God in his book Mecanique celeste In 1995, Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay for the Natural History magazine where he says that this story probably is not true]
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so… Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency - the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known. Stephen Jay Gould
Skinner: So, what's the word down at One School Board Plaza?
Chalmers: We're dropping the geography requirement. The children weren't testing well. It's proving to be an embarrassment.
Skinner: Very good. Back to the three R's.
Chalmers: Two R's, come October.
The Simpsons
Skinner: We can buy REAL periodic tables instead of these promotional ones from Oscar Meyer.
Krabappel: Who can tell me the atomic weight of bolognium?
Martin: Ooh … delicious?
Krabappel: Correct. I would also accept snacktacular.
The Simpsons
So behold here the triumph God's wisdom has won. Behold here the damage that can't be undone. Stagnation is good, and we're good to the core, while faith rots us like salt rots the land If your god helps the helpless, may he help you all well. I'm bound for the outside to find my own hell. If defiance means death, I would die before stand like a sheep to be thrown to God's hand.
[Julia Ecklar, "The Hand of God" from the album Divine Intervention]
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
[Bertrand Russell]
So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake… Religion is all bunk.
[Thomas Edison]
So how do theists respond to arguments like this? [The Argument from Evil] They say there is a reason for evil, but it is a mystery. Well, let me tell you this: I'm actually one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall. You ask me for proof of this. I have a simple answer: it's a mystery. Just accept my word for it on faith. And that's just the logic theists use in their discussions of evil.
Quentin Smith, "Two Ways to Defend Atheism"
So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place then, for a creator?
-Stephen W. Hawking (A Brief History of Time)
So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.
[Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies]
So much for Objective Journalism. Don�t bother to look for it here -- not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.
Hunter S. Thompson
So succesful were the drafters of the Constitution in defining government in secular terms that one of the most powerful criticisms of the Constitution when ratified and for succeeding decades was that it was indifferent to Christianity and God. It was denounced by many as a godless document, which is precisely what it is.
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 23.
So telling a lie becomes a sin if you tell it to take advantage of a person, but if you tell a lie to do a good thing for him that is not a sin. Even God tells lies very often; you can see this throughout history.
[Rev. Sun Myong Moon, in MASTER SPEAKS, 3/16/72—England, revealing the extent of his respect for truth, i.e. none]
So that a false statement knowingly made to one who has a right to the truth will not be a lie.
[Catholic Encyclical IX, 471]
So the secret to good self-esteem is to lower your expectations to the point where they're already met?
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
So you're a god, eh? Very nice, very nice. But, you still don't have a reservation…
[Monty Python]
So, how come there are no "talking snakes" nowadays? … Because you are not righteous enough to hear them talk.
[Raoul Newton, net.fundie.idiot]
So, if the Bible is our sole source of knowledge about God's will, we have no way of knowing what to do in many moral situations.
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.
Some heathens whose Idol was greatly weatherworn threw it into a river, and erecting a new one, engaged in public worship at its base.
'What is this all about?' inquired the New Idol.
'Father of Joy and Gore,' said the High Priest, 'be patient and I will instruct you in the doctrines and rites of our holy religion.'
A year later, after a course of study in theology, the Idol asked to be thrown into the river, declaring himself an atheist.
'Do not let that trouble you,' said the High Priest — 'so am I.'
[Ambrose Bierce, "Two Sceptics", Fantastic Fables]
Some of the state's witnesses suggested that the scientific community was 'closed-minded' on the subject of creationism and that explained the lack of acceptance of the creation-science arguments. Yet no witness produced an article for which publication had been refused.
Judge William R. Overton, "Decision of the Court" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984),
Some people will say, 'But God would never will something cruel like torture. He is, after all, a perfectly good Being.' There at least two important replies to this objection. First, it is not (strictly speaking) relevant. It might be that your friend Smith would never steal anything, but we can still reasonably ask, 'If Smith were to steal something, should he make amends?' And presumably, the answer is 'Yes.' In other words, a purely hypothetical question can still have an answer. So, even if God would not approve of torture, it is still true, according to the divine command theory, that if He were to approve of torture, then torture would be right.
C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 38.
Some persons are remembered solely for their virtues and others solely for their faults. This is why we have a Jesus and a Judas.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
Some theists, observing that all 'effects' need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 109.
Some two-and-a-half-thousand years after its debut in Western culture, materialism stands in the final decade of the twentieth century as a complete and well-defined philosophy in many respects. Its core assumption that there is no reality other than the material order exhibiting itself in what exists around and within us distinguishes it from competing philosophies today just as sharply as it did for Lucretius. The notion of supernatural or immaterial states of being that are alien to nature seems just as incoherent to materialists in the 1990s as it did to d'Holbach, who first worked out materialism's atheistic implications. The conviction not just that the laws of nature are knowable but that human science is capable, at least in principle, of knowing them is no less central now than it was for Buechner. And the assumption that all thought and feeling, human and otherwise, is a material process is still as key an element in materialism as it has been for the mind-brain reductionists of the twentieth century. In these four and many related ways, the materialist vision is what it has always been: the clearest and most consistent effort to comprehend and demystify nature and humanity's place in it that human intelligence has ever made.
[Richard C. Vitzthum, Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 176]
Some very cruel people, who have made life miserable for others, may deserve a lengthy period of punishment. We may even grant, for the sake of argument, that some deserve thousands of years of intense punishment. But can anyone literally merit unending punishment? It is natural to suppose that each sin a person commits merits some finite degree of punishment. To take an analogy from the legal sphere, we normally suppose that a burglar deserves a few years of imprisonment, and that it would be unjust to imprison him indefinitely. However, to put the point crudely, if each sin an unrepentant sinner commits adds a finite number of years in hell, the total number of years in hell will be finite (assuming the number of sins is finite).
C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 33.
Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?
[P.W. Atkins, "The Limitless Power of Science" essay in "Nature's Imagination", John Cornwell, ed.; 1995 Oxford University Press, p.123]
Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.
Stephen Jay Gould
Sometimes I think the environment in which we operate is too secular. That fact that we have freedom of religion doesn't mean we need to try to have freedom from religion. It doesn't mean that those of us who have faith shouldn't frankly admit that we are animated by that faith.
[Pres. Bill Clinton]
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes"
Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
(Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms)
Sometimes the gods have no taste at all. They allow sunrises and sunsets in ridiculous pink and blue hues that any professional artist would dismiss as the work of some enthsiastic amateur who'd never looked at a real sunset. This was one of those sunrises. It was the kind of sunrise a man looks at and says, 'No real sunrise could paint the sky Surgical Appliance Pink.' Nevertheless, it was beautiful.
(Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time)
Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal power should not become too important in any church.
[Eleanor Roosevelt]
St. Augustine found lying among the clergy so prevalent that he wrote two books (De Mendacio in 395 A.D. and Contra Mendacium in 420 A.D.), urging that it stop.
[Gordon Stein, A Second Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism,p. 65]
States who execute the most people have the highest murder rates. Which puts a kibosh on the conservative belief capital punishment is a deterrent.
Stating the 'The Constitution guarantess that government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religious exercises,' the court held the First Amendment is violated by including clerical members who offer prayer as part of an official school graduation ceremony, even though attendance was supposedly voluntary. The court concluding that attendance was in a real sense obligatory with the students indiced to conform.
[Lee v. Weisman (1992, U S) 120 L Ed 2d 467, 112 S Ct 2649, from the 1996 pocket part for the book "Modern Constitutional Law, Vol. I: The Individual And The Government", by Chester J. Antieau]
Still, some articles announced that scientists have viewed creation and seen 'the handwriting of God.' I've looked at the picture of the COBE results that has been widely published and am afraid I can't make out the words 'I am, who am' spelled out in the sky.
Victor J. Stenger, "Big Bang Ripples No Message from God"
Stone circles were common enough everywhere in the mountains. Druids built them as weather computers, and since it was always cheaper to build a new 33-Megalith circle than to upgrade an old slow one, there were generally plenty of ancient ones around
(Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)
Strange…a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
[Mark Twain]
Students made it long ago," said Rincewind. "Handy way in and out after lights out."
"Ah," said Twoflower, "I understand. Over the wall and out to brightly-lit tavernas to drink and sing and recite poetry, yes?"
"Nearly right except for the singings and the poetry, yes," said Rincewind.
(Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic)
Students?" barked the Archchancellor.
"Yes, Master. You know? They're the thinner ones with the pale faces?
Because we're a university? They come with the whole thing, like rats —
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
Styles of sculpture, music, and dance used to vary greatly from village to village within New Guinea. Some villagers along the Sepik River and in the Asmat swamps produced carvings that are now world-famous because of their quality. But New Guinea villagers have been increasing coerced or seduced into abandoning their artistic traditions. When I visited an isolated triblet of 578 people at Bomai in 1965, the missionary controlling the only store had just manipulated the people into burning all their art. Centuries of unique cultural development ("heathen artifacts," as the missionary put it) had thus been destroyed in one morning.
[Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, 1992, Harper Collins, New York, page 231]
Such an act can be neither verified (nor falsified) on the basis of empirical data, by facts established by historical investigation. His death as redemptive event was not an act visible to the disinterested observer. All such mythological acts lie outside the purview of the empirical sciences and hence of the historian.
Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 51.
Such reports persist and proliferate because they sell. And they sell, I think, because there are so many of us who want so badly to be jolted out of our humdrum lives, to rekindle that sense of wonder we remember from childhood, and also, for a few of the stories, to be able, really and truly, to believe—in Someone older, smarter, and wiser who is looking out for us. Faith is clearly not enough for many people. They crave hard evidence, scientific proof. They long for the scientific seal of approval, but are unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that impart credibility to that seal.
Carl Sagan
Suffer for sex…. Crucifixions for everyone… A baby a year 'til you drop…
[The "Pope", 11/12/89 Pro-Choice Rally in DC]
Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
[H.L. Mencken]
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
[H.L. Mencken]
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
[Edmund Blake (1729-1797)]
Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.
[Voltaire]
Superstition, born of paganism and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil.
[Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
Superstitions typically involve seeing order where in fact there is none, and denial amounts to rejecting evidence of regularities, sometimes even ones that are staring us in the face.
Murray Gell-Mann (Quark and the Jaguar)
Superstitions, cults and mysticism appear with surprising consistency during a social crisis. Today it is ESP and UFOs, astrology and clairvoyance, mystic cults and mesmeric healers. The growth of interest in such things is a sure indicator of social unrest, personal uneasiness, frustration and loss of purpose. These symptoms are also present in the West, particularly in the U.S., where they are more chronic; in the Soviet Union, however, we have an acute fever. …Carl Sagan of Cornell University has told me that in the U.S. there are 15,000 astrologers and only 1,500 astronomers. …It is fascinating that in the Soviet Union we are importing creationism from fundamentalists in the U.S. …The momentous changes happening now in the Soviet Union are the reason for this current upsurge of the irrational. What is important is the emerging extremism that they may signal.
[Sergei Kapitza, President of the Physical Society of the U.S.S.R. and editor of the Russian edition of Scientific American, "Antiscience Trends in the U.S.S.R.", Scientific American 265(2):32-38, August 1991]
Suppose we've chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we're just making him madder and madder
[Homer Simpson's version of Pascal's Wager, "The Simpsons"]
Suppose, however, that God did give this law to the Jews, and did tell them that whenever a man preached a heresy, or proposed to worship any other God that they should kill him; and suppose that afterward this same God took upon himself flesh, and came to this very chosen people and taught a different religion, and that thereupon the Jews crucified him; I ask you, did he not reap exactly what he had sown? What right would this god have to complain of a crucifixion suffered in accordance with his own command?
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 2, p. 259]
Surgeon General's Warning: Quitting Religion Now Greatly Increases the Chances of World Peace.
Surprise is the essence of humor, and nothing is more surprising than truth.
Bill Watterson
Susie: You'd get a good grade without doing any work.
Calvin: So?
Susie: It's wrong to get rewards you haven't earned.
Calvin: I've never heard of anyone who couldn't live with that.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Symbolically, reason has already triumphed in the debate over intelligent design. The faith-based side has shifted from using the term "creationism" to using "intelligent design". So their argument has…evolved.
Iain Banks in New Scientist, 19 Nov 2005
Take a hard look at the Grand Canyon. Try to explain that through evolution.
[Freddie Cash, net.fundie.idiot]
Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 285]
Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Take that cross and shove it!
Anita Hellerbach 1969 (Women's Activist. Hellerbach yelled these words to a group of Christians who heckled her about abortion during a ralley)
Talk of God leads by a direct road to the conclusion of atheism. The only sensible attitude is to dismiss the idea of God — to get it out of the way of more important ideas. The wide dissemination of this intelligent atheistic attitude is one of the leading features of any program of popular education which is completely worthy of the name.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience.
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
Television preacher Pat Robertson, who plans to officially announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next month, said he would not tolerate atheists in his administration, Time magazine reported yesterday. … Although Robertson firmly denied a quote attributed to him that only born-again Christians and Jews should hold government jobs, he told Time that nonbelievers would have no place in his administration if he were elected.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 21 September 1987 (UPI)]
Tell me there is a God in the serene heavens that will damn his children for the expression of an honest belief! More men have died in their sins, judged by your orthodox creeds, than there are leaves on all the forests in the wide world ten thousand times over. Tell me these men are in hell; that these men are in torment; that these children are in eternal pain, and that they are to be punished forever and forever! I denounce this doctrine as the most infamous of lies.
[Ingersoll, Man, Woman and Child]
Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all lands and in all ages, in splendour and vastness, testify to the metaphysical need of man, which, strong and ineradicable, follows close upon his physical need. Certainly whoever is satirically inclined might add that this metaphysical need is a modest fellow who is content with poor fare. It sometimes allows itself to be satisfied with clumsy fables and insipid tales. If only imprinted early enough, they are for a man adequate explanations of his existence and supports of his morality. Consider, for example, the Koran. This wretched book was sufficient to found a religion of the world, to satisfy the metaphysical need of innumerable millions of men for twelve hundred years, to become the foundation of their morality, and of no small contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and most extended conquests. We find in it the saddest and the poorest form of Theism. Much may be lost through translation; but I have not been able to discover one single valuable thought in it. Such things show that metaphysical capacity does not go hand in hand with the metaphysical need. Yet it will appear that in the early ages of the present surface of the earth this was not the case, and that those who stood considerably nearer than we do to the beginning of the human race and the source of organic nature, had also both greater energy of the intuitive faculty of knowledge, and a truer disposition of mind, so that they were capable of a purer, more direct comprehension of the inner being of nature, and were thus in a position to satify the metaphysical need in a more worthy manner. Thus originated in the primitive ancestors of the Brahmans, the Rishis, the almost superhuman conceptions which were afterwards set down in the Upanishads of the Vedas.
[Schopenhauer, "World as Will and Idea"]
Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.
Richard Dawkins
Terrorism is just another word for nothing left to lose.
Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 A.D. He was a pagan, and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city until about his 35th year, when he became a Christian …. To him is ascribed the sublime confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). This does not altogether accord with historical fact, for he merely said: "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." Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it.]
[C. G. Jung, in Psychological Types] (Teruillian was one of the founders of the Catholic Church).
Thank God" that the Bible cannot possibly be the word of God.
[Rev. Donald Morgan, Atheologian]
Thank you, but I'm afraid I can't accept your compliment. You see, I'm an atheist, so if I'm also God, that would mean that I don't believe in myself, and at this point in my life, I don't need the added insecurity.
[J. Michael Straczynski is the producer of Babylon 5, when a fan of Babylon 5 told Straczynski that he was God]
Thank you. before I begin, I'd like everyone to notice that my report is in a professional, clear plastic binder…When a report looks this good, you know it'll get an A. That's a tip kids. Write it down.
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
That [separation of church and state] was never in the Constitution, however much the liberals laugh at me for saying it, they know good and well it was never in the Constitution! Such language only appeared in the constitution of the communist Soviet Union
[Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, Jan. 22, 1995]
That church [Catholic] teaches us that we can make God happy by being miserable ourselves…
[Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 492]
That paragon of humorists, Art Buchwald, in a column entitled 'Hunting Down the Secular Humanists,' writes: 'What makes them so dangerous is that secular Humanists look just like you and me. Some of them could be your best friends without you knowing that they are Humanists. They could come into your house, play with your children, eat your food and even watch football with you on television, and you'd never know they have read Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, and Huckleberry Finn…. No one is safe until Congress sets up an Anti-Secular Humanism Committee to get at the rot. Witnesses have to be called, and they have to name names.
Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Seventh ed., New York: Continuum, 1990), p. xi.
That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?
(Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)
That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell.
[Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Summa Theologica]
That's right," he said. "We're philosophers. We think, therefore we am.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
That's the difference between me and the rest of the world! Happiness isn't good enough for me! I demand euphoria!
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
That's the problem with believing in a supernatural being. Trying to determine what he wants.
[Councellor Troi, ST:TNG]
That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.
Bill Watterson
That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
The `wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.
[Chief Justice William Rehnquist]
The 'evangel' died on the cross. What has been called 'evangel' from that moment was actually the opposite of that which he had lived: 'ill tidings,' a dysangel.
[Nietzsche]
The "dropping of context" — deliberately and deceitfully — by Creationist "spokesmen" is part of their game of fraud in the "use" of quotations from scientists. And it "works" (rhetorically, for the kinds of audience in front of which they use it) when the readers do NOT have the basic background in critical reading…
[Michael Siemon, in talk.religion.misc]
The "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment means at least this: neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.
[U.S. Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, Majority opinion Everson v. Board of Education 330 U.S. 1 (1947)]
The "stars" associated with the solar system, such as the planets and asteroids (and it should be remembered that the term "star" in Biblical usage applies to any heavenly body other than the sun and moon) would be particularly likely to be involved, in the view of the heavy concentration of angels, both bad and evil, around the planet Earth.
[Henry Morris, ICR]
The "wall of separation between church and state" is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.
William Rehnquist, Supreme Court
The [Christian] supremacists who lead the anti-gay crusade are wrong morally. They are wrong because justice is moral, and prejudice is evil; because truth is moral and the lie of the closet is the real sin; because the claim of morality is a subtle sort of subterfuge, a strategem which hides the real aim which is much more secular. The supremacists don't care about morality, they care about power. They care about social control. And their goal, my friends, is the reconstruction of American Democracy into American Theocracy.
[Urvashi Vaid (April 25, 1993)]
The ability to ask question like 'Where am I and who is the "I" that is asking?' is one of the things that distinguishes mankind from, say, cuttlefish.
(Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent)
The absurdity of a religious practice may be clearly demonstrated without lessening the numbers of people who indulge in it.
[Anatole France]
The academic mind, as we know, is sometimes capable of assuming an aggressive attitude. The official mind, on the contrary, is and has to be, expert in the art of self-defence.
R.A. Fisher
The account shows, however, that the gods dreaded education and knowledge then just as they do now. The church still faithfully guards the dangerous tree of knowledge, and has exerted in all ages her utmost power to keep mankind from eating the fruit thereof. The priests have never ceased repeating the old falsehood and the old threat: "Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." From every pulpit comes the same cry, born of the same fear: "Lest they eat and become as gods, knowing good and evil." For this reason, religion hates science, faith detests reason, theology is the sworn enemy of philosophy, and the church with its flaming sword still guards the hated tree, and like its supposed founder, curses to the lowest depths the brave thinkers who eat and become as gods.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
The ACLU is to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews.
[Rev. Jerry Falwell]
The act of bellringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
[Ezra Pound]
The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.
[H. L. Mencken]
The activities engaged in by the Christian Coalition…were a vital part of why we had a revolution at the polls on November 8, 1994.
[Newt Gingrich]
The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was… accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on Earth. Presuming we gradually enter upon the reverse course, there is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian god, there is now a considerable decline in mankind's feeling of guilt; indeed, the prospect cannot be dismissed that the complete and definitive victory of Atheism might free mankind of this whole feeling of guilty in- debtedness towards its origin… Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together.
[Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Genealogy of Morals]
The age of the earth is now established beyond any reasonable doubt as very great, yet in the United States millions of Fundamentalists still stoutly defend the naive view that it is relatively short, an opinion deduced from reading the Christian Bible too literally. They also usually deny that animals and plants have evolved and changed radically over such long periods, although this is equally well established. This gives one little confidence that what they have to say about the process of natural selection is likely to be unbiased, since their views are predetermined by a slavish adherence to religious dogmas.
Francis Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), p. 261-2)
The Ages of Faith, which are praised by our neo-scholastics, were the time when the clergy had things all their own way. Daily life was full of miracles wrought by saints and wizardry perpetrated by devils and necromancers. Many thousands of witches were burnt at the stake. Men's sins were punished by pestilence and famine, by earthquake, flood, and fire. And yet, strange to say, they were even more sinful than they are now-a-days.
Bertrand Russell, "A Debate on the Existence of God" (1948) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 208.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Ron Suskind, on the Bush administration
The Amendment's purpose was not to strike merely at the official establishent of a single sect, creed, or religion, outlawing only a formal relation such as had prevailed in England and some of the colonies…It was to create a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority by comprehensively forbidding every form of public aid or support for religion.
[Supreme court, Everson case]
The American creationist movement has entirely bypassed the scientific forum and has concentrated instead on political lobbying and on taking its case to a fair-minded electorate… The reason for this strategy is overwhelmingly apparent: no scientific case can be made for the theories they advance.
Kenneth R. Miller, "Scientific Creationism versus Evolution" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 22.
The American Family Association of Ohio believes that God has communicated absolute truth to man through the Word of God (the Bible) which is inerrant and infallible, and that all men are subject to the authority of God's Word at all times. Therefore, a culture based on an adherence to Biblical truth best serves the well being of our country, in accordance with the vision of our founding fathers.
Science Excellence for All Ohioans (SEAO), a project of the American Family Association of Ohio (AFAO)
The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.
[Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 5]
The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.
R.A. Fisher
The ancient poets animated all objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.
[William Blake, from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"]
The ancient seekers after truth differ from their modern successors in only one respect. It was permitted to them to suppose that supernatural forces were at work in the world-forces which could be perceived only by the eye of faith. The modern seeker refuses to accept any explanation which involves the action of a supernatural agent, even as a last resort.
Arthur Keith
The answer is simple: kill the heretics. History shows us that this is the actual solution that competing religions apply — trial by combat or trial by ordeal. God is the final arbiter. What a sad waste of human potential it has proven to be.
[Paul Hager (hagerp@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu)]
The applications of science are inevitable and unavoidable for all countries and peoples today. But something more than its application is necessary. It is the scientific approach, the adverturous and yet critical temper of science, the search for the truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on preconceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind all this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life itself and the solution of its many problems.
[Jawaharlal Nehru, former Prime Minister of India]
The Archchancellor's most important job, as the Bursar saw it, was to sign things, preferably, from the Bursar's point of view, without reading them first.
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.
Richard Dawkins
The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents.
[Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186]
The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents.
[Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186]
The atheist does not say "there is no God," but he says "I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word 'God' is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. … The Bible God I deny; the Christian God I disbelieve in; but I am not rash enough to say there is no God as long as you tell me you are unprepared to define God to me."
[Charles Bradlaugh, "Plea for Atheism"]
The attack on the peasant economy was accompanied by a fierce campaign against the Orthodox Church, the center of traditional peasant culture, which was seen by the Stalinist leadership as one of the main obstacles to collectivization.
[Alan Bullock, "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, ISBN 0-394-58601-8), p. 264, in the chapter "Stalin's Revolution", showing that Stalin's motivation for destroying churches was because of their threat to his political plans and not communistic "atheism"]
The authors of the best-selling "Left Behind" end-times thriller series call the new apocalyptic NBC mini series "unbiblical" and "weird." Jerry Jenkins, novelist of the "Left Behind" series, which has sold 62 million copies since its debut in 1995, said "Revelations" is "a mishmash of myth, silliness, and misrepresentations of Scripture."
The barbaric religions of primitive worlds hold not a germ of scientific fact, though they claim to explain all. Yet if one of these savages has all the logical ground for his beliefs taken away, he doesn't stop believing. He then calls his mistaken beliefs 'faith' because he knows they are right. And he knows they are right because he has faith.
[Harry Harrison, Jason dinAlt character, Deathworld, Berkeley Medallion Edition, 1976]
The beating of humanity's heart cannot be felt by placing the finger on the church's pulse.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
[Joseph Conrad]
The belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of the body is a matter of philosophical or theological speculation rather than of simple faith, and is accordingly nowhere expressly taught in Holy Scripture.
[The Jewish Encyclopedia (1910), Vol. VI, p. 564]
The belief that the world as it ought to be is, really exists, is a belief of the unproductive who do not desire to create a world as it ought to be. It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organizes a small part of it oneself." All the beauty and sublimity we have bestowed upon… imaginary things I will reclaim as the property and product of man… with what regal liberality he has lavished gifts upon things so as to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched!
[Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Will to Power]
The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
[Hungarian proverb]
The best argument for the use of the name Agnostic is simply that the word Atheist has been so long covered with all manner of ignorant calumny, that it is expedient to use a new term, which though in some respects faulty, has a fair start, and will in time have a recognized meaning. The case so stated is reasonable; but there is a per contra that whatever the motive with which the name is used, it is now tacked to half a dozen conflicting forms of doctrine, varying loosely between Theism and Pantheism. The name of Atheism escapes that drawback. Its unpopularity has saved it from a half-hearted and half-minded patronage.
[John M. Robertson]
The best defense against Christianity is a good Christian Education
[Psycho Dave]
The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.
[Clarence Darrow]
The best way to lose all is to cling with desperation to that which cannot possibly be sustained literally. Literalistic Christians will learn that a God or a faith system that has to be defended daily is finally no God or faith system at all. They will learn that any god who can be killed ought to be killed. Ultimately they will discover that all their claims to represent the historical, traditional, or biblical truth of Christianity cannot stop the advance of knowledge that will render every historic claim for a literal religious system questionable at best, null and void at worst.
[Bishop John Shelby Spong, Episcopal (Anglican) Bishop of Newark, NY, in Resurrection: Myth or Reality? pg. 22]
The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable.
[Thomas Huxley, English biologist]
The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman's emancipation.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), U.S. campaigner for women's rights. Free Thought Magazine (Sept. 1896)]
The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision.
[Lynn Lavner]
The Bible doesn't forbid suicide. It's Catholic directive, intended to slow down their loss of martyrs.
[Ellen Blackstone]
The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.
Steve Allen (Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
The Bible is "a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.
[Mark Twain, "Mark Twain and the Bible"]
The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.
[The Theological Works of Thomas Paine]
The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.
[Abraham Lincoln]
The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history
[Noam Chomsky]
The Bible is the authoritative Word of God and contains all truth.
[Pres. Bill Clinton, at a prayer breakfast]
The Bible is the inerrant…word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.
Jerry Falwell, Finding Inner Peace and Strength, p. 26.
The Bible says all men are without excuse. Even those who are given no good reason to believe and many persuasive reasons to disbelieve have no excuse, because the ultimate reason they do not believe is that they have deliberately rejected God's Holy Spirit.
William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p. 37.
The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a condition of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependant on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire.
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton]
The bible teaches that women brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire… Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
Robert A. Wilson (Right Where You Are Sitting Now)
The Bible upon which Christianity is founded does not say what Christianity is, what a Christian is, nor what we must do in order to be a Christian.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?
Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.
The big mistake Bill Clinton made was showing up for the Paula Jones civil suit. I’ll bet that wasn’t Hillary’s idea.
The blood in any person is in reality the person himself. … poisons due to personal living, eating and drinking habits … The poisons that produce the impulse to commit suicide, murder, or steal are in the blood. Moral insanity, sexual perversions, repression, inferiority complexes, petty crimes - these often follow in the wake of blood transfusion.
[Watchtower 9/15/61 page 564]
The book, called the Bible, is filled with passages equally horrible, unjust and atrocious. This is the book to be read in schools in order to make our children loving, kind and gentle! This is the book they wish to be recognized in our Constitution as the source of all authority and justice!
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
The Boy Scouts of America maintain that no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing his obligation to God.
[Boy Scouts of America, statement on membership form]
The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a nonphysical mind.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 99.
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
Lewis Thomas
The capitalist class is interested in keeping the workingmen divided among themselves. Hence it foments race and religious animosities that come down from the past.
[Daniel DeLeon, Two Pages from Roman History, 1903]
The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.
[Matilda Joslyn Gage, "Woman, Church and State"]
The Catholic Church… upheld feudalism, then monarchism, warning of growing evils and possible revolutions. In the same manner, and under the same reservations, she now upholds capitalism; but, above all things and forever, she upholds the Catholic Church.
[Daniel DeLeon, The Vatican in Politics, 1891]
The Catholic textbooks go so far as to state that oaths of office taken by the President, Congressmen, Governor, judge, etc. if the person be a Catholic must be taken with the mental restriction that his upholding of the Constitution and laws is subject to their non-conflict with the laws of the Catholic Church.
[Emmet McLoughlins, "American Culture and Catholic Schools", p.56]
The central problem of Christianity is: if the Messiah has come, why is the world so evil? For Judaism, the problem is: if the world is so evil, why does the Messiah not come?
[Seymour Siegel]
The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity—and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.
[Nietzsche, 75 Aphorisms]
The certainty with which a religious belief is held is usually in direct proportion to its absurdity.
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
The character of God would stand vastly higher in human estimation if he had visited the garden in which he had placed the first human pair and picked up the serpent and cast him over the garden wall before he had a chance to tempt Eve, instead of waiting until the mischief was done, and then cursing the whole lot for what he might so easily have prevented.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The Christian Bible is a drug store. It's contents have remained the same but the medical practice continues. For 1,800 years these changes were slight—scarcely noticeable… The dull and ignorant physician day and night, and all the days and all the nights, drenched his patient with vast and hideous doses of the most repulsive drugs to be found in the store's stock… He kept him religion sick for eighteen centuries, and allowed him not a well day during all that time.
["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.107]
The Christian Bible is a drug store. It's contents have remained the same but the medical practice continues. For 1,800 years these changes were slight—scarcely noticeable… The dull and ignorant physician day and night, and all the days and all the nights, drenched his patient with vast and hideous doses of the most repulsive drugs to be found in the store's stock… He kept him religion sick for eighteen centuries, and allowed him not a well day during all that time.
["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.107]
The Christian church…no where else shall you find a more potent hive of scum and villainry…
Turner Dukes
The Christian claims the Humanist worships man, yet it is the Christian that worships Jesus Christ - a man as well. If the Humanist worships humanity, at least he does it while it is still alive. Christ died many centuries ago.
Leonardo Foradelli 1851 (Italian Humanist)
The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ.
D. James Kennedy, Coral Ridge Ministries, 1993
The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all price, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation…
[Nietzsche]
The Christian religion cannot be believed without a miracle by any reasonable person.
J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 12.
The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.
[David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748]
The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
[Nietzsche]
The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
[Bertrand Russell]
The church doctrines of obedience to authority, repentance, fear of punishment, self-abnegation, acceptance of outer direction rather than inner assurance, elevation of faith over reason, and intolerance make institutionalized religion an ideal instrument of social constraint. In an unconstitutional partnership with the state, the church can impose the most irresistible, if covert, controls conceivable.
[Madalyn O'Hair, "Freedom under Siege"]
The Church doesn't believe in book-burning, but it believes in restricting the use of dangerous books among those whose minds are unprepared for them.
[Francis J. Lally, American Roman Catholic Monsignor, Mike Wallace Interview, Fund for the Republic, 1958]
The church has contributed nothing to civilization. It has progressed somewhat, and it has become a little more decent, in reflection of the movements of civilization that have taken place outside of the church and usually in the face of the strong opposition of the church. But the church has always resisted the process of civilization. It has struggled to the last ditch, by fair means and foul, to preserve as long as it could the vestiges of ancient and medieval theology, with all the puerile moralities and harsh customs and medieval styles of belief.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
The Church has through the centuries, understood that ideas are really more dangerous than other weapons. Their use should be restricted.
[Francis J. Lally, American Roman Catholic Monsignor, Mike Wallace Interview, Fund for the Republic, 1958]
The church is a bank that is continually receiving deposits but never pays a dividend.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The church is only a secular institution in which the half-educated speak to the half-converted.
William Ralph Inge
The church lives on the fact that modern research about Jesus is not known amongst the public.
[Hans Konzelmann]
The church of matches anoints in ignorance with gasoline, The church of matches grows fat by breathing in the smoke of dreams It's quite obscene
[XTC, "Books are Burning"]
The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.
[Ferdinand Magellan]
The church spends thousands of dollars to save a dogma, where it spends a cent to find a truth.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The church wants us to believe that God will go out of his way to strike a blasphemer and work a week to save the soul of a murderer.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The churches beg — and if we don't give them money, why, they take it anyway, forcibly, by means of this unjust state tax exemption.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
The churches can well afford to pay fair taxation. But supposing they couldn't. Would not that be a very significant evidence that the churches were not really wanted?
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
The churches can well afford to pay fair taxation. But supposing they couldn't. Would not that be a very significant evidence that the churches were not really wanted?
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
The churches erected in the name of God will ere long be tombstones to his, memory.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism, and other burning issues by burning the ismists, which is fine proof that there is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God.
[Ben N. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Revolt of Modern Youth, 1925]
The civilization of man has increased just to the same extent that religious power has decreased. The intellectual advancement of man depends upon how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth. The church never enabled a human being to make even one of these exchanges; on the contrary, all her power has been used to prevent them. In spite, however, of the church, man found that some of his religious conceptions were wrong. By reading his Bible, he found that the ideas of his God were more cruel and brutal than those of the most depraved savage. He also discovered that this holy book was filled with ignorance, and that it must have been written by persons wholly unacquainted with the nature of the phenomena by which we are surrounded; and now and then, some man had the goodness and courage to speak his honest thoughts. In every age some thinker, some doubter, some investigator, some hater of hypocrisy, some despiser of sham, some brave lover of the right, has gladly, proudly and heroically braved the ignorant fury of superstition for the sake of man and truth. These divine men were generally torn in pieces by the worshipers of the gods. Socrates was poisoned because he lacked reverence for some of the deities. Christ was crucified by a religious rabble for the crime of blasphemy. Nothing is more gratifying to a religionist than to destroy his enemies at the command of God. Religious persecution springs from a due admixture of love towards God and hatred towards man.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of a military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.
[Edward Gibbons, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
Lewis Thomas (1913 - 1993)
The community which does not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack.
[Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), American abolitionist, speech, 1863]
The conquering of fear is the beginning of wisdom
[Bertrand Russell]
The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society.
[Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, Dec. 30, 1981]
The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society. And that's what's been happening.
Pat Robertson
The convent is opposed to all that is sacred in human nature.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The cosmos is a gigantic fly wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
[H.L. Mencken]
The cosmos is all there is or ever was or ever will be.
Carl Sagan
The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control.
[Starhawk]
The court decided, based on its reading of our precedents, that the effects test of Lemon is violated whenever government action "creates an identification of the state with a religion, or with religion in general," …or when "the effect of the governmental action is to endorse one religion over another, or to endorse religion in general.
[Justice Kennedy, opinion of the court in Lee vs. Weisman]
The creationists have this creator who is evil, who is small-minded, who is malevolent, and who is not very bright and can't even get his science right. Creationists have made their creator in their own image, in my view.
[Prof. Ian Plimer - The Skeptic, Vol 13, No 2]
The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse. It is doubtful whether a movement which does not profess some preposterous and patently irrational dogma can be possessed of that zealous drive which "must either win men or destroy the world." It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction between profession and practice-that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt-are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others.
[Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951, section 88]
The crime of the century was not some black guy killing his white wife as the media tells us. But rather it was the murder of 168 people by a white conservative NRA minded U.S. Army veteran.
The critical thinking and precision of science began to really affect my ability to just believe something without any tangible evidence.
Salvador Cordova, proponent of Intelligent Design creationism
The cross everywhere is a dagger in the heart of liberty.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The cross people carry to-day is made of gold or set with diamonds.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The day of the Bible is passed. Books have taken its place.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion—except for the sect that can win political power.
[Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, dissenting opinion in Zorach v. Clauson (343 US 306 — 1952)]
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
The debate should not be whether abortion is good, bad or right or wrong, but whether a million women a year should have access to safe legal abortions or suffer dangerous illegal ones.
The Declaration of Independence "was a denial, and the first denial of a nation, of the infamous dogma that God confers the right upon one man to govern others.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "Individuality"]
The decline in American pride, patriotism, and piety can be directly attributed to the extensive reading of so-called 'science fiction' by our young people. This poisonous rot about creatures not of God's making, societies of 'aliens' without a good Christian among them, and raw sex between unhuman beings with three heads and God alone knows what sort of reproductive apparatus keeps our young people from realizing the true will of God.
[Jerry Falwell, "Can Our Young People Find God in the Pages of Trashy Magazines? No, Of Course Not!" Reader's Digest, Aug. 1985: 142-157]
The delegates of the annual conference are decidedly opposed to modern abolitionism, and wholly disclaim any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave in the slave-holding states of the union.
[Methodist Episcopal Church, Statement of the General Conference, Cincinnati, May 1836]
The deliverance of the saints must take place some time after 1914.
[Charles Taze Russell, American religious leader and founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, Studies in the Scripture, Volume 3, 1923 edition]
The devil and God are components of a Siamese twin. Neither has any existence apart from the other. In denying the existence of the one, Christians have helped to kill the other. If there need to be no fear of hell, people may well ask what is the attraction of heaven? Gods and devils were born together. Gods and devils will die together.
[Chapman Cohen, "The Devil", Pamphlets for the People, no. 6]
The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world.
[Robert Anton Wilson]
The difference between a cult and a religion is the number of people in it.
The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and the whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.
John Adams [U.S. President]
The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.
[John Adams]
The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.
John Adams
The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.
[Leslie Stephen, "Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking" (1905)]
The divorce between church and state ought to be absolute. It ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no church property anywhere, in any state, or in any nation, should be exempt from taxation, for if you exempt the church property of any church organization, to that extent you impose tax upon the whole community.
[US Pres. James A. Garfield, address to Congress]
The doctrine of salvation by faith is a libel on justice and has done more to undermine the virtue of the world than vice itself.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called "faith." What man, who ever thinks, can believe that blood can appease God? And yet, our entire system of religion is based upon that believe. The Jews pacified Jehovah with the blood of animals, and according to the Christian system, the blood of Jesus softened the heart of God a little, and rendered possible the salvation of a fortunate few. It is hard to conceive how the human mind can give assent to such terrible ideas, or how any sane man can read the Bible and still believe in the doctrine of inspiration.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith.
[Catholic Church's decision against Galileo Galilei]
The dogma of the divinity of Jesus should have died on the cross, when the man of Nazareth gave up the ghost.
[Lemuel K. Washburn]
The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the popes.
[Thomas Huxley]
The doubter is the safe man; the man who can be depended upon. He does not build upon a foundation of guesswork, and the structure he erects will stand. Let us not fear doubt, but rather fear to have falsehood passed for truth.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The Earth is an object lesson for the apprentice gods. 'If you really screw up,' they get told, 'you'll make something like Earth.'
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 286.
The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished.
[Muslim religious edict, 1993 Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz Supreme religious authority, Saudi Arabia]
The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Hunter S. Thompson
The effectiveness of any one of three prayers, each given twice, is expressed mathematically as: ((3x2)-6)/((6+1)-7)]
[Rev. Donald Morgan]
The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.
H.L. Mencken
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg (1933 - )
The efforts of the majority to destroy every trace of heretical 'blasphemy' proved so successful that, until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, nearly all our information concerning alternative forms of early Christianity came from the massive orthodox attacks upon them.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. xxiv.
The egg of prayer never yet became a chicken.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The eight Pauline letters I have accepted as genuine [Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon, and Colossians] are so completely silent concerning the events that were later recorded in the gospels as to suggest that these events were not known to Paul, who, however, could not have been ignorant of them if they had really occurred.
G.A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 22.
The enemy with whom I have to grapple is one with whom no peace can be made. Idolatry will not parley; superstition will not treat on covenant. They must be uprooted for public and individual safety.
[Richard Carlisle]
The entertainment company headed by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson agreed yesterday to buy Dorothy Hamill's Ice Capades, the skating road show rescued last year by the Olympic gold medalist. International Family Entertainment Inc., which owns the Family Channel cable network, declined to disclose how much it paid for the show and related assets owned by the figure skater and her husband, physician Kenneth Forsythe. The deal expands International Family's interests in live entertainment while providing a new source of material for programs that can be shown on broadcast or cable television here or abroad and on home video. International Family launched a live entertainment division last year with its purchase of three theaters in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where it produces live musical variety shows. 'This agreement will add another facet to our company's philosophy of supplying high-quality, family-oriented entertainment and programming to America and the world,' said Tim Robertson, chief executive and president. His father Pat is chairman of International Family Entertainment.
[San Francisco Chronicle, 9 June 1994 (AP)]
The equal toleration of all religions…is the same as atheism.
[Pope Leo XIII, "Imortale Dei"]
The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just keep your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.
Frank Zappa
The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?
"No, unfortunately, there is not. Furthermore, a choice between them is unlikely to remain arbitrary forever. The assumptions underlying the two world views are being tested with increasing severity by cumulative verifiable knowledge about how the universe works"
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 264.
The essence of the conservative ideology is for the government to do as little as possible for the least of us, to allow intolerance and bigotry to run their natural course, and that individual economic self-interest is the be-all and end-all of human existence.
The Essenes are not mentioned anywhere in the New Testament, although their numbers were at least as great as the Sadducees and Pharisees. This would suggest an element of intentional secrecy regarding the influence of the sect on the teachings and work of Jesus.
["The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the Resurrection" by Holger Kersten & Elmer R. Gruber p. 239]
The Essenes had various communities in Palestine, with the main center at Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea. The sensational discovery of numerous scrolls in a cave at Qumran in 1947 made it possible to gain glimpses into a community which practised in a way, 'Christianity before Christ'. As is well known, the translation of the material was systematically boycotted and only very recently almost all the Qumran texts have appeared in print. Similarities between the teaching of Jesus and those of the Essenes are obvious…
["The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the Resurrection" by Holger Kersten & Elmer R. Gruber p. 239]
The Establishment Clause, unlike the Free Exercise Clause, does not depend upon any showing of direct governmental compulsion and is violated by the enactment of laws which establish an official religion whether those laws operate directly to coerce nonobserving individuals or not.
[U.S. Supreme Court, Wallace v. Jaffree (1985)]
The evaporation of 4 million (people) who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place.
[Andrei Codrescu, on the NPR program "All Things Considered", Dec. 19, 1995, referring to believers in the Rapture]
The existence of God is inconsistent with the classical big bang theory.
Quentin Smith, "Atheism, Theism and Big Bang Cosmology"
The exoteric, state-organised section of the Christian Church persecuted and stamped out the esoteric section, destroying every trace of its literature… in striving to eradicate… gnosis from human history.
[Dion Fortune, "The Mystical Qabalah"]
The expression 'free thought' is often used as if it meant merely opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. But this is only a symptom of free thought, frequent, but invariable. 'Free thought' means thinking freely — as freely, at least, as is possible for a human being. The person who is free in any respect is free from something; what is the free thinker free from? To be worthy of the name, he must be free of two things: the force of tradition, and the tyrant of his own passions. No one is completely free from either, but in the measure of a man's emancipation he deserves to be called a free thinker.
Bertrand Russell, "The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery" (1944) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 239.
The extracts from Holy Writ unequivocally assert the right of property in slaves.
[Rev. E.D. Simms, professor, Randolph-Macon College]
The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty- four hours. But certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to make a display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves; and they maintain that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun revolves….Now, it is a want of honesty and decency to assert such notions publicly, and the example is pernicious. It is the part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed by God and to acquiesce in it.
[Melanchthon]
The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins. Footnote: Never trust a species that grins all the time. It's up to something.
(Terry Pratchett, Pyramids)
The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can argue with it.
Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent at the Behavioral Science Institution and Research Unit of the FBI Academy (from Carl Sagan's, The Demon-Haunted World)
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
[George Santayana, "The Life of Reason"]
The fact of the matter is that the fossil record not only documents evolution, but that it was the fossil record itself which forced natural scientists to abandon their idea of the fixity of species and look instead for a plausible mechanism of change, a mechanism of evolution. The fossil record not only demonstrates evolution in extravagant detail, but it dashes all claims of the scientific creationists concerning the origin of living organisms.
Kenneth R. Miller, "Scientific Creationism versus Evolution" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 22.
The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.
Bertrand Russell, "A Debate on the Existence of God" (1948) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 136.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
[George Bernard Shaw]
The fact that millions of people still believe in a hell of eternal punishment for sinners and unbelievers is a drastic reminder of the need for persistent, progressive education of the masses. We have as yet only begun to realize the possibilities of progress. But science, rationalism and humanism have pointed the way, they have taken the first great steps, and we must keep right ahead on the highway of modernism.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth.
[Clarence Darrow]
The fear of gods and devils is never anything but a pitiable degradation of the human mind.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
The feet of progress have always been shod by doubt.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about 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
The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god).
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.
[Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947),last words]
The First Amendment's Religion Clauses mean that religious beliefs and religious expression are too precious to be either proscribed or prescribed by the State. The design of the Constitution is that preservation and transmission of religious beliefs and worship is a responsibility and a choice committed to the private sphere, which itself is promised freedom to pursue that mission. It must not be forgotten then, that while concern must be given to define the protection granted to an objector or a dissenting non-believer, these same Clauses exist to protect religion from government interference. James Madison, the principal author of the Bill of Rights, did not rest his opposition to a religious establishment on the sole ground of its effect on the minority. A principal ground for his view was: "[E]xperience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation.
[Justice Kennedy, opinion of the court in Lee vs. Weisman]
The first priest was the first rogue who met the first fool.
[Voltaire]
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
[Karl Marx]
The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.
[C.S. Lewis]
The Flag Amendment should read: The desecration of the flag will be punishable by federal law, as say we, the United Buffoons of America.
The fool says in his heart, "There is no God."
The Wise Man Says it to the World.
The foolish and cruel notion that a wife is to obey her husband has sent more women to the grave than to the courts for a divorce.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
The foundation of morality is to. . . give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
T.H. Huxley
The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.
[Albert Einstein]
The four points of the compass are logic, knowledge, wisdom, and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable.
[Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light]
The Framers wrote the Constitution as a secular documet not because they were hostile to Christianity but because they did not want to imply that the new federal government would have any authority to meddle in religion.
Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), pp. 223-24.
The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts 'sins' and others 'virtue' on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences.
Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 118.
The fundamentalist belief system is one that purports to have all the answers. It also claims to be the only way — all deviations lead to hell. It follows then that parents who believe this would be very concerned about what their children believe. Any alternative ways of thinking about major life questions would be highly threatening. Consequently, the fundamentalist household rarely encourages children to explore their own thoughts, to be open-minded about ideas, or to come to their own conclusions. In fact, fundamentalist parents are typically vocal in their opposition to the teaching of critical thinking skills or values clarification in schools.
Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 120.
The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has.
[Isaac Asimov, quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996]
The fundamentalists leap up and down in apoplectic rage and joy. Their worst fantasies are vindicated, and therefore (or so they like to think), their entire theology and socio-political agenda is too. Meanwhile, teen-age misanthropes and social misfits murder their enemies, classmates, families, friends, even complete strangers, all because they read one of Anton LaVey's books or listened to one too many AC/DC records. The born- agains are ready to burn again, and not just books this time.
[excerpt from "Loompanics' Greatest Hits"]
The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start (examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science - or of any honest intellectual inquiry.
Stephen Jay Gould
The funniest thing regarding the 2000 Election was when Rush Limbaugh argued that it was a mandate for George Bush.
The future war is between the religious and the materialists. Collaboration between religious governments in support of outlawing abortion is a fine beginning for the conception of collaboration in other fields.
[Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Hashemi Rafsanjani, as reported in the Iranian newspaper Abrar of August 1, 1994, after meeting with special envoys from Pope John Paul II]
THE GARDEN OF LOVE
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joy and desires.
[William Blake, from "Songs of Experience"]
The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.
Richard Dawkins
The God of love that they preach invariably turns out, on examination, to be a God of harsh and arbitrary penalties and brutalities, just as the brotherhood of man that they preach, brought to the test, turns out to be only a kind of hatred. Hell is still their headquarters…
HL Mencken
The god of the Bible measures up to the level of a petty and vicious tyrant. The god of the bible punishes babies for the sins of their parents (Exodus 20:5, 34:7; Numbers 14:18; 2 Samuel 12:13-19); punishes people by causing them to become cannibals and eat their children (2 Kings 6:24-33, Lamentations 4:10-11); gives people bad laws, even requiring the sacrifice of their firstborn babies, so that they can be filled with horror and know that god is their lord (Ezekiel 20:25-26); causes people to believe lies so that he can send them to hell (2 Thessalonians 2:11), and many other atrocities, far too many to list here. It would not be hard to measure up to, and exceed, that level of moral purity. Atheists surpass it every day.
Doug Krueger, "That Colossal Wreck"
The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders, a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
[R.W. Emerson]
The god of the Christians, as we have seen, is the god who makes promises only to break them; who sends them pestilence and disease in order to heal them; a god who demoralizes mankind in order to improve it. A god who created man "after his own image", and still the origin of evil in man is not accredited to him.
[Johann Most, "The God Pestilence",]
The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.
[Nietzsche]
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked, his wrath towards you burns like fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night, that you was[sic] suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep.
["Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," preached July 8, 1741. In Ola Elizabeth Winslow, ed., Jonathon Edwards: Basic writings (New York: New American Library, 1966) p. 159.]
The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be duly thankful for out blessings.
[Garrett Hardin, in "Science and Creationism, ed. Ashley Montague]
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
St. Augustine
The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.
George Washington, Treaty of Tripoli, 1796
The great mass of women and common people cannot be induced by mere force of reason to devote themselves to piety, virtue, and honesty. Superstition must therefore be employed, and even this is insufficient without the aid of the marvelous and the horrible.
[Strabo of Amasia, geographer and contemporary of the Roman Emperor Augustus]
The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas H. Huxley (1825 - 1895)
The greatest achievement ever made in the cause of human progress is the total and final separation of church and state. If we have nothing else to boast of, we could lay claim with justice that the first among the nations we of this country made it an article of organic law that the relations between man and his maker were a private concern, into which other men have no right to intrude. To measure the stride thus made for the Emancipation of the race, we have only to look back over the centuries that have gone before us, and recall the dreadful persecutions in the name of religion that have filled the world.
[David Dudley Field (1805-1894) in describing 'American Progress in Jurisprudence,' as quoted in Anson Phelps Stokes, Church And State In The United States Vol I, p. 37]
The greatest evil at work in the world is murder for immutable cause, that which the victim has little or no choice in changing, and when that evil raises it’s ugly head, the righteous should stand up and lop it off.
The greatest lesson I have learned in my plunge into the political debate has been how little things change. We seem to always be going where we’ve already been. The three political issues at work since the first tribe had their first meeting are still with us; who will be included, what those included responsibilities and benefits are, and how best to screw those not included.
The greatest of lies is found in the New Testament. Whether they are the product of misinterpretation or outright ignorance is a moot point. It takes but the most elementary of logic to assert that this literary work of rubbish has given us societal grief beyond anything the authors of the bible could have envisioned.
Gerhard Eichenaur 1872 (Austrian Politician. Eichenaur was outspoken in his disdain for Christianity. Most of his anti-Christian rhetoric is found in his letters to his Hungarian counterparts)
The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.
Nietzsche (from Human, All-Too Human)
The gun lobby pushes the white-wing theory that if enough guns are pumped into the inner cities, blacks will eventually shoot themselves out of existence.
The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More]
The happy do not believe in miracles.
Goethe
The Hell Law says that Hell is reserved exclusively for them that believe in it. Further, the lowest Rung in Hell is reserved for them that believe in it on the supposition that they'll go there if they don't.
[HBT, "The Gospel According to Fred" 3:1]
The historian, who can take no cognizance of his miraculous birth to the Virgin Mary, has to conclude that his father was Joseph, the son of Jacob (or Heli).
Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (New York: Collier, 1977), p. 171.
The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, speech, New York City, May 1, 1881]
The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.
Ernst Mayr
The history of the rise of Christianity has everything to do with politics, culture, and human frailties and nothing to do with supernatural manipulation of events. Had divine intervention been the guiding force, surely two millennia after the birth of Jesus he would not have a world where there are more Muslims than Catholics, more Hindus than Protestants, and more nontheists than Catholics and Protestants combined.
[John K. Naland, "The First Easter", Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 2]
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
P.B. Medawar
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein. It rejects it.
[P.B. Medawar]
The iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing - that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
HL Mencken
The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.
[Gore Vidal]
The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker? . . Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking "for our sakes was the world created.
[Julian The Apostate]
The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
[Mikhail Bakunin]
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas —uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.
[Salman Rushdie]
The idea of vouchers is a terrible idea. Vouchers come with the tentacles of the federal government attached to them, and I just don't believe that the federal government ought to be doing it.
Oliver North quoted in "50 Years of Freedom" Church & State December 1997, p. 13.
The idea that a good God would send people to a burning Hell is utterly damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed! I don't want to have anything to do with such a God. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to me.
[Luther Burbank, address to Science League of San Francisco, Dec. 1924]
The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
[Carl Sagan]
The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.
Rev. Jerry Falwell
The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started — it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 140-41.
The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy.
HL Mencken
The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man's chains. Man must throw off the flowers, and also the chains.
[Karl Marx, Simon Emler, editor, The Wisdom of Karl Marx, 1948]
The immortality of the soul … was really an element foreign to Hebrew belief and Hebrew psychology which was never assimilated into the Old Testament or New Testament.
[Dictionary of the Bible, by Jesuit priest John L. McKenzie]
The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favour during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the acid era—but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover; a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.
Hunter S. Thompson
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
Sir William Bragg (1862 - 1942)
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
William Bragg, Sr.
The impotence of God is infinite.
[Anatole France]
The improver of natural science absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
T.H. Huxley
The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex - because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious.
HL Mencken
The infidels of one age have been the aureoled saints of the next. The destroyers of the old are the creators of the new.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, The Great Infidels]
The influences that have lifted the race to a higher moral level are education, freedom, leisure, the humanizing tendency of a better-supplied and more interesting life. In a word, science and liberalism- the two forces, fundamentally skeptical, that we have seen continuously at work in human progress- have accomplished the very things for which religion claims the credit.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Outline of Bunk"]
The initial word does not lie within the province of the theologian, but of the historian and the psychologist.
[Hugh J. Schonfield, The Passover Plot]
The inspiration of the Bible depends on the credulity of him who reads.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 124.
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
[Delo McKown]
The Jews are a frightened people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have broken down their nerves.
[Israel Zangwill]
The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight — that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether
[Daniel Dennett, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", p. 18]
The language and concepts contained herein are guaranteed not to cause eternal torment in the place where the guy with the horns and pointed stick conducts his business.
[Frank Zappa]
The language of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment is at best opaque, particularly when compared with other portions of the Amendment. Its authors did not simply prohibit the establishment of a state church or a state religion, an area history shows they regarded as very important and fraught with great dangers. Instead they commanded that there should be "no law respecting an establishment of religion." A law "respecting" the proscribed result, that is, the establishment of religion, is not always easily identifiable as one violative of the Clause. A given law might not establish a state religion but nevertheless be one "respecting" that end in the sense of being a step that could lead to such establishment and hence offend the First Amendment.
[Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for the majority in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971]
The last Christian died on the cross.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The late Christopher Evans, a psychologist and author, calculated that if the motor car had evolved as fast as the computer, and over the same time period, 'Today you would be able to buy a Rolls-Royce for ?.35, it would do three million miles to the gallon, and it would deliver enough power to drive the QE2.'
Richard Dawkins
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.
[Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951, section 9]
The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lession is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people,
[Supreme Court Justice Kennedy for majority, Lee v. Weisman, 1992]
The level of awe that you get by contemplating the modern scientific view of the universe: deep time (by which I mean geological time), deep space, and what you could call deep complexity, living things….. that level of awe is just orders of magnitude greater and more awe-inspiring than the sort of pokey medieval world-view which the church still actually has. I mean, they sort of pay lip-service to the scientific world-view, but if you listen to what they say on Thought For The Day [a religious program on BBC Radio] and things like that, it is medieval. It's a small world, a small universe, with the sky up there, very little advance since that time. So I yield to nobody in my awe for the universe and for life, but I also have a deep desire to understand it, in terms of what makes it work, what makes it tick, and not to take refuge in spurious non-explanations like "I just believe it because I believe it," that sort of thing.
[Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams]
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
[H.L. Mencken]
The Libertarian Party is much like pornography, trying to find any redeeming social value in it is problematic.
The Librarian of Unseen University had unilaterally decided to aid comprehension by producing an Orang-utan/Human Dictionary. He'd been working on it for three months. It wasn't easy. He'd got as far as "Oook".
(Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms)
The librarian was, ex officio, a member of the college council. No-one had been able to find any rule about orang-utans being barred, although they had surreptiously looked very hard for one.
(Terry Pratchett, Eric)
The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed Christian notions.
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 106.
The louder these Christians shout up there on the altar of superstition, the more cotton I want to shove in my ears. For Christ's sake put a lid on it will ya?
Frank Simons [Columnist. Spoken during radio address 1978]
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. WE HAVE KILLED HIM - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, foreward, in all direction? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light candles in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Madonnas will be returning to a post office near you next year. …Thanks in part to pressure from President Clinton, the Postal Service on Wednesday reversed its decision to abandon the popular Madonna and Child stamp series in 1995. That action, disclosed last week, had upset religious groups, members of Congress and the president.
[Press Democrat, 24 November 1994]
The main doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.
[Andrew White]
The major argument going on among paleontologists dealing with the reptile/mammal transition is, where the hell do you draw the line? These things grade in sensibly into each other.
Eugenie Scott in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 20.
The major contribution of Protestant thought to the knowledge of mankind is its massive proof that God is a bore.
[H.L. Mencken]
The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.
— Dr. Arroway Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 162.
The making of an Atheist implies a mental stimulation and training which brings into play the primary factors of social progress.
[Joseph McCabe]
The man hates superstition But he believes in God I think that's inconsistent I think that's really odd When you believe in things that you don't understand then you suffer Superstition ain't the way
[Stevie Wonder, "Superstition"]
The man or country that fights priestcraft and priests is to my mind striking deeper for freedom than can be struck anywhere.
[George Meredith, letter of Sept. 3,1874]
The man who accepts the faith of Calvin is miserable in proportion to the extent he carries it out.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The man who gets on his knees has not learned the right use of his legs.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The man who has the harihood to avow that he does not believe in a God, shows a recklessness of moral character and utter want of moral responsibility, such as very little entitles him to be heard or believed in a court of justice in a country designated as Christian.
[Supreme Court of Tennessee, 1871]
The man who wants to be an angel is never in a hurry to begin.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The manifest object of the men who framed the institutions of this country, was to have a State without religion, and a Church without politics — that is to say, they meant that one should never be used as an engine for any purpose of the other, and that no man's rights in one should be tested by his opinions about the other. As the Church takes no note of men's political differences, so the State looks with equal eye on all the modes of religious faith. … Our fathers seem to have been perfectly sincere in their belief that the members of the Church would be more patriotic, and the citizens of the State more religious, by keeping their respective functions entirely separate.
[Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Jeremiah S. Black, from a 1856 speech on religious liberty]
The many instances of forged miracles, and prophecies, and supernatural events, which, in all ages, have either been detected by contrary evidence, or which detect themselves by their absurdity, prove sufficiently the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and marvellous, and ought reasonably to begat a suspicion against all relations of this kind.
[David Hume, "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" 1748]
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Richard Dawkins
The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion.
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Eight Years and More"]
The merest accident of microgeography meant that the first man to hear the voice of (the God) 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 need to be led.
[Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"]
The Meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation. [Lew Mammel, Jr.] "One fails the Inverse-Meta-Turing test if one conceives of a Creator, but does not attempt to devise an intelligence test for It/Him. One also fails if the concept of the Creator remains unchanged as the result of the test.
[Bill Huston]
The million, million, million … to one chance happens once in a million, million, million … times no matter how surprised we may be that it results in us.
R.A. Fisher
The mind of the fundamentalist is like the pupil of the eye: the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract.
The minister must take his pious grasp off of the throat of Sunday.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The minister of the Gospel is really the yardstick by which the nation measures its morals.
[Jimmy Swaggart]
The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.
[Albert Einstein, letter to Sigmund Freud, 30 July 1932]
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
Edward Abbey
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The money man gives to get him into heaven is what he ought to use to improve the earth.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The Moral Majority, in its ignorant attacks on the philosophy (or religion) of Humanism, makes no mention of the far-reaching moral values that Humanists uphold.
Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Seventh ed., New York: Continuum, 1990), p. xii.
The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer become his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am convinced that such behavior on the part of representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is 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. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task…
[Albert Einstein, "Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium", published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941]
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself
[Sir Richard F. Burton]
The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.
Stephen Jay Gould
The more mystery is encouraged, the more deceit can impose upon the human mind.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less can we believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer. But Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventual to organized and adaptive complexity, to mosquitoes and mammoths, to humans and therefore, indirectly, to books and computers.
Darwin's theory is now supported by all the available relevant evidence, and its truth is not doubted by any serious modern biologist…
Dr. Richard Dawkins Department of Zoology, Oxford University, UK), The necessity of Darwinism. New Scientist, vol.94, 15 April 1982, p.130.
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
[Sigmund Freud]
The more you know, the harder it is to take decisive action. Once you become informed, you start seeing complexities and shades of gray. You realize that nothing is as clear and simple as it first appears. Ultimately, knowledge is paralyzing.
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes (THERE'S TREASURE EVERYWHERE)
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery— even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds — it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
[Albert Einstein,The World as I See It]
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein
The most decisive refutation of Adler's claim that 'negative existential propositions cannot be proven' is the fact that the claim that 'negative existential propositions cannot be proven' is itself a negative existential proposition. If negative existential propositions cannot be proven, then that implies there are no proofs for negative existential propositions. But the claim that 'there are no proofs for negative existential propositions' is itself a negative existential proposition.
Jeffery Jay Lowder, "Is a Proof of the Non-Existence of a God Even Possible?"
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
Stephen Jay Gould
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny …'
Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
The most extraordinary Roman soldiers that Rome ever heard of were those soldiers that were set to watch the tomb of Jesus. They managed to fall asleep simultaneously in order to allow Jesus to pass unseen, and when they awoke, for a bribe they deliberately committed suicide by admitting that they had slept — an admission that meant instant execution. Was ever invention so stupidly desparate and medacity so reckleslly absurd as that invention and that mendacity upon which rests the story of the Resurrection, upon which the whole fabric of the Christian faith has elected to stand or fall? The basis is too puerile to support a story told by an idiot for the purpose of imposing upon a fool.
W.S. Ross, "Did Jesus Christ Rise from the Dead?" An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (ed. Gordon Stein, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980), p. 211.
The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.
[Helen H. Gardner, Men, Women and Gods]
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
[Thomas Paine, "Age of Reason"]
The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
Mohandas Gandhi (Young India, 1927)
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould (Dinosaur in a Haystack)
The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself.
Gerard Piel
The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H.Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the sacharrine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not recieve this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.
[Lazarus Long, from "Time Enough For Love" by R. Heinlein]
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
[Bertrand Russell, "Unpopular Essays"]
The most serious demand for unquestioned belief is, of course, the atonement. First the believer is to suspend familiar notions of justice, such as punishment for the guilty as opposed to an innocent party. You are then expected to accept the necessity of blood sacrifice for sin; that wrongdoing must be paid for, and not necessarily in proportion to the crime. A father's sacrifice of his innocent son is supposed to be not only just but generous and wonderful. Then the temporary three-day feath of this one person is supposed to wipe out all the wrongdoing and ineptitude of a species. And finally, you should believe that all you need do to erase responsibility for your actions and enter a haven of eternal reward is to believe. It's no wonder that once a convert has wrapped his or her mind around this story, anything can be accepted as truth. The rest of fundamentalist doctrine can be easily swallowed, including Jonah.
Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), p. 75.
The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
[Albert Einstein]
The myths about Hades and the gods, though they are pure invention, help to make men virtuous.
[Diodorus Siculus, about 20 B.C.]
The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused.
[John E. Remsburg, The Christ(1910)]
The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused.
John E. Remsburg- [Author] {1910}
The National Government will therefore regard as its first and supreme task to restore to the German people unity of mind and will. It will preserve and defend the foundations on which the strength of our nation rests. It will take under its firm protection Christianity as the basis of our morality, and the family as the nucleus of our nation and our State.
[Nazism, A History in Documents & Eyewitness Accounts. (Original source listed in the bibliography: Jacobsen and Jochmann, Ausgewahlte Dokumente Bd II.)]
The nearer the church, the further from God.
Bishop Lancelot Andrews (Andrewes)
The New York Times reports that evangelist Pat Robertson, who will announce in two weeks whether he will run for the presidency, claims he can pray away bad weather. … Robertson said in a recent interview that his prayers to keep Hurricane Gloria away from Virginia Beach last June had been successful, which was 'extremely important because I felt, interestingly enough, that if I couldn't move a hurricane, I could hardly move a nation.' … Robertson said that if the hurricane had come ashore, he would have seen it as a sign from above to abandon his presidential ambitions.
[Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 September 1986]
The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural,Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible.
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 109.
The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian savior Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight, the instant of the turn of the year from increasing darkness to light.
[Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, Bollingen Series C, Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 33]
The noble soul has reverence for itself
[Nietzsche]
The North American church is out of touch with global realities.
[Evangelical Foreign Mission Association, affiliated with the Baptist Church, on the current state of mission outreaches by American christian churches]
The notion of personal responsibility in fundamentalism is a curious one. You are responsible for your sins, but you cannot take credit for the good things that you do. Any good that you do must be attributed to God working through you. Yet you must try to be Christlike. When you fail, it is your fault for not 'letting the power of God work in you.' This is an effective double bind of responsibility without ability.
Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1993), pp. 70-71.
The notion of religious liberty is that you cannot be forced to participate in a religious ceremony that's not of your choosing simply because you're out-voted.
[Ira Glasser, Exec. Dir.of ACLU, 1995]
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
HL Mencken
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
[H.L. Mencken]
The objective [of the Wedge Strategy] is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are introduced to 'the truth' of the Bible and then 'the question of sin' and finally 'introduced to Jesus.'
Phillip Johnson
The observances of the church concerning feasts and fasts are tolerably well-kept, since the rich keep the feasts and the poor keep the fasts.
[Sydney Smith]
The observer cannot be left out of the description of the observation.
Dr. John A. Wheeler, physicist
The old faiths light their candles all about, but burly Truth comes by and puts them out.
[Lizette Reese]
The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief — call it what you will — than any book ever written.
[A.A. Milne]
The Old Testament is tribal in its provinciality; its god is a local god, and its village police and sanitary regulations are erected into eternal laws.
[John Macy, "The Spirit of American Literature"]
The only alternative is to say that they did arise from muck because God's finger went out and touched that muck. That is to say, there was a non-natural process. And that's really where the action is. Either you think that complex organisms arose by non-natural phenomena, or you think that they arose by natural phenomena. If they arose by natural phenomena, they had to evolve. And that's all there is to it.
Richard Lewontin
The only Bible-honoring conclusion is, of course, that Genesis 1-11 is the actual historical truth, regardless of any scientific or chronologic problems thereby entailed.
Henry M. Morris, Remarkable Birth, p. 82. Quoted in Kenneth R. Miller, "Scientific Creationism versus Evolution" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 56. (italics added)
The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own.
[Frank Zappa]
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, 1859)
The only good I can find in fundamentalists consumed by the afterlife is they will make better dead people than live ones.
The only hope liberalism has for the future is cloning.
The only things eternal are God, garbage and guns.
The only way we can determine the true age of the earth is for God to tell us what it is. And since He has told us, very plainly, in the Holy Scriptures that it is several thousand years in age, and no more, that ought to settle all basic questions of terrestrial chronology.
[Henry Morris, ICR President, 1974]
The order of creation in the Bible is woefully incorrect and violates even the most simple and obvious rules of natural science.
[Charles Cazeau, U.S. professor of geology]
The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.
[Clarence Darrow]
The original sin was not in eating of the forbidden fruit, but in planting the tree that bore the fruit.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The originality of repetition, and the mental vigor of acquiescence, are all that we have any right to expect from the Christian world. As long as every question is answered by the word "God," scientific inquiry is simply impossible. As fast as phenomena are satisfactorily explained the domain of the power, supposed to be superior to nature must decrease, while the horizon of the known must as constantly continue to enlarge.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
The other end of the room is very far away and it should not surprise you that I get there with one step at a time, and that's what we are talking about.
Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 46.
The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.
[William Jennings Bryan, testifying at the Scopes trial, July 16, 1925]
The party stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive Christianity IS National Socialism…National Socialism is the doing of God's will…God's will reveals itself in German blood…Dr. Zoellner and Count Galen have tried to make clear to me that Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God. That makes me laugh…No, Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle's Creed…True Christianity is represented by the party, and the German people are now called by the party and especially by the Fuehrer to a real Christianity…The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation.
[Dr. Hans Kerrl, Nazi Minister for Church Affairs]
The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'.
Richard Dawkins
The people who boast the loudest of carrying their cross are never around when man cries for help.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The people with the best reason to attack Pat Robertson are devout Christians who care about the credibility of their faith. They object to the partisan uses he has sought to make of the passion of Christ. But not one of them worthy of respect, and especially not the Pentecostal faith where Robertson began, would trivialize the agony and suffering of its redemptive God into campaign slogans for politicians. Faith, to be blunt, is irrelevant to many of the political causes that Robertson has forcefully championed. Not to all of them, and we shall come to those issues. What needs emphasis now is the fact that Robertson's self-declared war to save the soul of America is not with secular humanists, as he says. It is with other Christians.
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 155. (italics added)
The persistence of erroneous beliefs exacerbates the widespread anachronistic failure to recognize the urgent problems that face humanity on this planet.
Murray Gell-Mann (Quark and the Jaguar)
The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.
Hunter S. Thompson
The phrase 'the child should cheat' means that genes that tend to make children cheat have an advantage in the gene pool. If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 139.
The point of the big lie that the news media has a liberal bias is perpetrated so conservatives can then out of hand disregard any negative things said about conservatives.
The politics of failure has failed! And I say we must move forward, not backward! Upward, not forward! And always twirling, twirling, TWIRLING toward freedom!
Kodos, (disguised as Bob Dole), THE SIMPSONS
The poor wretches have convinced themselves that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, by worshipping that crucified sophist and living under his laws…they receive these doctrines by tradition, without any definite evidence. So if any charlatan or trickster comes among them, he quickly acquires wealth by imposing upon these simple people.
[Lucian]
The Pope put his foot on the neck of kings, but Calvin and his cohorts crushed the whole human race under their heels in the name of the Lord of Hosts.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., address to the Massachusetts Medical Society, May 30, 1860]
The popes, like Jesus, are conceived by their mothers through the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost. All popes are a certain species of man-gods, for the purpose of being the better able to conduct the functions of mediator between God and mankind. All powers in Heaven, as well as on earth, are given to them.
[Pope Stephanus V, 9th century]
The popular notion that witches were burned is quite false. In fact, no witches were burned at any time in Salem or anywhere else in America. Nor were witches by any means all women; in fact, they were not all even human beings. Two dogs were actually put to death in Salem for 'witchcraft.' The means of execution in all cases, including the unfortunate dogs, was by hanging, with one exception: an old man named Giles Corey. …Corey's death was by 'pressing'; heavy stones were placed upon his chest in an attempt to force him to plead [he protected his kin by refusing to plead either way]. …Nor was the witchcraft hysteria confined to Salem; Andover, Massachusetts, was caught up in it before the affair had run its course, and at least one witch was found in Maine. Salem was not, as a matter of fact, even the first to hang a witch. An old woman in Boston had confessed to witchcraft and been hanged in 1688, four years before the first execution in Salem.
[Tom Burnam, The Dictionary of Misinformation, 1975]
The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement . I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.
Richard Dawkins
The power of the priesthood lies in the submission to a creed. In their onslaughts on rebellion they have exhausted human torments; nor, in their lust for earthly dominion, have they felt remorse, but rather joy, when slaying Christ's enemies and their own.
[Brooks Adams, The Emancipation of Massachusetts]
The power that conquers men to-day must be the power of enlightened opinion.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
The pragmatic suggestion, that we had better teach the Christian religion whether it is true or not, because people will be much less criminal if they believe it, is disgusting and degrading; but it is being made to us all the time, and it is a natural consequence of the fundamental religious attitude that comfort and security must always prevail over rational inquiry.
Richard Robinson, "Religion and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 117.
The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.
[Mario Cuomo]
The priest is the personification of falsehood.
[Guiseppi Garibaldi]
The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes.
[John Adams, letter to John Taylor]
The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.
[Joseph Campbell]
The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's time.
T. H. Huxley
The principal framers of the American political system wanted no religious parties in national politics. They crafted a constitutional order that intended to make a person's religious convictions, or his lack of religious convictions, irrelevant in judging the value of his political opinion or in assessing his qualifications to hold political office.
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 23.
The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth.
Richard Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 1)
The principle that government may accommodate the free exercise of religion does not supersede the fundamental limitations imposed by the Establishment Clause, which guarantees at a minimum that a government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise, or otherwise act in a way which "establishes a [state] religion or religious faith, or tends to do so." Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668, 678. Pp.7-8. (b)State officials here direct the performance of a formal religious exercise at secondary schools' promotional and graduation ceremonies. Lee's decision that prayers should be given and his selection of the religious participant are choices attributable to the State.
[Lee vs. Weisman, 1992, Supreme Court decision regarding prayers at US high school graduation ceremonies]
The probabilistic teleological argument exploits the idea that it is extremely improbable that the laws of the universe should be so balanced as to permit the development of life unless we adop the hypothesis that these laws were fixed by a creator who desired the development of life. The argument, however, faces the same kind of objection as the one we brought against the cosmological argument in the previous chapter: it takes a certain concept out of a context in which it is obviously applicable, and applies it to a context in which that concept is not applicable. In the case of the cosmological argument, the crucial concept is that of causation; in the case of the teleological argument, it is statistical probability. Neither argument carries conviction because we can plausibly deny that the concept in question can be extended to cover extraordinary contexts.
Robin Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism, (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 57.
The problem with Protestantism is that it's not quite silly enough to be rejected out of hand.
[R. Craig Coulter]
The proof in the pudding for the need of affirmative action is so many white people bleeding from the ears to get rid of it.
The proper place for the study of religious beliefs is in a church or temple, at home, or in a course on comparative religions, but not in a biology class. There is no place in our world for an ideology that seeks to close minds, force obedience, and return the world to a paradise that never was. Students should learn that the universe can be confronted and understood, that ideas and authority should be questioned, that an open mind is a good thing. Education does not exist to confirm people's superstitions, and children do not learn to think when they are fed only dogma.
[Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism]
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." —-
[Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England, 1848-1855]
The Puritan is simply one who, because of physical cowardice, lack of imagination or religious superstition, is unable to get any joy out of the satisfaction of his natural appetites. Taking a drink, he fears that he is headed for the gutter. Grabbing a gal, he is staggered by thoughts of hell and syphilis. Observing that other men do such things innocently, he hates them.
HL Mencken
The Puritan through Life's sweet garden goes To pluck the thorn and cast away the rose.
[Kenneth Hare]
The pursuit of happiness belongs to us, but we must climb around or over the church to get it.
[Heywood Broun (1888-1939)]
The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: 'The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 136.
The question ["Do you believe in God?
] has a peculiar structure. If I say no, do I mean I'm convinced God doesn't exist, or do I mean I'm not convinced he does exist? Those are two very different questions.
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 168.
The question at issue is whether we must be unable to judge that there are no justifying reasons for human nonintervention if we are unable to judge that there are none for Divine nonintervention. I have argued that we must. Moral skepticism about God's omissions entails moral skepticism about our own omissions.
Bruce Russell, "Defenseless" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 198.
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?
[John Adams]
The question of the mythological and legendary character of the Gospels did not first arise in modern times. The historical reliability of the accounts of Jesus' life was already an issue for Christian thinkers in the second century.
Robert L. Wilken, The Christians As the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale, 1984), p. 112.
The question of the truth of a religion is one thing, but the question of its usefullness is another. I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.
[Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Christian, 1957]
The Questioning Spirit, whose curiosity has for its wholesome object the verification of truth, is the most effectual instrument of knowledge available to mankind. A well-directed question is like a pickaxe - it liberates the gold from the superincumbent quartz. Whole systems of error sometimes fall to the ground from the force of unanswerable questions. All error has contradiction in it, which is revealed by a relevant inquiry, when an artillery of counter assertions might not disclose it. Arguments may be evaded, but a fair and pertinent question creates no animosity, and must answered, since silence is a confession of error or of ignorance.
[George Jacob Holyoake, "Introduction" to A New Catechism by M.M. Mangasarian]
The questions of immortality of the soul and freedom of the will, though they have called forth libraries of controversial literature, continue to appear not only utterly beyond any possibility of satisfactory proof but, instead, trivial in being so definitely personal, once the principle of an all-pervading and ordering force is accepted. And the conception of a God so constituted that we are, as individuals, of direct concern to Him appears both presumptuous — considering our individual insignificance in the scheme as a whole — and unnecessary for that feeling of helpless reverence in face of the universal order which is the essence of religious experience. Moreover, paleontologically considered, one would have to assume that such a 'personal' God existed long before the evolution of man. 'Why did He wait so long to create man?' asked Diderot. Yet reward, punishment, immortality of the soul in the theological sense, could have no meaning whatever until there had developed creatures possessing a nervous organization capable of abstract thinking and of spiritual suffering. One cannot imagine such a God occupied through millions of years, up to the Pleistocene, with personal supervision, reward and punishment, of amoebae, clams, fish, dinosaurs, and sabre-toothed tigers; then, suddenly, adjusting His own systems and purposes to the capacities of the man-ape He had allowed to develop.
[Hans Zinsser, As I Remember Him]
The Quirmian philosopher Ventre put forward the suggestion that "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts…
(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)
The real answer to limiting war to only those absolutely necessary is to create and enforce an international law requiring only men over 40 be allowed in the military.
The real oppressor, enslaver, and corrupter of the people is the Bible.
[Some Mistakes of Moses, Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 2 p. 43]
The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities.
(Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay)
The reason that revelation is always made to the simple is that the wise could not be imposed upon.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
The recognition of God as the ruling and leading power in the universe and the grateful acknowledgment of His favors and blessings are necessary to the best type of citizenship…
[Boy Scouts of America policy, 1970]
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The religious part of easter is treated with solemnity, even the resurrection, but the secular part is pure paganism with all the heartiness drained out of it. Easter needs its Dickens.
[Samuel Marchbank's Almanac]
The Religious Right aren't, and Scientific Creationism isn't.
[Anonymous]
The religious right has many people crippled and blinded…They're cowering when there's no need to cower. The government's job is not to suggest, promote or choose religious thoughts to be recommended to the people.
[Tennessee State Sen. Steve Cohn, in response to a Tennessee Senate resolution urging people to post and observe the Ten Commandments]
The Religious Right is more concerned with what goes on before birth and after death than what happens in between.
The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The remaining part of the clause declares. that 'no religious test shall ever be required, as a qualification to any office or public trust, under the United States.' This clause is not introduced merely for the purpose of satisfying the scruples of many respectable persons, who feel an invincible repugnance to any religious tests, or affirmation. It had a higher object; to cut off for ever every pretence of any alliance between church and state in the national government.
[Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Vol. III page 703, referring to the ban on religious tests found in Article VI, Section III of the U.S. Constitution]
The Republicans gained control of congress by throwing prime rib to the wealthy for the money, tossing buffalo wings to the middle class for the votes and gas of bean on everyone else.
The response of defensive skeptics, such as Plantinga (chapter 5), is to make a distinction between the pastoral and epistemic problem of evil. What this amounts to, though they wouldn't want to put it this bluntly, is that the working theist whose faith is strained or endangered by the evils which directly confront her is emotionally overwrought and not able to take the cool stance of the epistemologist of religion and thereby see that these evils, however extensive and seemingly gratuitous, are really no challenge to her theistic beliefs. Since she is unable to philosophize clearly at her time of emotional upset, she needs the pastor to hold her hand and say whatever might help her to make it through the night and retain her faith in God.
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. 214.
The Rev. Lovejoy, Msgr. Kenneth Daly, and Rabbi Krustofsky, on their joint radio show:
Announcer: And our first caller is from Shelbyville Heights.
Caller: Yes, hi. With all the suffering and injustice in the world, do you ever wonder if God really exists?
Rev. L: No.
Msgr. D: [Irish accent] Not for a second.
Rabbi K: Not at all.
Announcer: Great, good conversation there. Our next call…
The Simpsons
The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.
[Rev. R. Furman, D.D., Baptist, of South Carolina]
The rights of the people to be free to exercise their religious and philosophical beliefs" includes by necessity the right to abstain from the practise of any religious and philosophical beliefs. This right cannot be guaranteed in any environment wherein a practice of this type is enacted in a state funded context — like a classroom — and the participation is all but complusory for those present in that they must experience another's religious practice on their time and against their will. School ground is not the issue. School TIME is. At that point, it becomes STATE time, which makes it STATE religion. Say hello to theocracy.
[Timothy Jones <timelord@u.washington.edu>, on alt.atheism]
The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.
Richard Dawkins
The Roman Catholic Church announced yesterday that the Shroud of Turin, venerated by millions of Christians over the centuries as the burial cloth of Jesus, cannot be authentic because new scientific tests show that it dates from the Middle Ages. … Nevertheless, Catholics were encouraged to continue their veneration of the shroud as a pictorial image of Christ, still capable of performing miracles, even though it cannot be accepted as a genuine historic relic, and no one knows how the image was produced. … At a news conference yesterday, the shroud's custodian, Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero, revealed that radiocarbon tests conducted independently by three laboratories this year have concluded that the shroud cloth was created between 1260 and 1390. … The shroud's authenticity has been debated since it was first put on display in the mid-14th century. … In the Middle Ages, many objects appeared in Europe that were said to be the shroud of Jesus, fragments of his cross or other relics, but most were discarded as fakes long ago, and few others maintain a devoted following as does the Shroud of Turin. … The shroud, which belongs to the pope, has been kept for the last 410 years at the Cathedral of Turin, where it lies folded inside a silver casket. It is rarely put on public display. … An estimated 3 million visitors came to see it when it was last exhibited in 1978.
[Roberto Suro, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 October 1988]
The Roman Catholic church, convinced that it is the only true church, must demand the right to freedom for herself alone and the end of freedom for all others.
[Jesuit publication]
The Roman Catholic motto is ourselves alone for fellow Roman Catholics. We must defeat all heretics (non-Roman Catholics) at the ballot box. The holy father states that negative tactics are fatal. The demands of the holy father (the pope) are that the public services should be 100% Roman Catholic soon. Care must be taken that no suspicion may be raised when Roman Catholics are secretly given more government jobs than Protestants, Jews, and other heretics.
[Australian Archbishop Gilroy, 1940]
The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.
Hunter S. Thompson
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
The same means that have supported every other popular belief, have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, assassination, and falsehood: deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity have made it what it is.
[Percy Bysshe Shelley, notes to "Queen Mab"]
The same standards apply to heathen evidence as to biblica. Is it based on a primary source? Is it biased, ambiguous or simply wrong? Relevant evidence is extremely scarce; what, if anything, does silence imply? In the early parts of the Bible's story, biblical persons have yet to be identified correctly in any external sources. There have been many attempts, and some confident claims, but as yet there is no good reason to identify Moses or Joseph with any known person or period in ancient Egyptian records.
Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 252.
The Santa myth is one of the most effective means ever devised for intimidating children, eroding their self- esteem, twisting their behavior, warping their values, and slowing their development of critical thinking skills.
[Tom Flynn, The Trouble with Christmas]
The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.
G.W. Allport
The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment —- that it should obey a program of coded instructions —- is again only quantitatively less true for brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another, but also we sometimes don't. Nevertheless, 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. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to ``speak in tongues'' —- the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive —- are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability.
Richard Dawkins
The seeker after truth must, once in the course of his life, doubt everything, as far as is possible. What is doubtful should even be considered as false. This doubt should not, meanwhile, be applied to ordinary life.
[Descartes, 1-3rd Principles of Human Knowledge]
The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.
[Soren Kierkegaard]
The sense of spiritual relief which comes from rejecting the idea of God as a supernatural being is enormous.
[Julian Huxley]
The sentient may perceive and love the universe, but the universe may not perceive and love the sentient. The universe sees no distinction between the multitude of creatures and elements which comprise it. All are equal. None is favored. The universe, equipped with nothing but the materials and the power of creation, continues to create: something of this, something of that. It cannot control what it creates and it cannot, it seems, be controlled by its creations (though a few might deceive themselves otherwise). Those who curse the workings of the universe curse that which is deaf. Those who strike out at those workings fight that which is inviolate. Those who shake their fists, shake their fists at blind stars.
[Michael Moorcock, from The Chronicles of Corum]
The separation of church and state is a socialist myth perpetrated by the ACLU.
[Robert Simonds, head of Citizens for Excellence, group which took over Vista CA school board]
The sequence [allocated in most texts] from jellyfish to trilobite to nautiloid to armored fish to dinosaur to monkey to human is no lineage at all, but a chronological set of termini on unrelated evolutionary trunks. Moreover life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense - only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.
Stephen Jay Gould
The sergeant put on the poker face which has been handed down from NCO to NCO ever since one protoamphibian told another, lower ranking protoamphibian to muster a squad of newts and Take That Beach.
(Terry Pratchett, Eric)
The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist's mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the lift, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. Although, possibly, quicker. And only licensed to carry fourteen people.
(Terry Pratchett, Sourcery)
The silence of the early material about so much of what Jesus (according to the later material) said and did, is widely admitted to be something of a problem. Of course, silence does not always imply ignorance. But a book on transport in Cologne which, though written after 1965, made no reference to an undergound railway, might reasonably be presumed to have been written in ignorance of the undergound then constructed there. In other words, silence on a topic is significant if this silence if this silence extends to matters obviously relevant to what the writer has chosen to discuss.
G.A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 218.
The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
[Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)]
The so-called geologic ages are essentially synonymous with the evolutionary theory of origins. The latter is the anti-God conspiracy of Satan himself.
[Dr Henry Morris, President of the Institute for Creation Research, 1978]
The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God dies; it by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible.
[Tertullian, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, by Roberts & Donaldson, Chapter 5 p. 525]
The spanking and capital punishment issues are very much alike. If either form of violence actually work as a deterrent, then children would never have to be spanked more than once, and we would be executing less people rather than more.
The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not dazzled by the divine radiance.
[Bertrand Russell]
The state (the U.S. Constitution) has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he may desire.
[Pope Pius IX]
The state is a bankrupt institution. The only alternative to this bankrupt 'humanistic' system is a God-centered government.
[R.J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionist theologian, from The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism In America, published by ADL]
The statement that Thomas Jefferson meant his "wall of separation" to be "one-directional," only to protect the church from incursions by the state "is an example of one of the Religious Right's more blatant lies. It is impossible to determine where this myth originated, but we do know that it began appearing with increasing frequency in the early 1990s. The phrase 'one-directional' often appears in quotation marks to make it appear as if it were lifted from a letter or personal writing of Jefferson's. "Of course, Jefferson said no such thing about his 'wall,' as any of his biographers or church-state historians will readily testify. Jefferson's writings indicate beyond a doubt that he believed separation would protect both church and state.
Robert Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 222.
The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.
R.A. Fisher
The story of the Roman soldiers falling alseep is too feeble and clumsy to merit serious refutation; and that the soldiers were bribed to say they slept is, if possible, more preposterous still. The penalty while doing sentry work would be death, and it requires a rather liberal bribe to induce a man to offer himself for instant execution. If there be any such bravo on record, I have not heard of him, and I cannot quite see what use the bribe for which he gave his life would be to him, even if he took it with him into his coffin.
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.
The students were staring at her in the manner of those who have heard of the species 'female' but have never expected to get this close to one.
(Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
[Nietzsche "The Dawn" (1881)]
The sweep [of the Establishment Clause] is broad enough that Madison himself characterized congressional provisions for legislative and military chaplains as unconstitutional -establishments.- Madison's Detached Memoranda- 558-559"]
[Justice Souter, concurring opinion in Lee Vs. Weisman]
The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion.
Stephen Jay Gould
The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that … The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E) temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed …[However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving … shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.
[From "Applied Optics" vol. 11, A14, 1972]
The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.
[John Stuart Mill]
The terrible religious wars that inundated the world with blood tended at least to bring all religion into disgrace and hatred. Thoughtful people began to question the divine origin of a religion that made its believers hold the rights of others in absolute contempt. A few began to compare Christianity with the religions of heathen people, and were forced to admit that the difference was hardly worth dying for. They also found that other nations were even happier and more prosperous than their own. They began to suspect that their religion, after all, was not of much real value.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
The terrorists have us at an advantage with their endless supply of people who will sacrifice themselves for the cause while we have trouble sacrificing two cents a head so a poor kid can have a carton of milk and a jelly sandwich at school.
The theistic hypothesis does not differentially explain specific phenomena in the way that successful scientific theories do: it does not explain why we have these phenomena rather than others.
J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 138.
The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for progress.
[Emmet F. Fields]
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
[Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 317]
The theory that religion is not only hostile to magic but quite separate from it is as fallacious as the distinction between religion and superstition.
[J.M. Robertson, Pagan Christs, 1903]
The thesis that the universe has an originating divine cause is logically inconsistent with all extant definitions of causality and with a logical requirement upon these and all possible valid definitions or theories of causality.
Quentin Smith, "Causation and the Logical Impossibility of a Divine Cause"
The thing between Death's triumphant digits was a fly from the dawn of time. It was the fly in the primordial soup. It had bred on mammoth turds. It wasn't a fly that bangs on window panes, it was a fly that drills through walls.
(Terry Pratchett, Mort)
The things you are liable to read in the Bible, they ain't necessarily so.
[Porgy and Bess]
The third major characteristic of God — "infinitude" — is the catchall, the universal modifier of Christian theology. God is not merely a being; he is infinite being. God is not merely good; he is infinite goodness. God is not merely wise; he is infinite wisdom. And so on down the list. God is exaggeration run amuck".
George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), p. 68.
The thirty-nine articles of orthodoxy are only the ashes of the mind.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The thoughts of man, in order to be of any real worth, must be free. Under the influence of fear the brain is paralyzed, and instead of bravely solving a problem for itself, tremblingly adopts the solution of another. As long as a majority of men will cringe to the very earth before some petty prince or king, what must be the infinite abjectness of their little souls in the presence of their supposed creator and God? Under such circumstances, what can their thoughts be worth?
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
[Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), British author, poet. Plain Tales from the Hills, chapter heading to "Lispeth" (1888)]
The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the date last shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.
(Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)
The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known.
[John Stuart Mill]
The tiny inscription fragments from Dan, chiseled more than a hundred years after the alleged event, are presently the nearest there is to written evidence of the existence of the great King David and the even greater King Solomon. If I might borrow a popular phrase, Professor Rainey and his highly professional colleagues in academe are ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the corner, which is the fact that thousands of tenth-century B.C.E. ostraca and artifacts have been found confirming the existence of minor neighboring kingdoms that were contemporary with David and Solomon, but there is nothing, not one potshard, not a scrap, to confirm the greatness of the founders of the United Monarchy.
[Peter Vokac, Tucson, Arizona. Letter in Biblical Archaeology Review, Mar/Apr '95, pg. 20]
The tolerance of liberty can be maintained until complete federal and state control by Catholics has been accomplished.
[Bishop O'Connor, Pittsburgh]
The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature
[Alfred North Whitehead]
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now—with somebody—and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives
Hunter S. Thompson
The treatment of prayer proposals by Congress seems, as much as anything, a reflection of the state of the level of morale within the institution. If congressional morale is high and much is going on, little attention is paid to such hardy perennials. When, however, Congress begins to feel excluded and ineffectual, the bad penny of a prayer amendment seems to turn up and begins commanding attention again.
[Richard E. Morgan, "The Supreme Court and Religion"]
The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion.
Richard Dawkins
The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
[Herb Caen (b. 1916), U.S. columnist, author. San Francisco Chronicle (20 July 1981)]
The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
[H.L. Mencken]
The trouble with divine revelation is that we do not know who did the business.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
[Terry Pratchett, "Diggers"]
The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).
Stephen Jay Gould
The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we say that science alone is capable of verification.
[George Santayana (1863-1952), "The Life of Reason" (1905-1906)] ——— "The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
[George Santayana (1863-1952) U.S. philosopher, writer, professor]
The true man walks the earth as the stars walk the heavens, grandly obedient to those laws which are implanted in his nature.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood.
[Leslie Stephen]
The truth is that all examples of child protection and parental care, and all associated bodily organs … are examples of the working in nature of the kin-selection principle.
Richard Dawkins
The truth isn't easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than soap, and much more difficult to find…
(Terry Pratchett, Sourcery)
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost their power of reasoning.
[Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
The truths which God revealed have been overthrown by the truths which man has discovered.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
The twin doctrines of separation of church and state and liberty of individual conscience are the marrow of our democracy, if not indeed America's most magnificent contribution to the freeing of Western man.
Clinton Rossiter, American historian
The two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time
Albert Einstein
The Unitarian walks with a cane, the Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist go with crutches, the Episcopalian has to be pushed about in an invalid's chair, while the Roman Catholic crawls on his hands and knees and is led around with a ring in his nose by a priest.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
The United States is not a Christian nation. It is a great nation with Christians, among others, in it. But our greatness is based on the fact that there is no official religion.
[Sen. Lowell Weicker]
The universal cosmic process was not created by any god or man; it forever was, is, and forever will be, an Everliving Fire.
[Heraclitus of Ephesus, 500 BC]
The universe doesn't much care if you tread on a butterfly. There are plenty more butterflies. Gods might note the fall of a sparrow but they don't make any effort to catch them.
(Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)
The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.
Richard Dawkins
The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.
[John H. Holmes, A Sensible Man's View of Religion, 1933]
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
[Bertrand Russell]
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it: 'For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither care nor know.' DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Richard Dawkins
The unnatural, that too is natural.
[Goethe]
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
H. L. Mencken
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
[Edward Gibbons]
The very admission of the need to harmonize is an admission that the burden of proof is on the narratives, not on those who doubt them. What harmonizing shows is that despite appearances, the texts still might be true.
Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again, p. 75.
The villa's and the chapel's where I learned with little labor The way to love my fellow man And hate my next-door neighbor.
[C. K. Chesterton]
The violence of some anti-abortionists was an ongoing problem. On October 10, 1985, security was tightened at the Supreme Court after Justice Blackmun received a death threat; the day before, an anti-abortion protester had disrupted court proceedings. Anyone who has ever attended a Supreme Court hearing knows one doesn't even whisper, much less interrupt the Court. On December 4, the FBI released figures on terrorism, but these did not include data on abortion clinic bombings, as they were supposedly not attributable to organized groups. Abortion clinics were increasingly the targets of acts of vandalism, death threats to employees, telephoned bomb threats, and other forms of harassment. On Christmas Day, three clinics were bombed in Pensacola, Florida, and on New Year's Day, 1986, a Washington, D.C., clinic was bombed. The Christmas bomber, who was later arrested, said his actions had been "a Christmas present for Jesus.
[Sarah Weddington, attorney in Roe v. Wade, A Question of Choice, 1992, pp.206, 208]
The wages of sin is death, but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays.
(Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad)
The wars of extermination have given a lot of people trouble unless they know what was going on. The people in the land of Palestine were very wicked. They were given over to idolatry; they sacrificed their children; they had all kinds of abominable sex practices; they were having sex, apparently, with animals; they were having sex men with men, and women with women; they were committing adultery, fornication; they were worshipping idols, offering their children up; and they were forsaking God. God told the Israelites to kill them all - men, women and children, to destroy them. And that seems to be a terrible thing to do. Is it? Or isn't it? Well, let us assume there were 2,000 of them, or 10,000 of them living in the land, or whatever number there was of them. I don't have the exact number. Pick a number. God said, 'Kill them all.' Well, that would seem hard, wouldn't it? That would be 10,000 people who would probably go to Hell. But, if they stayed and reproduced, in 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 100 more years, they could conceivably be - 10,000 would go to a 100,000 - 100,000 could conceivably go to a million. And then, there would be a million people who would have to spend eternity in Hell! And it's far more merciful to take away a few than to see in the future a 100 years down the road, and say, 'Well, I have to take away a million people that would forever be apart from God,' because the abomination was there like a contagium. God saw that there was no cure for it. It wasn't going to change; their hearts weren't going to change; and all they would do is cause trouble for the Israelites, and pull the Israelites away from God, and prevent the truth of God from reaching the Earth. So, God, in love, took away a small number that he might not have to take away a large number.
[Pat Robertson, rationalizing genocide committed by the early Israelites, on "The 700 Club" television program. May 6, 1985]
The Washington newsletter Roll Call reports that a 1981 tape of candidate Pat Robertson, who used to be an evangelical faith healer, has been distributed to several political reporters. The tape shows Robertson at a 1981 faith healing session in Philadelphia, claiming to cure members of the audience of cancer, hemorrhoids and bad teeth. Later, he shouts that God has just fixed a hernia.
[Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 October 1987]
The watchmaker not only stamped his design on the face of the watch, but he teaches how to wind it up when run down; how to repair the machinery when out of order; and how to put a new spring in when the old one is broken, and leave the watch as good as ever. Does the great Watchmaker, as he is called, show the same intelligence and power in keeping, or teaching others to keep, this contemplated mechanism — Man — always in good order? and when the life-spring is broken replace it with another, and leave him just the same?
Ernestine L. Rose, "A Defence of Atheism" (1878, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 80.
The way to make money is to start your own religion.
[L. Ron Hubbard, 1954]
The weakness of the body and that of the mind in infancy are exactly proportioned; their vigour in manhood, their sympathetic disorder in sickness, their common gradual decay in old age. The step further seems unavoidable; their common dissolution in death.
[David Hume (1771-1776) "Of the Immortality of the Soul"]
The weirdest way to fantasize While frigid Solstice thaws Imagine- Christless Christmastime! Replaced by… "Jesus Claus"?
[Gerald Tholen]
The West, it is sadly said, has lost confidence in the Enlightenment. It is quite common to see intellectuals state as a fact that the Enlightenment project has been tried and failed. This is a lie. There never was one single Enlightenment project, and of the Enlightenment projects that there were, many have succeeded beyond the wildest hopes of their proponents.
Simon Blackburn
The whole Bible was written by slave owners, and for slave owners. There is no hint of criticism of slavery anywhere in that book. Jesus made no objection to mistreatment of slaves. He indicated that selling of debtors into slavery would be continued his forthcoming kingdom of heaven as well as masters having the right to beat their slaves and put them to torture.
[Merrill Holste, "Slavery and the Bible", article in the May 1986 issue of American Atheist Magazine]
The whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that intellectualism is the work of the Devil. Remember the apple on the tree? O.K., it was the Tree of Knowledge. "You eat this apple, you're going to be as smart as God. We can't have that".
[Frank Zappa]
The whole of religion has been one uniform curse to the human race…
[Richard Carlile, "As to God"]
The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell.
[Sean P. Ningen]
The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.
[Elizabeth Cady Stanton]
The word [Christian] does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning how as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions. "Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 4.
The word heretic ought to be a term of honour…
[Charles Bradlaugh]
The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realize that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand."
Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.
Richard Dawkins
The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.
Richard Dawkins
The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism.
Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing.
Richard Dawkins
The world holds two classes of men — intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.
[Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri (973-1057; Syrian poet)]
The world is a mirror representing the divine life… Intelligent design readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.
William Dembski
The world is in need of less religion and more common sense.
[Llewelyn Powys, "Celsus and Origen"]
The world is proof that God is a committee.
[Bob Stokes]
The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles.
[U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis]
The World Trade Center destruction was caused by Pagans, Abortionists, Feminists, Gays, Lesbians, and the ACLU.
Jerry Falwell
The world was created on 22d October, 4004 B.C. at 6 o'clock in the evening.
[James Ussher (1581-1656; Archbishop of Armagh), Annals of the World: 1650-1654]
The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most ditinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.
[John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) British philosopher]
The worst criminals are not half so immoral as the creators and perpetrators of the unquestionable hell of Christian theology
[M.M. Mangasarian Morality Without God, 1913]
The worst of madmen is a saint run mad
[Alexander Pope]
The year is 2001. Half the population hs been converted to faith in Jesus Christ, and the Christian churches rule the world. Though this seems implausible, more than two hundred Christian missionary organizations are scheming to bring it about—as a birthday present for Jesus. The battle lines are being drawn for the conflict of the century.
[Skip Porteous, "Christian Activism Intensifies as 2001 Approaches", Free Inquiry magazine]
Theism is incompatible with the responsibility of a moral being because in theism responsibility always falls back on the Creator of that being….If our will is free it is also original being, and vice versa.
[Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)]
Theism tells men that they are the slaves of a God. Atheism assures men that they are the investigators and users of nature.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
Theism's "continuing hold on the minds of many reasonable people is surprising enough to count as a miracle in at least the original sense."
J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 12.
Theists think all gods but theirs are false. Atheists simply don't make an exception for the last one.
Then you have to say one or other of two things. Either God only speaks to a very small percentage of mankind — which happens to include yourself — or He deliberately says things are not true in talking to the consciences of savages.
Bertrand Russell, "A Debate on the Existence of God" (1948) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 136.
Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant: non serviam: I will not serve. That instant was his (Lucifer's) ruin.
[James Joyce,A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]
Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system.
[Baron Paul Henri T. d'Holbach]
Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there.
[Robert A. Heinlein, "JOB: A Comedy of Justice"]
Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature. In order to increase our respect for the Bible, it became necessary for the priests to exalt and extol that book, and at the same time to decry and belittle the reasoning powers of man. The whole power of the pulpit has been used for hundreds of years to destroy the confidence of man in himself— to induce him to distrust his own powers of thought, to believe that he was wholly unable to decide any question for himself, and that all human virtue consists in faith and obedience. The church has said 'Believe and obey!' If you reason you will become an unbeliever, and unbelievers will be lost. If you disobey, you will do so through vain pride and curiosity, and will, like Adam and Eve, be thrust from Paradise forver! For my part, I care nothing for what the church says, except in so far as it accords with my reason; and the Bible is nothing to me, only in so far as it agrees with what I think or know.
[Some Mistakes of Moses, Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 2 p. 53]
Theology still tries to interfere in medicine where moral issues are supposed to be specially involved, yet over most of the field the battle for the scientific independence of medicine has been won. No one now thinks it impious to avoid pestilences and epidemics by sanitation and hygiene; and though some still maintain that diseases are sent by God, they do not argue that it is therefore impious to try to avoid them. The consequent improvement in health and increase of longevity is one of the most remarkable and admirable characteristics of our age. Even if science had done nothing else for human happiness, it would deserve our gratitude on this account. Those who believe in the utility of theological creeds would have difficulty in pointing to any comparable advantage that they have conferred upon the human race.
Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 108-09.
Theology-An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.
[H.L. Mencken]
Theology: The study of elaborate verbal disguises for non-ideas.
There are actually two ways to prove the non-existence of something. One way is to prove that it cannot exist because it leads to contradictions (e.g., square circles, married bachelors, etc.). The other way is, in the words of Keith Parsons, 'by carefully looking and seeing'. This is how we can know that such things as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Abimonable Snowman, etc. do not exist.
Jeffery Jay Lowder, "Is a Proof of the Non-Existence of a God Even Possible?"
There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting… But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.
Richard Dawkins
There are basically two kinds of conservatives, those who don’t got it and blame liberals and minorities for it, and those who got it and only care about keeping it that way.
There are degrees of being wrong. The Creationists are at the bottom of the scale. They pull every trick in the book to justify their position. Indeed, at times, they verge right over into the downright dishonest … Their arguments are rotten, through and through.
Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies, (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1982), pp. 303, 321.
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
There are hundreds of millions who believe the Messiah has come. If he did, then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and death have had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might have been expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond question, that we Christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en masse, as non-Christians.
Steve Allen (Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
There are in fact so many strong biblical, doctrinal, and logical arguments against the existence of a literal hell that this question naturally arises: Why do the churches teach it and why do people often believe it? … The churches tend to believe that fear, rather than love conquers all.
[Robert Short, Methodist clergyman, U.S. Catholic magazine, April 1980 pp. 37-40]
There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.
Hippocrates (460 BC - 377 BC), Law
There are many extraordinary tales from antiquity, including women with snakes for hair, creatures whose gaze turns you to stone, creatures with equine bodies and human torsos, many accounts of people rising from the dead, lots of tales of magic, and numerous accounts of physical encounters with fantastic beings. Ancient people were a superstitious, scientifically primitive lot, and believed in many things that today we know are silly. I find it bizarre that so many people see nothing suspicious about the extraordinary or supernatural claims of the bible, yet don't hesitate to express disbelief in equally well documented claims of minotaurs, basilisks, and wizards.
[Scott Brown]
There are many gods which Christians reject. I just believe in one less god then they do. The reasons that you might give for your atheism toward the Roman gods are likely the same reasons I would give for not believing in Jesus.
Dan Barker
There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.
[James Morrow]
There are no atheists in the foxholes.
[William Thomas Cummings, Field Sermon on Bataan (1942)]
There are no gods in my coffee cup.
[Tony Lawrence]
There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.
[Richard Davisson]
There are no sects in geometry.
[Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.
Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895)
There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remains.
["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.110]
There are only two kinds of people floating up their eyebrows in religion, those that gain wealth or power from it, and the nitwits who give it to them.
There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject.
[George Bernard Shaw]
There are some truths, however, that we should never forget: Superstition has always been the relentless enemy of science; faith has been a hater of demonstration; hypocrisy has been sincere only in its dread of truth, and all religions are inconsistent with mental freedom.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
There are ten church members by inheritance for every one by conviction.
[Anonymous]
There are ten commandments, right? Well, it's like an exam. You get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the class.
[Mordecai Richler]
There are two things in the world that can never get together- religion & common sense.
[George W. Foote]
There can be no peaceful coexistence with homosexuals
[Kevin Tebedo, Exec. Dir. of CFV]
There can be no perfect freedom unless the church and state are separated. But the church and state are not separated in America so long as the state grants a subsidy to the church in the form of tax exemption.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
There has been a rumor in recent years to the effect that I have become less opposed to religious orthodoxy than I formerly was. This rumor is totally without foundation. I think all the great religions of the world- Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism- both untrue and harmful.
[Bertrand Russell, 1957]
There has never been a good war or a bad peace.
Benjamin Franklin
There is a commonality between those owning guns, Pit Bulls & Rottweilers, and more SUV than they need. They all seem to wear cowboy hats that hang down past their ears.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Isaac Asimov, from a 1980 column in Newsweek
There is a God, but He drinks
[Blore]
There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are. These occasions are rare, but they happen—despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths....
Hunter S. Thompson
There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of the Fatherland.
[Message, signed Hitler, painted on walls of concentration camps; Life, August 21, 1939]
There is a sense in which everyone can admit that religious experiences occur: for people do report having experiences which they take to be perceptions of God. But then, won't the acceptance of some kind of principle of credulity require one to regard these reports as prima facie evidence that such people have veridical perceptions of God? No. The reported content of these experiences is compatible with ever so many hypotheses about the nature of the creators of the world, including hypotheses involving neglectful or deceptive creators, and hypotheses on which there are no creators. Hence, all that a reasonable principle of credulity could require is that one accept that such people do have experiences with the reported content; that these people take the content of these experiences to be experiences of a particular deity should not provide one with any reason to suppose that the experiences really are of that deity. Indeed, more strongly, one could not take these experiences to be of a particular deity unless one had come to believe in the existence of that deity. (It should also be noted that principles of credulity must be carefully constrained: reports of experiences of alien spacecraft landing in suburban backyards surely should not be taken to constitute even prima facie evidence that there have been alien spacecraft landing in suburban backyards.)
Graham Oppy, "In Defense of Weak Agnosticism" (1995)
There is a sucker born-again every minute.
C. Spellman
There is an old, old story about a theologian who was asked to reconcile the Doctrine of Divine Mercy with the doctrine of infant damnation. 'The Almighty,' he explained, 'finds it necessary to do things in His official and public capacity which in His private and personal capacity He deplores.
[Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988) Methuselah's Children ASF c.1941]
There is as much perfumery in petroleum as there is righteousness in orthodoxy. Its dead theology and make-believe piety have no value only to the priest. Orthodoxy survives only by right of possession. Turn it out of the churches and it would never re-enter them. The church to-day is a hospital for sick dogmas. Every Christian doctrine is a cripple; not one can walk or stand alone. Orthodoxy has put a false valuation on things. It calls a man good who goes to church, offers a prayer in public and accepts the Bible as the word of God; it calls a man bad who stays at home and enjoys himself with his family on Sunday, who eats without asking God to bless his food, and who does not expect to go to heaven on the vicarious railroad.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
There is but one way to demonstrate the existence of a power independent of and superior to nature, and that is by breaking, if only for one moment, the continuity of cause and effect. Pluck from the endless chain of existence one little link; stop for one instant the grand procession and you have shown beyond all contradiction that nature has a master. Change the fact, just for one second, that matter attracts matter, and a god appears. The rudest savage has always known this fact, and for that reason always demanded the evidence of miracle. The founder of a religion must be able to turn water into wine — cure with a word the blind and lame, and raise with a simple touch the dead to life. It was necessary for him to demonstrate to the satisfaction of his barbarian disciple, that he was superior to nature. In times of ignorance this was easy to do. The credulity of the savage was almost boundless. To him the marvelous was the beautiful, the mysterious was the sublime. Consequently, every religion has for its foundation a miracle — that is to say, a violation of nature — that is to say, a falsehood. No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of nature. The church wishes us to believe. Let the church, or one of its intellectual saints, perform a miracle, and we will believe. We are told that nature has a superior. Let this superior, for one single instant, control nature, and we will admit the truth of your assertions.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
There is greater argument in one fact than in all the creeds.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher- the clergyman.
[Victor Hugo]
There is indeed one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection of creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and under which they marched. When Hull claimed that �the Darwinians did not totally agree with each other, even over essentials�, he overlooked one essential on which all these Darwinians agreed. Nothing was more essential for them than to decide whether evolution is a natural phenomenon or something controlled by God. The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together in spite of their disagreements on other of Darwin's theories.
Ernst Mayr
There is just no evidence for the existence of God.
Richard Dawkins
There is no 'Complete Idiots Guide to Creationism,' but perhaps one is not needed.
[Andrei Codrescu, on NPR Aug. 25, 1999, monologue on the "Complete Idiot" and "For Dummies" books]
There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
There is no authority that can be quoted against a man but the authority of some other man.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
There is no Energy Shortage. There is no Energy Crisis. There is a Crisis of Ignorance.
R. Buckminster Fuller
There is no Heaven, there is no Hell; These are the dreams of baby minds; Tools of the wily Fetisheer, To fright the fools his cunning blinds.
[Richard Francis Burton, The Kasidah]
There is no justifiable Christianity in this age.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.
Anton Chekhov
There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad.
[Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption]
There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or He didn't. If he did, then Christianity becomes plausible; if He did not, then it is sheer nonsense. I defy any genuine scientists to say that he believes in the Resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian system.
[H.L. Mencken, "Prejudices"]
There is no progress in evolution. The fact of evolutionary change through time doesn't represent progress as we know it. Progress is not inevitable. Much of evolution is downward in terms of morphological complexity, rather than upward. We're not marching toward some greater thing. The actual history of life is awfully damn curious in the light of our usual expectation that there's some predictable drive toward a generally increasing complexity in time. If that's so, life certainly took its time about it: five-sixths of the history of life is the story of single-celled creatures only.
Stephen Jay Gould
There is no question that deadly force should be used to protect innocent life.
[Paul Hill, leader of Defensive Action]
There is no religious experience which guarantees that our experience is an experience of God. This can be asserted without for a moment doubting that some people have religious experiences. The psychological reality of such experience is one thing, that these experiences are actually experiences of God is another.
Kai Nielsen, Philosophy and Atheism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1985) p. 46.
There is no sadder grief than that which lies at the bottom of a life that has been wrecked through deception.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes or digital information.
Richard Dawkins
There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.
[Van Wyck Brooks, The Nation, 14 August 1954]
There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter our civil affairs, our government would soon be destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be destroyed.
[Supreme Court of Wisconsin, Weiss v. District Board, March 18, 1890
There is no such thing as a god. If such a creature existed, belief would be rendered unnecessary, and the entire system of organized religion would collapse.
[Ron Barrier, Rbargodnow@aol.com]
There is no tyrrany so cruel, no yoke so intolerable as priestcraft when invested with temporal power.
[Venner]
There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
A. J. Muste
There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world's religions.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting slavery, but many regulating it. It is not then, we conclude, immoral.
[Rev. Alexander Campbell]
There is not the slightest question but that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous, vengeful God, inflicting not only on the sinful "pagans" but even on his Chosen People fire, lighting, hideous plagues and diseases, brimstone, and other curses.
Steve Allen (Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves
[David Hume]
There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that sanctifies the separation of church and state.
[Pat Robertson]
There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
Hunter S. Thompson
There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.
[Suzanne Lafollette]
There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of God upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. His image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which come to the surface one after another…. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in a historical garb.
[Dr Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus]
There is nothing to fear from gods, There is nothing to feel in death, Good can be attained, Evil can be endured
[The Four Herbs of Epicurus, 341-270 BC]
There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
George Washington (address to Congress, 8 January, 1790)
There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is - in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree - it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime- the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.
[Mark Twain, "Reflections on Religion"]
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
[George Bernard Shaw]
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
There is something feeble and a little contemptable about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not real, he becomes furious when they are disputed.
[Bertrand Russell, "Human Society in Ethics and Politics"]
There is virtually nothing of Jesus Christ left in the Religious Right, it is now wholly dedicated to three issues: denying women the constitutional right to choose their own futures in regards to abortion; promoting discrimination, prejudice, bigotry and hatred of homosexuals, and destroying the concept of separation of Church and State by replacing the public schools with a system of religious indoctrination centers.
There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or later the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable.
[H. L. Mencken, 1930]
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.
[H.L. Mencken]
There is, then, in this analysis of variance no indication of any other than innate and heritable factors at work.
R.A. Fisher
There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.
[Tennyson]
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
There may be Gods, but they care not what men do.
[Henry David Thoreau]
There may be lots of Providence in the world, but no man seems to know just where it can be found.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
There must be a Silicon Heaven. Where do all the calculators go?
[Kryten, "Red Dwarf"]
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
[J. Robert Oppenheimer, Life, 10 October 1949]
There once was a time when all people beleived in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.
[Richard Lederer, Anguished English]
There should be absolutely no 'Separation of Church and State' in America.
[David Barton, president of Wallbuilders and a close ally of the Christian Coalition, 1994 Anti-Defamation League Report]
There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as The Dark Ages.
Ruth Hurmence Green (The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible)
There was never such a gigantic lie told as the fable of the Garden of Eden.
[Henry Ward Beecher, early American preacher, from "What Great Men Think Of Religion" by Ira Cardiff]
There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance…
[Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow]
There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one— the pulpit. It yielded last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession— at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery texts [in the Bible] remained; the practice changed; that was all.
["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.109]
There was no such person in the history of the world as Jesus Christ. There was no historical, living, breathing, sentient human being by that name. Ever. [The Bible] is a fictional, nonhistorical narrative. The myth is good for business.
[Jon Murray, President of American Atheists, as quoted in Life Magazine, Dec. 1994 "Jesus" issue]
There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
[G. C. Lichtenberg (1742-99), German physicist, philosopher. Aphorisms, "Notebook L," aph. 16 (written 1765-99; tr. by R. J. Hollingdale, 1990)]
There's lots will take things as they are - fat and stupid; and lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and that they ought to be doing something. Now whenever things are that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you've seen the same thing. It's energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean inside out. These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety. And those of a less simple sort will work in a bit of - what is it? - eroticism.
[H. G. Wells, from The War of the Worlds]
There's nothing an agnostic can't do if he doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not
[Monty Python, "The Meaning of Life"]
There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.
Richard Dawkins
There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.
Richard Dawkins
There’s something about the term Homeland Security that is reminiscent of Hitler’s Fatherland; and when Moslems and Jews are attached respectively, it gets even worse.
Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God.
William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), pp. 35-36.
These are actually chunks of lung itself being coughed up. I don't understand exactly what it is, but God has healed you right now. Amen.
[Pat Robertson, during a "faith healing" session]
These deities have demanded the most abject and degrading obedience. In order to please them, man must lay his very face in the dust. Of course, they have always been partial to the people who created them, and have generally shown their partiality by assisting those people to rob and destroy others, and to ravish their wives and daughters.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
These extremist sects appeal to many people in an antispiritual age because they combine their empowering theology with a warm, supportive environment, at least at first. Those who join become part of a close-knit body of believers who are convinced they understand the meaning of history and what the future holds.
[Bruce Nelan, Time Magazine]
These gods did not even know the shape of the worlds they had created, but supposed them perfectly flat. Some thought the day could be lengthened by stopping the sun, that the blowing of horns could throw down the walls of a city, and all knew so little of the real nature of the people they had created, that they commanded the people to love them. Some were so ignorant as to suppose that man could believe just as he might desire, or as they might command, and that to be governed by observation, reason, and experience was a most foul and damning sin. None of these gods could give a true account of the creation of this little earth. All were woefully deficient in geology and astronomy. As a rule, they were most miserable legislators, and as executives, they were far inferior to the average of American presidents.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
These loons have so much guns and ammo on the brain that the lead content in their heads is dragging them down so far they’ll soon need a new planet with less gravity to keep their faces out of the dirt.
These people's God has shown them by a million acts that he respects none of the Bible's statues. He breaks every one of them himself, adultery and all.
["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.124]
They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition of their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the alter of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson
They [the Creationists] have been getting away with this nonsense [Creation Science] for some time now, even to the extent of getting legislation passed to allow them to teach "creationism" side by side with evolution. The true scientific community has largely remained within its hallowed halls rather than storming out into the quadrangle to do battle with what it knows to be pure nonsense. Scientists, unlike religionists, are political neophytes and generally remain oblivious to the issue of religion. Average Americans are not willing, nor intellectually mature enough, to handle such heady stuff as questioning any religion except upon tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee issues. Undoubtedly, this results from living under a Constitution which, in its consummate fairness in not favoring one religion above another, has made attacks on religion nearly needless and obsolete. But in the First Amendment's success lies a great danger to our liberties. If we never question our religions or their motives, they will ultimately destroy our freedom to do so.
[William H. Reynolds, Creationism: The Fossil Record and the Flood]
They all err; Muslim, Christian and Jew Two make up humanity's universal sect One man intelligent without religion, The other religious without intellect
[Ma'arri (1024)]
They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our unbroken apostolic traditions.
[Bishop John Shelby Spong, Episcopal (Anglican) Bishop of Newark, NY, in Resurrection: Myth or Reality? pg. 100]
They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rational for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes,and we are their survival machines.
Richard Dawkins
They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.
(Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites)
They call them extremists. We have our own names. We call them senators, congressman, governors, mayors, state legislators.
[Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition Executive Director]
They express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
Richard Dawkins
They feed you on the guilt to keep you humble, keep you low Some man and myth they made up a thousand years ago.
["Silent Legacy", Melissa Etheridge]
They have kept us in submission because they have talked about separation of church and state. There is no such thing in the Constitution. It's a lie of the left, and we're not going to take it anymore.
[Pat Robertson, The State, Columbia, South Carolina, Nov. 14, 1993]
They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly. … Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit…
[Galileo Galilei, 1615]
They said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must pray against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For me, religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just couldn't agree with.
[Gene Roddenberry]
They say one day He'll liquidate His holdings up on high, I say it's all speculation.
[Michelle Shocked "God is a Real Estate Developer"]
They say there are strangers, who threaten us In our immigrants and infidels They say there is strangeness, too dangerous In our theatres and bookstore shelves Those who know what's best for us- Must rise and save us from ourselves Quick to judge … Quick to anger … Slow to understand… Ignorance and prejudice and fear
[all] Walk hand in hand.
[RUSH]
They were allowed to stay there on one condition, and that is that they didn't eat of the tree of knowledge. That has been the condition of the Christian church from then until now. They haven't eaten as yet, as a rule they do not.
[Clarence Darrow]
Think about the bio-mass involved [with the Biblical flood]. What happened to all the corpses?" "Sharks, for one.
[Raoul Newton, net.fundie.idiot]
Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium,. the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.
Richard Dawkins
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword.
[Jesus, Matthew 10:34]
Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
This (Aum sect Tokyo nerve gas attack) was done not by people with a political ideal but by a lunatic religious group whose idea of a happy death is mass suicide.
[Atsuyuki Sassas, Japanese expert on terrorism]
This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief.
[Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.152]
This indictment of Christianity I will write on all walls, wherever there are walls—I have letters to make even the blind see.
[Nietzsche]
This is a lttle prayer dedicated to the separation of church and state. I guess if they are going to force those kids to pray in schools they might as well have a nice prayer like this:
Our Father who art in heaven, and to the republic for which it stands, thy kingdom come, one nation indivisible as in heaven, give us this day as we forgive those who so proudly we hail. Crown thy good into temptation but deliver us from the twilight's last gleaming. Amen and Awomen.
[George Carlin, on "Saturday Night Live"]
This is my religion . . . joy and exaltation in my own existence . . . so go ahead and snarl . . . bite . . . howl, you Calvinistic divines and all you who say I am no Christian. I say you are not Christian.
[John Adams, in Toward the Mystery]
This is not an attack on the First Amendment rights of people who believe in faith healing. We just don't believe the First Amendment allows them to inflict their views upon their children and let them die from such things as infections, when one quick trip to a doctor would cure the problem. Children should not have to die to uphold the religious beliefs of their parents.
[Scott Greenwood, Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD)]
This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
Richard Dawkins
This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts…
(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)
This meeting of the Get Rid Of Slimy Girls club will now come to order. First Tiger Hobbes will read the minutes of our last meeting."
"Thank you. (9:30) Meeting called to order. Dictator For Life Calvin proposed resoultion condemning the existence of girls. (9:35) First Tiger Hobbes abstains from vote. Motion fails. (9:36) Patriotism of First Tiger called into question. (9:37) Philosophical discussion. (10:15) Bandages administered. Dictator For Life rebuked for biting."
"Is this a great club or what?"
"(10:16) Forgot what debate was about. Medals of bravery awarded to all parties.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen …
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
This question is put to Christians who believe that the Bible unerringly describes God and reports the commands and the characteristics of God. If there is a God, it is natural that we should wish to be quite correct in our understanding of that God's nature. So, we ask: Can and does God lie? Looking this point up in the mazes of Holy Writ, we discover confusion. In Numbers xxiii, 19, we are told: "God is not a man, that he should lie." This is put even mere strongly in Hebrews vi, 18, where we read: "It was impossible for God to lie." But do these citations settle the matter? Ah, no, we are upset in, our calculations the moment we turn to 2 Thessalonians ii, 11, where we read: "For this cause God shall send them strong delusions, that they should believe a lie." And in I Kings xxii, 23, God is thus reported: "Now, therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee." Can God lie? Can the Bible lie? Anyway, there is a mistake somewhere. The big mistake is in entertaining the idea of a God.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
This so called new religion is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants designed to take away the money of fools. Let us say the Lord's prayer 40 times, but first let's pass the collection plate.
Reverend Lovejoy in a sermon about the Movementarians, The Simpsons
This was a prelude only, wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
Heinrich Heine
This whole Christian theology thing is that god came down to experience life through his son. Well, how's he experiencing life if he doesn't get laid? Give me a break. And why would he not get laid, as he created the apparatus in the first place?
[Tori Amos, interview in Vox, May, 1994, by Steve Maline]
Thixotropy — the property that lets toothpaste ooze when squeezed out of its tube and yet not drip off the toothbrush — may explain a centuries-old miracle. Blood, once congealed, tends to stay that way. But when religious leaders handle a vial believed to contain the blood of St. Januarius, the dark brown substance begins to flow. Periodic demonstrations of this effect have drawn crowds to Naples since 1389, notes Luigi Garlaschelli, an organic chemist at the University of Pavia in Italy. In the Oct. 10 [issue of] Nature, Garlaschelli and two other Italian researchers propose that medieval alchemists could have created a thixotropic substance that looked like blood by mixing water and salt with a mineral called molysite. Thixotropic materials exist as gels until a mechanical stress — such as picking up or tilting their containers — makes them flow. To explore this possibility, Garlaschelli searched through the scientific literature and discovered that about 70 years ago, researchers demonstrated thixotropy in an iron hydroxide alloy. He reproduced their work by mixing a ferric chloride compound with calcium carbonate in water, then separating out the iron hydroxide that formed. By adding salt to a solution of this alloy, he created a dark brown gel. 'It looks exactly like the samples in Naples,' he told Science News. All of these materials were available five centuries ago, including ferric chloride, found near Mt. Vesuvius in the form of molysite, he says.
[Ivars Peterson, Science News 140(15):229, 12 October 1991]
Those in the media deciding what information to give us are in the top 5% of our income structure.
Those Jesus freaks, well they're friendly but, the shit they believe has got their minds all shut.
[Frank Zappa, "The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing"]
Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money.
[Eleanor Roosevelt]
Those people who tell me that I'm going to hell while while they are going to heaven somehow make me very glad that we're going to separate destinations.
[Martin Terman]
Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will never even stop to learn.
[Galen]
Those who fight so intensely against Affirmative Action belittle the slavery and apartheid of the past while ignoring the racism of the present.
Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principles that they are laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.
Ethan Allen (quoted from Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World)
Those who look to science to provide evidence to bolster their faith in the fantasy of God won't find it in the ripples of the big bang.
Victor J. Stenger, "Big Bang Ripples No Message from God"
Those who really really want a gun, are the very ones who really, really shouldn’t be allowed to have one.
Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that once ignorance is put aside that wonderment would be taken away which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.
Spinoza
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
Benjamin Franklin (Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759)
Thou shalt have one God only; who would be at the expense of two?
[Arthur Hugh Clough, The Latest Decalogue]
Though I drew this conclusion, now it draws me.
[Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra]
Though there are a number of rather savage apocalyptic scenarios current among American Fundamentalists, I am aware of none quite so inhumane as the Jehovah's Witnesses' accounts of the End of our Time. There is something peculiarly childish in these Watchtower yearnings: the remind me of why very small children cannot be left alone with wounded and suffering household pets.
[Harold Bloom, The American Religion, pg. 169-170]
Thought is one of the manifestations of human energy, and among the earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand conspicuous — Fear and Greed. Fear, which, by stimulating the imagination, creates a belief in an invisible world, and ultimately develops a priesthood; and Greed, which dissipates energy in war and trade.
[Brooks Adams (1848-1927), The Law of Civilization and Decay]
Three years ago, Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition, wished not to be seen. 'I want to be invisible,' he said. 'I do guerilla warfare…'… But on June 25th Reed played the expansive host at a luncheon given by the Coalition, the most influential group on the religious right, which was attended by hundreds of delegates to the Iowa Republican Party convention. They were celebrating their victories in gaining control of the state Party's central committee, ousting moderate Republicans, and in dictating a platform that supported the teaching of creationism in the public schools.
["Christian Soldiers", New Yorker magazine, July 18, 1994]
Throughout the 1970s I had been mainly studying black holes, but in 1981 my interest in questions about the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican. The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference — the possibility that space- time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 115-16.
Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity — famine, earthquake, and plague — led to mass conversions, another indirect influence by which epidemic diseases contributed to the destruction of classical civilization. Christianity owes a formidable debt to bubonic plague and to smallpox, no less than to earthquake and volcanic eruptions.
[Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, 1934]
Throughout the last 400 years, during which the growth of science had gradually shown men how to acquire knowledge of the ways of nature and mastery over natural forces, the clergy have fought a losing battle against science, in astronomy and geology, in anatomy and physiology, in biology and psychology and sociology. Ousted from one position, they have taken up another. After being worsted in astronomy, they did their best to prevent the rise of geology; they fought against Darwin in biology, and at the present time they fight against scientific theories of psychology and education. At each stage, they try to make the public forget their earlier obscurantism, in order that their present obscurantism may not be recognized for what it is.
Bertrand Russell, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (1943) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 209.
Throughout this protracted & disgraceful assault on American womanhood the clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion…
[Matilda Joslyn Gage]
Thunder rolled… It is said that the gods play games with the fates of men. But what games, and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and what the rules are - who knows?
Best not to speculate.
Thunder rolled…
It rolled a six.
(Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)
Thus a certain false psychology, a certain kind of fantasy in interpreting motives and experiences, is the necessary prerequisite for becoming a Christian and experiencing the need for redemption. With the insight into this aberration of reason and imagination, one ceases to be a Christian.
[Nietzsche]
Thus no clear criteria of evidence, logic, or certainty separate religion even from its supposed antithesis, science. Instead, they are separated most sharply by their attitude toward anthropomorphism: science tries to avoid it, while religion takes it as foundation.
Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 196.
Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.
[Epicurus]
Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye, which is already better than 48 per cent, and the difference is significant."
Nilsson and Pelger began with a flat retina atop a flat pigment layer and surmounted by a flat, protective transparent layer. The transparent layer was allowed to undergo localised random mutations of its refractive index. They then let the model deform itself at random, constrained only by the requirement that any change must be small and must be an improvement on what went before. … The results were swift and decisive. A trajectory of steadily mounting acuity led unhesitatingly from the flat beginning through a shallow indentation to a steadily deepening cup, as the shape of the model eye deformed itself on the computer screen. The transparent layer thickened to fill the cup and smoothly bulged its outer surface in a curve. And then, almost like a conjuring trick, a portion of this transparent filling condensed into a local, spherical subregion of higher refractive index. Not uniformly higher, but a gradient of refractive index such that the spherical region functioned as an excellent graded- index lens.
Richard Dawkins
Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye…
Richard Dawkins
To affirm that the Sun … is at the centre of the universe and only rotates on its axis without going from east to west, is a very dangerous attitude and one calculated not only to arouse all Scholastic philosophers and theologians but also to injure our holy faith by contradicting the Scriptures
[Cardinal Bellarmino, 17th Century Church Master Collegio Romano, who imprisoned and tortured Galileo for his astronomical works]
To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
Theodore Roosevelt.
To assert that Christianity communicated to man moral truths previously unknown, argues on the part of the asserter either gross ignorance or else wilful fraud…. The system of morals expounded in the New Testament contains no maxims which had not been previously enunciated.
[Henry Thomas Buckle]
To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
[Cardinal Bellarmino 1615, during the trial of Galileo]
To be a Christian, you must "pluck out the eye of reason.
[Martin Luther]
To be elected in America, no matter from what party, the candidates have no choice but to year after year pledge to lower taxes further and further. We have become the nation of Ken and Barbie, looking good but very poor at the math.
To be true to the mythical conception of a God is to be false to the interests of mankind.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
[William Ralph Inge, 1920]
To believe a myth is as easy a thing as breathing the air. But holding one's breath for a lifetime — that is difficult.
[Michael P. Kube-McDowell, "Exile"]
To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car.
[Frank Zindler]
To Believe without evidence and demonstration is an act of ignorance and folly.
[Volney]
To build one house for man is better than to build a dozen houses to God.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover.
[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies"]
To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.
R.A. Fisher
To depend upon God is like holding on to the tail-end of nothing.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
To doubt has more of faith … than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters.
[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]
To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.
[C. K. Chesterton]
To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.
David Brooks, "The Necessity of Atheism"]
To hate man and worship god seems to be the sum of all the creeds.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
To hell with the U.S. Constitution.
[Father Bernard Leeming, from America Magazine, 7/23/63]
To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.
[Michael Servetus]
To make a bad day worse, spend it wishing for the impossible.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
To make sure that my blasphemy is thoroughly expressed, I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition, that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s), that devils, demons, angels and saints are myths, that there is no life after death, heaven nor hell, that the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and that the Holy Ghost is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision. I accuse the Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place — not to mention the "ethnic cleansing" presently being performed by Christians in our world — and I condemn and vilify this mythical deity for encouraging racial prejudice and commanding the degradation of women.
[James Randi, challenging blasphemy laws in several US states]
To me the scientific point of view is completely satisfying, and it has been so as long as I can remember. Not once in this life have I ever been inclined to seek a rock and a refuge elsewhere. It leaves a good many dark spots in the universe, to be sure, but not a hundredth time as many as theology. We may trust it, soon or late, to throw light upon many of them, and those that remain dark will be beyond illumination by any other agency. It also fails on occasion to console, but so does theology…
HL Mencken
To me, faith is not better because it is atheistic rather than theistic. I am an atheist because of a lack of faith, not because of a different faith.
[Russell Turpin on alt.atheism]
To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom…
[Susan B. Anthony]
To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.
[Diderot]
To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim. […] I do not accept the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one can not be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that 'there can be no coercion in matters of religion'. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.
[Salman Rushdie, "In Good Faith", 1990]
To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the "scientific" establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it.
[Isaac Asimov]
To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage
[James Randi, "The Faith Healers"]
To reject the idea that chance is something that could be used by the divine is to limit the power of the divine considerably.
Barry Lynn in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 36.
To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him… If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of 'dissing,' then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police.
[Salman Rushdie, to Reuters News Service, 4/17/96]
To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.
[Bertrand Russell, "The Prospects of Industrial Civilization"]
To say that this Timeless God began Time along with the Universe at a time when there was no Time implies that at that moment when He initiated this Unique Event He was engaged in a Time, or at a time in order to bring this Event about. He did something. What brought that Event about?
Peter A. Angeles, The Problem of God: A Short Introduction (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 67.
To someone who advocates intelligent design, does the sequence of these organisms in the fossil record simply mean that the intelligent designer was incompetent, he kept making things and they went extinct, extinct, or that he was restless — 'I'll try this, I'll try that, I'll try the other thing,' — or does it mean that in fact these organisms are related by descent with modification?
Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 50.
To succeed in chaining the multitude, you must seem to wear the same fetters.
[Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
HL Mencken
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
[Isaac Asimov]
To take an unequivocal stand, it seems to me, is of greater heuristic value and far more likely to stimulate constructive criticism than to evade the issue.
Ernst Mayr
To talk intelligibly about modern physics, we have to admit the possibility of uncaused events.
Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
To the amateur, however, to grant that something is possible is immediately taken as verification of a canonical report. For the skeptic, on the other hand, walking on the water is impossible; therefore Jesus did not do it. The historian accedes to neither generalization. Possibilities (and impossibilities) do not and cannot establish facts. Historians insist on looking every report in the face and judging its reliability independently of theoretical possibilities.
Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), pp. 60-61.
To the Jews I became as a Jew, to win the Jews; to those under the law I became as one under the law-though not being myself under the law-that I might win those under the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel…
Paul, 1 Corinthians 9:20-23
To the truly religious man, God is not being without qualities . . . the denial of determinate, positive predicates . . . is nothing else than a denial of religion, with, however, an appearance of religion in its favour, so that it is not recognized as a denial; it is simply a subtle, disguised atheism.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1873, trans. George Eliot, New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pp. 14-15.
To think is to differ.
[Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, July 1925]
To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance. That implies that everyone else (such as the opposing football team, driver, student, parent) is de-selected, unfavored by God, and that I am special, above it all.
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 109.
To understand what a Libertarian is, fill the mold with the intellectual racism of Charles Murray, the political extremism of Ron Paul, and the nature of Timothy McVeigh.
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason.
HL Mencken
To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but to those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand…
Jesus, Mark 4:11-12
To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
[Woody Allen]
Today Christianity has been so important for so long that one is apt to assume that it must have appeared important to educated pagans who lived AD 50-150; and that if they fail to discuss Jesus' historicity or the pretensions of his worshippers, their silence must be attributed to their consciousness that they were unable to deny the truth of the Christian case. In fact, however, there is no reason why the pagan writers of this period should have thought Christianity any more important than other enthusiastic religions of the Empire.
G.A. Wells, Did Jesus Exist? (Revised edition, London: Pemberton, 1986), p. 15.
Today my spirit is going to school while my body stays in bed.
Bill Watterson, "Calvin", Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons"
Today, Jesus' name is used to divide us, to make us intolerant, bigoted, hateful. There is nowhere Jesus could be born today were he would feel comfortable. Jesus is being betrayed by the people who claim to believe in him.
[F. Forrester Church, Unitarian minister and author of God and Other Famous Liberals, quoted in Life Magazine, Dec. 1994 "Jesus" issue]
Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
[James Watson, winner of the Nobel prize for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA]
Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
[Dr. James D. Watson, winner of the Nobel prize for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA]
Tonight, instead of discussing the existence or non- existence of God, they have decided to fight for it.
[Monty Python]
Too long has this world been at the feet of the priest. Man is never in that position for his own benefit, but for the benefit of the priest.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Too much thinking can give people diabetes. It is not sugar that causes diabetes, it's thinking. We can cure diabetes. After realization. And this new thing AIDS. After realization we can cure that too.
[Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, yet another Eastern mystic]
Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.
[James Russell Lowell, Literary Essays, Witchcraft]
Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals.
(Terry Pratchett, Mort)
Traveller: God has been mighty good to your fields, Mr. Farmer.
Farmer: You should have seen how he treated them when I wasn't around.
Treasures well used on earth will help the world more than treasures laid up in heaven.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
Treat Pro Lifers fairly if they hold true to their reasoning by also decrying capital punishment and without any of that conservative hypocritical blather about getting the government off our backs.
TREATY OF PEACE AND FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE BEY AND SUBJECTS OF TRIPOLI OF BARBARY 8 Stat. 154, Treaty Series 358 Treaty signed at Tripoli November 4, 1796, and at Algiers January 3, 1797. Senate advice and consent to ratification June 7, 1797. Ratified by the President of the United States June 10, 1797 Entered into force June 10, 1797 Proclaimed by the President of the United States June 10, 1797. ARTICLE 11 "As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,— and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religous opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
[John Adams, 1797-05-27, Article 11, Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the US and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary. Treaties and Other International Acts of America, ed. Hunter Miller]
True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten oneself and others.
[Voltaire]
Truth in matters of religion, is simply opinion that has survived.
[Oscar Wilde]
Trying to find God is a good deal like looking for money one has lost in a dream.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you!
Frances Wright, "Life, Letters and Lectures" (1829, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 40.
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "What the Germans Lack," aph. 2 (1889)]
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
[anonymous]
Two organisms may maintain the same feature because both inherited it from a common ancestor. These are homologous similarities, and they indicate 'propinquity of dissent,' to use Darwin's words. Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such desperate structures from the same parts. Therefore, the parts existed before the particular set of structures now housing them: they were, in short, inherited from a common ancestor.
Stephen Jay Gould
Two recent surveys rate the United States at the top among Western nations in belief in God and at the bottom among six major countries in school kids' understanding of science and math. This could be dismissed as chance, but it shouldn't be. While our economic competitors' schools are teaching students advanced math and science, many of our schools are wasting energy debating whether to teach evolution or creationism, which maintains that God created the universe over a six-day period about 6,000 years ago.
[Bill Mandel, San Francisco Examiner, 12 February 1989]
U.S. Adults (Gallup): humans didn't evolve, 46 percent; evolution guided by God, 40; evolution occurred by itself, 10 percent.
[Quoted by Adam L. Carley, Free Inquiry, Fall 1994]
Underachiever---and proud of it, man!
Matt Groening
Unfortunately, we're all "someone else" to someone else.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes, "The Revenge of the Babysat"
Unless some people change their habits before they die, there will be a lot of dirty angels in the next world, if there is any next world.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
Unlike Descartes, however, he regarded mind and body (or ideas and the physical universe) as merely different aspects of a single substance, which he called alternately God and Nature, God being Nature in its fullness. This pantheism was considered blasphemous by the religious and political authorities of his day.
[The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, Second Edition, 1989, on Spinoza's beliefs]
Use against heretics the spiritual sword of excommunication, and if this does not prove effective, use the material sword.
[Pope Innocent III (1161-1216)]
Using Constitutional quotes and arguments regarding abortion are ludicrous as that document did not include women, Indians or Blacks yet alone a fetus.
Vaccination is a direct violation of the everlasting covenant that God made with Noah after the flood…. Vaccination never saved human life. It does not prevent smallpox.
[The Golden Age, (predecessor to Awake!), Feb. 4, 1931 (Jehovah's Witnesses)]
Van Inwagen "is a self-servingly selective modal skeptic who makes demands of the atheologian that he does not of the theist. Theism makes many modal claims, for example that it is possible for an immaterial being to create worldly things ex nihilo by the mere act of willing them, that it is possible that certain purported defenses are true, but one does not find van Inwagen extending his modal 'modesty' to them."
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. 212-13.
Very often in science one finds that there are ideas in the air, and lots of people hold them, but they don't even realize they hold them. The person who can crystallize them, and lay out not only the central idea but its implications for future scientific research can often make a tremendous contribution. And I think that's what 'The Selfish Gene' did. Lots of scientists, they'd been Darwinians all their lives, but they'd been inarticulate Darwinians. And now they really understood what was foundational to Darwinism and what was peripheral. And once you understand what is foundational, then you begin to deduce conclusions.
Richard Dawkins
Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species— back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire— has been ethically ambiguous.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
Voodoo is a very interesting religion for the whole family, even those members of it who are dead.
(Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
W. V. O. Quine has been one of the most ruthless of recent appliers of this principle [Ockham's razor.] I recall an exchange in print (a fest-schrift, around 1980) where someone quoted Shakespeare's "There are more things on heaven and earth, than are dreamed of in your philosophy" at Quine. Quine responded something like, "Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.
[David Lyndes]
Walking on water is easy. It is what we do for a living. You just have to know where the rocks are. Step from rock to rock, and those on the shore will think you are performing a miracle.
[advice from professional prophets]
Walnut Creek. The movement to grant California families credit toward private tuition just got some unexpected support — a coven of witches who plan to open their own school if the program passes. …Proponents say a school based on their religion is as valid as any church school.
[San Francisco Examiner, 18 July 1993]
War to the death against depravity—depravity is Christianity.
[Nietzsche]
Watsonville. In this sleepy farm town where thousands are still feeling the effects of the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, people take their signs of hope where they can find them. … About a month ago, an elderly woman praying in a shaded grove at Pinto Lake County Park found one in the bark of a tree. … An estimated 4,000 people have flocked every day this week to see what many claim is the outline of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the limb of an oak tree, and park officials have cordoned off part of the tree because pilgrims are carving gashes and dents in it to take bark home as souvenirs. … She is said to appear on the Watsonville tree as the outline of a cloaked woman. Some visitors claim they see two other Virgins on the same tree. Skeptics see little more than a garden-variety growth on an unremarkable oak.
[Dan Turner, San Francisco Chronicle, 23 July 1992]
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.
Richard Dawkins
We agree [that the State's use of the Regents' prayer in its public school system breaches the constitutional wall of separation between Church and State] since we think that the constitutional prohibition against laws respecting an establishment of religion must at least mean that in this country it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government.
[U.S. Supreme Court, Engel v. Vitale]
We aim in the domain of politics at republicanism; in the domain of economics at socialism; in the domain of what is today called religion, at atheism.
[August Bebel, Summary of Views]
We all know that the result of ending Affirmative Action is less black faces in colleges, government, management and winners of contract bids.
We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.
Benjamin Harrison
We are a people of faith. We have been so secure in that faith that we have enshrined in our Constitution protection for people who profess no faith. And good for us for doing so. That is what the First Amendment is all about.
[Pres. Bill Clinton]
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins
We are asked to justify these frightful passages, these infamous laws of war, because the Bible is the word of God. As a matter of fact, there never was, and there never can be, an argument even tending to prove the inspiration of any book whatever. In the absence of positive evidence, analogy and experience, argument is simply impossible, and at the very best, can amount only to a useless agitation of the air. The instant we admit that a book is too sacred to be doubted, or even reasoned about, we are mental serfs. It is infinitely absurd to suppose that a god would Address a communication to intelligent beings, and yet make it a crime, to be punished in eternal flames, for them to use their intelligence for the purpose of understanding his communication. If we have the right to use our reason, we certainly have the right to act in accordance with it, and no god can have the right to punish us for such action.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
We are convinced the masses of evidence render the application of the concept of evolution to man and the other primates beyond serious dispute.
[Pontifical Academy of Sciences]
We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe.
[Gary Bauer, religious-right Family Research Council]
We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
Stephen Jay Gould
We are god because only we can create his existence within our minds.
[Yello]
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher' answer—-but none exists.
Stephen Jay Gould
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher' answer—but none exists.
Stephen Jay Gould
We are not accountable for the sins of "Adam
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
We are not endeavoring to chain the future but to free the present. … We are the advocates of inquiry, investigation, and thought. … It is grander to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed. … I look for the day when reason, throned upon the world's brains, shall be the King of Kings and the God of Gods.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
We are only fabulous beasts, after all.
[John Ashbery]
We are starting a movement in the state legislatures…to forbid the installation of clinics that dispense contraceptives.
[Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum]
We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Richard Dawkins
We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
George Wald, U.S. biochemist "The Origin of Optical Activity," in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 69 (1957)
We are then to conclude that Christianity is held only by the ignorant.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
We are told by the church that we have accomplished nothing… Is it a small thing to make men truly free, to destroy the dogmas of ignorance, prejudice and power, the poisoned fables of superstition, and drive from the beautiful face of earth the fiend of fear?
[D.M. Bennett, Champions of the Church]
We are told in the Pentateuch, that god, the father of us all, gave thousands of maidens, after having killed their fathers, their mothers, and their brothers, to satisfy the brutal lusts of savage men. If there be a god, I pray him to write in his book, opposite my name, that I denied this lie for him.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
We are told that "all things are possible with God," and yet God cannot boil an egg in cold water.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
We can hardly love someone who intentionally hurts us and keeps his reasons a secret unless for the most part we know his reasons for affecting us as he does and moreover know that they are benevolent.
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.
We cannot disprove beliefs like these, especially if it is assumed that God took care that his interventions always closely mimicked what would be expected from evolution by natural selection. All that we can say about such beliefs is, firstly, that they are superfluous and, secondly, that they assume the existence of the main thing we want to explain, namely organized complexity. The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 316.
We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.
[A. N. Wilson, "Against Religion"]
We cannot take a step towards constructing an idea of God without the ascription of human attributes.
Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1870), p. 442.
We Catholics may lie and say we are Protestants when we are among the Protestants or we may lie when we are among the Huguenots and say we are Huguenots; and if we wish we can stoop so low as to say we are Jews when we are among the Jews if our lying would benefit the Catholic Church.
[Jesuit oath from the Congressional Record]
We could believe in God if he shortened the road for the lame, led the blind or fed the starving.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
We created god in our own image and likeness!
[George Carlin]
We didn't send you to Washington to make intelligent decisions. We sent you to represent us.
[Kent York, Baptist minister to US Rep. Bill Sarpalius]
We do not ask to be born; and we do not ask to die. But born we are and die we must. We come into existence and we pass out of existence. And in neither case does high-handed fate await our ratification of its decree.
[Corliss Lamont (1902-1995) "The Illusion of Immortality"]
We do not know how the Creator created, [or] what processes He used, for he used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative processes used by the Creator.
Duane Gish, Evolution? The Fossils Say No!, (1985), p. 42.
We do not say that another world is not worth a single thought, but rather that this world is worth all our thoughts, and needs them.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
We do not want holy books, but true ones; not sacred writings, but sensible writings.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand.
[James Watt]
We face the nineties with a Court that relegates First Amendment rights to the level of any law, a Justice Department quite willing to establish first- and second-class citizenship determined by religious belief….a Christian arrogance and exclusivism reminiscent of earlier centures of religious persecution.
[Robert S. Alley, "Christian Exclusivism and Second-Class Citizenship" Free Inquiry]
We found a great number of books…and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the Devil we burned them all.
[Catholic Bishop Diego De Landa, after burning priceless books of Mayan history and science, July 1562]
We found that we didn't have much problem with him [J.C.], it was his followers we found questionable.
[Graham Chapman, discussing making of "Life of Brian"]
We get that in here some nights, when someone's had a few. Cosmic speculation about whether the gods exist. Next thing, there's a bolt of lightning through the door with a note wrapped round it saying, "Yes, we do" and a pair of sandals with smoke coming out.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
[William Ralph Inge]
We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want a 'this year's fact'. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years. Their reputation for 'truth and veracity' in the neighborhood where they resided is wholly unknown to us. Give us a new miracle, and substantiate it by witnesses who still have the cheerful habit of living this world. Do not send us to Jericho to hear the winding horns, nor put us in the fire with Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego. Do not compel us to navigate the sea with Captain Jonah, nor dine with Mr. Ezekiel. There is no sort of use in sending us fox-hunting with Samson. We have positively lost all interest in that little speech so eloquently delivered by Balaam's inspired donkey. It is worse than useless to show us fishes with money in their mouths, and call our attention to vast multitudes stuffing themselves with five crackers and two sardines. We demand a new miracle, and we demand it now. Let the church furnish at least one, or forever hold her peace.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
[Jonathan Swift]
We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common, we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad,' 'psychotic' or 'delusional.'
Sam Harris
We have no king but Jesus.
John Ashcroft, May 8, 1999
We have the duty of formulating, of summarizing, and of communicating our conclusions, in intelligible form, in recognition of the right of other free minds to utilize them in making their own decisions.
R.A. Fisher
We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.
Mario Cuomo
We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups, substitute different emotions.
[Bertrand Russell]
We may have faith in something, about something, even faith in spite of evidence for something, but if there is nothing existing in the first place to have faith about then the act of faith is not only ungrounded but completely misplaced and without content. Faith of itself does not provide supporting evidence for anything. It does provide such things as pyschological reassurances and attitudes to be taken towards things. It may provide perspectives from which to relate to events and people. But faith that Creation Ex Nihilo does take place cannot be had. There is nothing there in the first place to have faith in. If the attitude of faith is a supporting ground for the validity of an idea, then by the same token one can by faith give supporting ground to any notion whatever. By an act of faith God could be said not to Create Ex Nihilo, but He is Co-Eternal with the Universe. By an act of faith it could be said that God does not exist, or that many Gods exist, or that God isn't here yet, or that God passed out of existence many years ago. Unguarded, both the appeal to mystery and the appeal to faith tend to become arguments from ignorance or arguments to ease the burden of something unknown or unacceptable.
Peter A. Angeles, The Problem of God: A Short Introduction (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 66.
We must condemn christianity, not christians; strike the church, but spare the heart.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected.
[Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama, Time April 11, 1988]
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
Epictetus (Discourses)
We must not hold back in the battle for children's minds
[Church of England spokesman]
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
Gene Roddenberry.
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
[Gene Roddenberry]
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
[H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956]
We must therefore ask ourselves: What sort of thing is it reasonable to believe without proof? I should reply: The facts of sense experience and the principles of mathematics and logic — including the inductive logic employed in science.
Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 253.
We need a new cosmology. New Gods. New Sacraments. Another drink.
[Patti Smith]
We need to be like a united front. I know that all these laws says that we've got to be careful, but there's nothing that says we can't have a few informal discussions amongst ourselves.
[Ripples of laughter from audience] Pat Robertson, Sept 13., 1997
We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun
Richard Dawkins
We now know that where Matthew and Luke overlap with Mark, their reports do not constitute independent sources for those events.
Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 61.
We pass through this world but once.
Stephen Jay Gould
We profess our faith in a Supreme Being on our coins marked "In God we trust." It seems more appropriate to me to recognize the Deity in our spiritual dedication to the flag, the symbol of our God-given freedom. Our belief in God highlights one of the fundamental differences between us and the Communists.
[Rep. Charles G. Oakman, Congressional Record, Appendix, p. A2527]
We really have dinosaurs today, without any question. You just need the right weather conditions, as I see it, to get huge creatures. And in the ocean, of course, we have huge creatures…This is where the pleisosauruses seem to be today, and perhaps also this fire-breathing dragon is still down there- very rare, but occasionally there.
[Rev. Walter Lang, Founder, Bible-Science Association]
We seem at least to be at a loss to understand what it is we are asserting or denying when we use … nonanthropomorphic god-talk.
Kai Nielsen, "Empiricism, Theoretical Constructs, and God" Journal of Religion 54:199.
We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.
[Ignatius of Loyola, Spanish founder of the Society of Jesus
[Jesuits], Exercitia spiritualia, 1541]
We should do unto others as we would want them to do unto us. If I were an unborn fetus I would want others to use force to protect me, therefore using force against abortionists is justifiable homocide.
["Pro-Life" doctor killer Paul Hill]
We should not be directing our anger at the AM Hate radio hosts, but at their audience of tens of millions of conservative bigots who keep them in business.
We should scorn the person who would be mean enough to allow his fellow-being to be punished for his deeds. Yet we have a religion in our midst that is founded on this kind of meanness.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun."
There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out."
Note, accordingly, how little it means to say something like "Uranus moves into Aquarius". 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). A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into'."
The shape of a constellation, moreover, is ephemeral. A million years ago our Homo erectus ancestors gazed out nightly at a set of very different constellations. A million years hence, our descendants will see yet other shapes in the sky, and their astrologer (if our species has not grown up and sent them packing long since) will be fabricating their oracles on the basis of a different zodiac."
Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
Richard Dawkins
We still have no adequate theory to describe conditions before the Planck time; consequently, as most physicists will admit, we really have no idea what to say about those conditions (nor, indeed, whether to admit that we should give a realistic interpretation to our models of the universe at, and before, that time). But, in these circumstances, I see no good reason to accept the extrapolation beyond the Planck time which is required in order to arrive at an initial cosmological singularity. What there is good evidence for is the claim that the universe has expanded to its present size from a much smaller early universe; but this claim is quite compatible with the further claim that there was no initial cosmological singularity. (Note, by the way, that a bouncing, or oscillating universe, is not the only possible alternative. There are various other options—e.g. those involving world ensembles and wormholes—which might avoid an ex nihilo origination.)
Graham Oppy, "Reply to Professor Craig" (1995)
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Richard Lewontin
We teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, by the divine assistance promised him in blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith and morals; and that therefore such definitions of the Roman pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church.
[Vatican Council, 24 April 1870]
We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.
[Jack Handey, "Deep Thoughts"]
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
[Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not A Christian"]
We warn the North that every one of the leading abolitionists is agitating the negro slavery question merely as a means to attain their ulterior ends… a surrender to Socialism and Communism — to no private property, no church, no law; to free love, free lands, free women and free children.
[George Fitzhugh, 1857]
We will find you, we will try you, and we will execute you. I mean every word of it.
[Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, at the Aug 8, 1995 U.S. Taxpayers Alliance Banquet in Washington DC, talking about doctors who perform abortions and volunteer escorts]
We will not, therefore, lose our time praying to an imaginary god for things which our own exertions alone can procure.
[Francisco Ferrer]
We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism… we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today…our battle is with Satan himself.
[Jerry Falwell]
We're going to bring back God and the Bible and drive the gods of secular humanism right out of the public schools of America.
Pat Buchanan, at an anti-gay rally in Des Moines, Iowa, February 11, 1996
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
Robert Wilensky
We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.
Pastor Ray Mummert of Dover, PA
We've learned how to move under radar in the cover of the night with shrubbery strapped to our helmets.
[Ralph Reed, executive director of Christian Coalition]
We've literally been inundated since the election [with evangelicals] saying please, please, please crank up the Moral Majority again.
[Jerry Falwell]
We've satisfied our endless needs, And justified our bloody deeds, In the name of Destiny, And in the Name of god
[Eagles,"The Last Resort"]
We
[Catholics] are also under an obligation to keep secrets faithfully. And sometimes the easiest way to fulfill that duty is to say what is false, or to tell a lie.
[Catholic Encyclical X, 195]
Weasling out of work is important to learn; it is what separates humans from animals. Except for weasels.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 118.
Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Stephen Jay Gould
What a queer thing is Christian salvation! Believing in firemen will not save a burning house; believing in doctors will not make one well, but believing in a savior saves men. Fudge!
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
What a theologian feels as true, must be false: one has therein almost a criterion of truth.
[Nietzche, The Anti-Christ, 1889]
What about complex parasites? Did this designer design complex parasites or is that evolution? I mean, you get all the good things and evolutionists get all the bad things.
Michael Ruse in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 35.
What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? 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 can the divine command theorist mean by saying that God is good (and hence would not approve of torture)? In general, to say that something is good is to say that it meets certain relevant standards. A good painting meets aesthetic standards; a good knife is one that cuts well; a good father is one that can be expected to behave in certain specified ways. A good Deity, then, is presumably one whose acts accord with certain standards. This is not to say that creatures set the standards. Of course they do not. It is merely to say that there must be some standards for the expression 'God is good' to have any content. But on the divine command view it seems there must be some standards for the expression 'God is good' to have any content. But on the divine command view it seems that there are no such standards. To say that God is good is apparently to say that God approves of His own acts, or that He wills whatever acts He performs. So, how can the divine command theorist confidently assert that God would not approve of torture since He is good? If God did approve of torture (rape, theft, etc.), He would still be good from the point of view of the divine command theory.
C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 39.
What can we say to a man who tells you that he would rather obey God than men, and that therefore he is sure to go to heaven for butchering you? Even the law is impotent against these attacks of rage; it is like reading a court decree to a raving maniac. These fellows are certain that the holy spirit with which they are filled is above the law, that their enthusiasm is the only law that they must obey.
[Voltaire, 1764]
What Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.
[Heinrich Heine]
What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that.
[George Bernard Shaw]
What good is a beautiful church that serves the spiritual needs to someone sleeping on a steam grate?
[James Felder]
What happens when the same number of people pray for something as pray against it? How does God decide whose prayer to answer? Does the total number of people praying for or against something matter? How about the righteousness of the supplicants? Are positive prayers answered more frequently than negative ones? Does God take the positive ones and Satan the negative? Does the intensity of the praying have any effect on the outcome? Does the length of time one devotes to praying have any effect on the frequency with which one's prayers are answered? Do the words and phrases used in the prayer — either positive or negative — have any bearing on the success rate? Does the nature of the thing or things prayed for have any bearing on the prayer's success rate — either positive or negative prayers? Why or why not??
Robert A. Baker, "Prayer Wars" Skeptical Briefs.
What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? … What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?
Richard Dawkins, biologist (Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, 1991)
What has God revealed to man that has ever helped him get a living?
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false. If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels work! The achievements of theologians don't do anything, don't affect anything, don't mean anything. What makes anyone think that "theology" is a subject at all?
Richard Dawkins (Free Inquiry, Spring 1998 v18)
What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the 'index expurgatorius', the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the guillotine.
[John Adams, letter to John Taylor]
What I conclude is that religion has nothing to do with experience or reason but with deep and irrational needs.
[Richard Taylor, "Will Secularism Survive?", Free Inquiry]
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide on how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
Stephen W. Hawking (Der Spiegel, 1989)
What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism
[Albert Einstein]
What I'm saying is, if God wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could have done a better job.
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 164.
What influence in fact have Christian ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In many instances they have been upholding the thrones of political tyranny. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, does not need the clergy.
James Madison
What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not.
James Madison (from Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, 1785)
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
[Ursula K. LeGuinn, The Day before the Revolution]
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. These 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 (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 193.
What is it that a man may call the greatest things in life?"
- "Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.
(Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic)
What is much more likely to undermine Christian faith is the dogmatic and persistent effort of creationists to present their theory before the public, Christian and non-Christian, as in accord with Scripture and nature, especially when the evidence to the contrary has been presented again and again by competent Christian Scientists.
[Davis A. Young, Creation and the Flood]
What is really happening is that the religious right, as usual, wants to force their will upon the world. It's been happening since Christianity spawned the Crusades and as long as we as a species cling to our monotheistic tenets then it will never ever stop. Anyone with an iota of intelligence understands that a mandated moment of silence is a moment when the religionist can say to the rest of the world, "Look at me. I'm praying to my god. Maybe you should be praying also.
[sgtcyber@datanet.ab.ca (SgtCyber)]
What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.
[H. L. Mencken, "Minority Reports"]
What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world.
Richard Dawkins
What is tolerance? — it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature.
[Voltaire]
What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital.
Richard Dawkins
What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful though, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.
Bertrand Russell, "The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery" (1944) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), pp. 239-40.
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
[George Santayana, Reason in Religion]
What seems so right in the interest of toleration and its cousins-liberty, equality and fraternity-is actually one of the subtlest lies of the 'father of lies.'
["The Southern Baptist Convention and Freemasonry" by James L. Holly, Page 40]
What suggests to non-Evangelical scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary accounts? First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion.
Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again, p. 75.
What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected
[Kurt Vonnegurt, "Slaughterhouse 5"]
What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought that you didn't believe in God?" "I don't," she sobbed, bursting into tears, "but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be.
[Joseph Heller]
What the mind cannot cannot believe the heart can finally never adore.
Bishop John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, (San Fransisco: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 24.
What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.
[Alice Walker, "The Temple of My Familiar"]
What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.
[Bertrand Russell]
What troubles me most about the position of skeptical theists like Alston is not ST1, but rather the inference from ST1 to the conclusion that all probabilistic arguments from evil fail. One is reminded of those philosophers who attack one teleological or cosmological or ontological argument for theism and then conclude that the teleological or the cosmological or the ontological argument fails.
Paul Draper, "The Skeptical Theist" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 176.
What was Carl Sagan's perspective on religion, according to his widow? "Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.
Ann Druyan (Carl Sagan's widow)
What was God doing (in His Time) for an eternity into His past before He Created the Universe Ex Nihilo? God existed by Himself through an Eternity before the Creation without needing a Universe. Why did He suddenly desire to create the Universe?
Peter A. Angeles, The Problem of God: A Short Introduction (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 67.
What was it they said about gods? They wouldn't exist if there weren't people to believe in them? And that applied to everything. Reality was what went on inside people's heads.
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
What we have here is religious bigotry, and it represents the same insidious type of exclusion that I experienced growing up black in Dixie.
[Morgan State prof. Stefan Goodwin, on religious convocation ceremonies, Washington Post, August 17, 1994]
What we have to fight for…is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator.
[Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 125]
What with blowing up clinics, shooting doctors, Andrea Yates’ excuses and the endless terrorists blowing themselves up hither and yon, the truth regarding the cause of the violence is not addressed by anyone at all: Blind faith in interactive Deities.
What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?
Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism" God, Freedom, and Immortality, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 74.
What you are about to hear is God's word to the men of this nation. We are going to war as of tonight. We have divine power — that is our weapon. We will not compromise. Wherever truth is at risk, in the schools or legislature, we are going to contend for it. We will win.
[Bill McCartney, head of Religious Right group "Promise Keepers"]
What you should say to outsiders that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it
[Susan B. Anthony, Susan B. Anthony: a Biography, by Kathleen Barry, New York University Press, 1988, p.310]
What, then, should be our approach in apologetics? It should be something like this: 'My friend, I know Christianity is true because God's Spirit lives in me and assures me that it is true. And you can know it is true, too, because God is knocking at the door of your heart, telling you the same thing. If you are sincerely seeking God, then God will give you assurance that the gospel is true. Now, to try to show you it's true, I'll share with you some arguments and evidence that I really find convincing. But should my arguments seem weak and unconvincing to you, that's my fault, not God's. It only shows that I'm a poor apologist, not that the gospel is untrue. Whatever you think of my arguments, God still loves you and holds you accountable. I'll do my best to present good arguments to you. But ultimately you have to deal, not with arguments, but with God himself.'
William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p. 48.
What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.
Stephen Jay Gould
What's the Christian-bashing all about? Simple- a struggle for the soul of America is under way, a struggle to determine whose views, values, beliefs and standards will serve as the basis of law.
[US Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, Washington Times, June 15, 1995]
What's the point of wearing your favorite rocketship underpants if nobody ever asks to see 'em?
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
What…can we surmise about the likelihood of someone's being caring and generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer? Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have studied that question for decades.
[Alfie Kohn, in "Psychology Today"]
Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: 'Great God, grant that twice two be not four.'
[Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) Russian novelist, writer]
Whatever alleged "truth" is proven by results to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage!
[Infernal Diatribe II:12, Satanic Bible]
Whatever good you would do out of fear of punishment, or hope of reward hereafter, the Atheist would do simply because it is good; and being so, he would receive the far surer and more certain reward, springing from well-doing, which would constitute his pleasure, and promote his happiness.
Ernestine L. Rose, "A Defence of Atheism" (1878, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p. 85.
Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.
[John Fowles, The Aristos]
Whatever tends to prolong the existence of ignorance or to prevent the recognition of knowledge is dangerous to the well-being of the human race.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Whatever the motive, the consequence is that if a reputable scholar breathes so much as a hint of criticism of some detail of current Darwinian theory, the fact is eagerly seized on and blown up out of all proportion. So strong is this eagerness, it is as though there were a powerful amplifier, with a finely tuned microphone selectively listening out for anything that sounds the tiniest bit like opposition tp Darwinism. This is most unfortunate, for serious argument and criticism is a vitally important part of any science, and it would be tragic if scholars felt the need to muzzle themselves because of the microphones. Needless to say the amplifier, though powerful, is not hi-fi: there is plenty of distortion! A scientist who cautiously whispers some slight misgiving about a current nuance of Darwinism is liable to hear his distorted and barely recognizable words booming and echoing through the eagerly waiting loudspeakers.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 251.
whatsoever person or persons withing this Province … shall from henceforth blaspheme God … or shall deny our Saviour Jesus to be the Sonne of God, or shall deny the Holy Trinity, the Father, Sonne and Holy Ghost, or the Godhead of any of the said Three persons of the Trinity or the Unity of the Godhead … shall be punished with death and confiscation or forfeiture of all his or her lands…
[Maryland's "Tolerance Act", 1649, often hailed as the first law for religious "freedom" in the colonies]
When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!
[David Starr Jordan, Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion]
When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect
[Sigmund Freud: The Future of an Illusion]
When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God's sheep and Devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who are damned.
[Robert Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why"]
When a minister says that God will help you, ask him to put up the collateral.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
When any conservative begins whining about Clinton’s sex life, be sure to remind them that both Ronald Reagan and Pat Robertson married pregnant women.
When belief in a god dies, the god dies.
[Harlan Ellison, "Deathbird Stories"]
When christian ministers stand up in their pulpits and say "Let us pray," if they would sometimes vary the invitation and say: Let us laugh, they would do their congregations more good.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
When Christianity gained control of the Roman Empire it suppressed the writings of its critics and even cast them into flames.
Robert L. Wilken, The Christians As the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale, 1984), p. xii.
When confronted with a demand that the universe have a cause, infidels have usually pointed out that God was not much of an explanation. This is true enough, but not really a positive argument. After mechanistic explanation became popular, infidels liked to restrict causality to the chain of causes in an eternal material universe, pointing out that no supernatural cause was then necessary. Plausible, but still rather defensive. Today's skeptic can do better. In all likelihood, the universe is uncaused. It is random. It just is." Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
When God permits horrendous suffering for the sake of some good, if that good is beyond our ken, God will make every effort to be consciously present to us during our period of suffering, will do his best to explain to us why he is permitting us to suffer, and will give us special assurances of his love and concern during the period of the suffering. Since enormous numbers of human beings undergo prolonged, horrendous suffering without being consciously aware of any such divine presence, concern, and explanations, we may conclude that if there is a God, the goods for the sake of which he permits horrendous human suffering are more often than not goods we know of.
William L. Rowe, "The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look" The Evidential Argument from Evil (ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 276.
When he that speaks, and he to whom he speaks, neither of them understand what is meant, that is metaphysics.
[Voltaire]
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President [1861-1865]. From Henry O. Dormann, compiler, The Speaker's Book of Quotations, New York: Ballantine Books, 1987, p. 127.)
When I dream of the perfect religion, I dream of that which is the utmost anti-thesis of Christianity.
Sir Frederick Pheller [19-20th Century Philospher] {1912}
When I get down on my knees, it is not to pray.
[Madonna]
When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man.
[Diogenes]
When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at lat, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure thay had attained a certain 'gnosis,' — had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion.
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Agnosticism" Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays (1889, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1992), p. 162.
When I said during my presidential bid that I would only bring Christians and Jews into the government, I hit a firestorm. `What do you mean?' the media challenged me. `You're not going to bring atheists into the government? How dare you maintain that those who believe in the Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to govern America than Hindus and Muslims?' My simple answer is, `Yes, they are.'
[Pat Robertson, "The New World Order," page 218]
When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
[Oscar Wilde]
When I was a kid in the ghetto, a gang started going around harassing people, so some of the toughest kids formed a gang called The Sharks to stop them. The other gang was called The Jehovah's Witnesses.
[Charles Kosar]
When I wrote this program, I never thought that it would evolve anything more than a variety of treelike shapes. I had hoped for weeping willows, cedars of Lebanon, Lombardy poplars, seaweeds, perhaps deer antlers. Nothing in my biologist's intuition, nothing in my 20 years experience of programming computers, and nothing in my wildest dreams prepared me for what actually emerged on screen. I can't remember exactly when in the sequence it first began to dawn on me that an evolved resemblance to something like an insect was possible. With a wild surmise, I began to breed, generation after generation, from whichever child looked most like an insect. My incredulity grew in parallel with the evolving resemblance…. I still cannot conceal from you my feeling of exultation as I first watched these exquisite creatures emerging before my eyes. I distinctly heard the triumphal opening chords of 'Also Sprach Zarathustra' (the 2001 theme) in my mind. I couldn't eat, and that night 'my' insects swarmed behind my eyelids as I tried to sleep."
My prize would be for a visually appealing world in which the life-forms have a visible, and preferably 3-D, morphology on the computer screen. They must evolve adaptations not just to 'inanimate' factors like the weather (which would produce essentially predictable, not emergent evolution) but to other evolving life forms (which is a recipe for emergent properties).
Richard Dawkins
When man comes to the realization that he is not the "favorite" of God; that he was not specifically created, that the universe was not made for his benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws of nature as all other forms of life, then, and not until then, will he understand that he must rely upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever benefits he is to enjoy; and devote his time and energies to helping himself and his fellow men to meet the exigencies of life and to set about to solve the difficult and intricate problems of living.
[Joseph Lewis, "An Atheist Manifesto"]
When men are hungry roast mutton is better than the lamb that taketh away wrath.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
When one admits that nothing is certain, one must, I think, also add that some things are much more nearly certain than others.
Bertrand Russell, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (ed. Lee Eisler, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), p. 294.
When one area of taxation is reduced, other areas of taxation are increased to make up for it, most always having progressive taxes replaced with regressive ones.
When one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world, and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare with one's blood, one's life, one's intellegence, and one's reason, without ever satisfying them.
[Eliphas Levi]
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
Stephen Jay Gould
When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them.
[Frank Herbert, Dune]
When religion comes in at the door common sense goes out at the window.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
When religion controls government, political liberty dies;and when government controls religion, religious liberty perishes.
[Sen. Sam Ervin]
When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data.
[Henry Morris, Head of Institute for Creation Research]
When the authorities warn you of the dangers of having sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.
Matt Groening
When the church teaches that "confession is good for the soul," it teaches false doctrine; it is only good for the church.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
[Oscar Wilde]
When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
When the people failed to worship one of these gods, or failed to feed and clothe his priests, (which was much the same thing,) he generally visited them with pestilence and famine. Sometimes he allowed some other nation to drag them into slavery — to sell their wives and children; but generally he glutted his vengeance by murdering their firstborn. The priests always did their whole duty, not only in predicting these calamities, but in proving, when they did happen, that they were brought upon the people because they had not given quite enough to them.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
When the people stare at the sky and dream of blessedness, or when they quiver with fear for hell after death, their eyes get blinded so they can't see their own right of primogeniture.
[Gerrard Winstanley]
When the temptation to masturbate is strong, yell "Stop!" to those thoughts as loudly as you can in your mind. Then recite a portion of the Bible or sing a hymn.
[Mormon Guide to Self-Control]
When we describe something as a random process or an event as occurring by chance, there are two very different things that we may have in mind. …[One such concept of chance applies to processes] that are apparently random, but have a deterministic basis. … The process is apparently random because we are ignorant of at least part of the deterministic basis. We use words like chance and random to indicate our ignorance. "We should separate apparently random processes from irreducibly random processes. An irreducibly random process is one that has no deterministic basis. That is, for an irreducibly random process, there is no set of laws of nature that can be applied to a complete description of the initial state of the system to permit the deduction of a description of the outcome.
Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 86.
When we make mistakes they call it evil. When God makes mistakes they call it Nature!
[Jack Nicholson in "The Witches of Eastwick"]
When we read that some minor scientist (usually a skilled technical worker but not a thinker in science) has "found God" somewhere, we are not excited. We know this is only a form of words, meaning only that the scientific worker, turning away from science, has rediscovered the stale old assumption of theology, "There is a God." We find invariably (as we should expect) that there is no satisfactory definition or description or identification or location or proof of a God. "God" is merely a word, whether it is used by a preacher or a mystic in a laboratory.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
When we speak of the Christian religion at it's most rudimentary level we must always be caustious to reserve our estimations as to who and what we are dealing with. You see, were it not for it's folowers, there might have been some value to these Christian virtues. However, with what this dogmatic system has become as a result of it's spokespeople, it is best to steer clear of this bastardized religion.
Gillain Forester [19th Century Scholar] {1886}
When Yahweh your god has settled you in the land you're about to occupy, and driven out many infidels before you…you're to cut them down and exterminate them. You're to make no compromise with them or show them any mercy.
[Deut. 7:1 (KJV)]
When you arrive in a city, summon the bishops, clergy and people, and preach a solemn sermon on faith; then select certain men of good repute to help you in trying the heretics and suspects denounced before your tribunal. All who on examination are found guilty or suspected of heresy must promise to absolutely obey the commands of the Church. If they refuse, you must prosecute them.
[Pope Gregory I, order to the Dominicans on their duties in the Inquisition, 1231]
When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point- of-view is seldom necessary.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
When you know the LORD you have no need for masturbation.
[Brice Wellington, net.fundie.idiot]
When you say you don't find it [the two observed instances of speciation listed above] impressive, that's what Richard Dawkins calls the argument from personal incredulity. My evidence against evolution is that I don't believe it.
Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 25.
When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon…does he, in fact, do anything more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?
[Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) "Systeme de la Nature" (1770)]
Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance. Believing himself to be the slave of God, he imitates his master, and of all tyrants, the worst is a slave in power.
[Robert Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why"]
Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.
Richard Dawkins
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
[Karl Popper]
Whenever I think of how religion started, I picture some frustrated old man making out a list of all the ways he could gain power, until he finally came up with the great solution of constant fear and guilt, then he leaped up and started planning a new wardrobe.
[Steve Blake]
Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern from of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.
Robert A. Wilson (Cosmic Trigger II, 1991)
Whenever religion is involved, terrorists kill more people.
[Dr. Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University, Scotland]
Whenever Republicans are in charge, buying stock in prison contracting and Remington go without saying, but the highest yields are always fortified wines, bottled water and high-end golf carts.
Whenever there are great virtues, it�s a sure sign something�s wrong.
Bertolt Brecht
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
Where are the sons of gods that loved the daughters of men? Where are the nymphs, the goddesses of the winds and waters? Where are the gnomes that lived inside the earth? Where are the goblins that used to play tricks on mortals? Where are the fairies that could blight or bless the human heart? Where are the ghosts that haunted this globe? Where are the witches that flew in and out of the homes of men? Where is the devil that once roamed over the earth? Where are they? Gone with the ignorance that believed in them.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
Where are you homosexuals going to go when we win?
[Kevin Tebedo, Exec. Dir. of religious-right CFV]
Where Christ erecteth his church, the divell in the same church-yarde will have his chappell.
Richard Bancroft
Where do we keep all our chainsaws, Mom?
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Where Galileo was charged with heresy for championing a scientific theory, Newton really was a heretic. He denied the Christian Trinity, and though he believed that Christ had been more than a man, Newton believed him to be subordinate to God the Father. Naturally, he kept these beliefs secret.
Morris, Richard. 1997. Achilles in the Quantum World. New York: Henry Holt & Co., p. 61.
Where horrendous evils are concerned, not only do we not know God's actual reason for permitting them; we cannot even conceive of any plausible candidate sort of reason consistent with worthwhile lives for human participants in them.
Marilyn McCord Adams, "Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God" http://www.faithquest.com/philosophers/adams/horevil.html
Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
[John Morley]
Where knowledge ends, religion begins.
Benjamin Disraeli
Where the cross has been planted only superstitions have grown.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]
Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years with time off for good behavior?
[NY State Senator James Donovan, speaking in support of capital punishment]
Whether or not the statement is analytically true is not as important as the fact that it is a priori true and hence transcendentally true.
[Charles Onstott on alt.atheism]
Whether the 'Christ' they worshipped had been on earth as a man will have been of no interest either to him [Pliny] or to Trajan. What worried them was that Christians were holding meetings which, because of Christian unwillingness to make due obeisance to the emperor, might have been seditious, they were not concerned about whether there was any historical basis to Christian doctrinal niceties.
G.A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996), p. 41.
Whether the Bible is true or false, is of no consequence in comparison with the mental freedom of the race.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Which beginning of time according to our Chronologie, fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of Octob. in the year of the Julian Calender, 710.
[Bishop J. Ussher, dating the creation]
While it cannot be proved retrospectively that any experience of possession, conversion, revelation, or divine ecstasy was merely an epileptic discharge, we must ask how one differentiates "real transcendence" from neuropathies that produce the same extreme realness, profundity, ineffability, and sense of cosmic unity. When accounts of sudden religious conversions in TLEs [temporal-lobe epileptics] are laid alongside the epiphanous revelations of the religious tradition, the parallels are striking. The same is true of the recent spate of alleged UFO abductees. Parsimony alone argues against invoking spirits, demons, or extraterrestrials when natural causes will suffice.
[Barry L. Beyerstein, "Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual Possession", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 3, pg. 255]
While Political Correctness concerns administrative reprimands for publicly expressing various forms of bigotry, Conservative Correctness concerns the click of safeties and jail cell doors for saying unpatriotic, irreligious and naughty things.
While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possesion of the truth, In our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded…if one attempts to assign religion it's place in mans 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]
While the dismantling of objectivity seems to some to be the way towards a liberating political radicalism, to others it allows such unliberating views as the denial that there was (objectively) such an event as the Second World War or the Holocaust…The postmodernist frame of mind…may seem to depend on a cavalier dismissal of the success of science in generating human improvement, an exaggeration of the admitted fallibility of any attempt to gain knowledge in the humane disciplines, and an ignoring of the quite ordinary truth that while human history and law admit of no one final description, they certainly admit of more or less accurate ones…
Simon Blackburn
While utterly discarding all creeds, and denying the truth of all religions, there is neither in my heart nor upon my lips a sneer for the hopeful, loving and tender souls who believe that from all this discord will result a perfect harmony; that every evil will in some mysterious way become a good, and that above and over all there is a being who, in some way, will reclaim and glorify every one of the children of men; but for those who heartlessly try to prove that salvation is almost impossible; that damnation is almost certain; that the highway of the universe leads to hell; who fill life with fear and death with horror; who curse the cradle and mock the tomb, it is impossible to entertain other than feelings of pity, contempt and scorn.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]
Who are beneficiaries of the Court's protection? Members of various minorities including criminals, atheists, homosexuals, flag burners, illegal immigrants (including terrorists), convicts, and pornographers.
[US Presidential candidate Pat Buchahan, Address to the Heritage Foundation, January 29, 1996]
Who are these Swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? … They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and viscious in the American character … I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck Them.
Hunter S. Thompson
Who do you think supplied Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction to use against us in the first place? It sure wasn’t Moonies at a Dylan concert.
Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads?
Hunter S. Thompson
Who is more godless than I, that I may rejoice in his teachings?
[Nietzsche]
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of Christian men? These self-proclaimed spokesmen for God who so boldly assert their chosen status as His messenger of salvation are no different than you or I. Rather they are a bit more eccentric, a bit more arrogant, and most certainly a lot more zealous than the average contemporary thinker.
Norman Rudell [Writer]
Who made who?"
[AC/DC]
Who says lying doesn't get you anywhere? Look at the success of Christianity!
C.Spellman
Who speaks of liberty while the human mind is in chains?
[Francis Wright, speech, Cincinnati, 1828]
Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?
Richard Dawkins
Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?
[John Calvin, citing Ps. 93:1 in his Commentary on Genesis]
Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?
[John Calvin, citing Ps. 93:1 in his Commentary on Genesis]
Who would have guessed only a few weeks after Americans got their $300 a piece tax rebate, they would have spent it all on flags.
Whoever did this (burn down the Margaret Sanger Center) is a hero. I think they are heroes. The Bible commands us to rescue those being dragged to death.
[Nancy O'Brien, Co-Director Project Jericho, 2/23/87]
Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
(Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay)
Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.
[Robert Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why"]
Why be born again when you can just grow up?
Bumper Sticker
Why be born again, when you can just grow up?
Why can't the Jews and Arabs just sit down together and settle this like good Christians?
[Overheard in Congressional debate]
Why did the consensus of Christian churches not only accept these astonishing views but establish them as the only true form of Christian doctrine? . . . these religious debates — questions of the nature of God, or of Christ — simultaneously bear social and political implications that are crucial to the development of Christianity as an institutional religion. In simplest terms, ideas which bear implications contrary to that development come to be labeled as 'heresy'; ideas which implicitly support it become 'orthodox.'
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. xxxvi.
Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?
[Katherine Whitehorn]
Why do you think you're God?" "Because when I pray, I find I'm talking to myself.
[from The Ruling Class]
Why does god cause tornados and train wrecks?
[Crash Test Dummies]
Why does the Vatican have lightning rods?
Why doesn't God behave in such a way as to be worthy of worship?
[Barry O'Grady, bary@it.com.au]
Why don't we teach astrology in the schools? Astrology holds that the course of each human life is determined to a considerable degree by the position of the stars in the sky at the exact moment of the individual's birth. Belief in it, in one variant or another, has probably been held by most of the people on earth. Even today, some universities in India offer degrees in the subject. Yet American believers do not pressure boards of education to add their subject to the curriculum. If belivers in astrology became as well organized as the creationists, it is hard to see how their demands could be withstood.
Garrett Hardin, "Marketing Deception as Truth" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 162.
Why get excited over this latest episode in the long, sad history of American anti-intellectualism? Let me suggest that, as patriotic Americans, we should cringe in embarrassment that, at the dawn of a new, technological millennium, a jurisdiction in our heartland has opted to suppress one of the greatest triumphs of human discovery.
Stephen Jay Gould
Why has a religious turn of mind always a tendancy to narrow and harden the heart?
[Robert Burns]
Why is every utterance of the Pope considered to be worthy of worldwide attention and respect? It's like the fawning reverence that was accorded every banal platitude ever uttered by the late Mother Teresa. But the Pope is not exactly on the cutting edge of world events — or anything else, for that matter. It was only a little over a year ago, in October 1996, that John Paul II announced that the scientific theory of evolution could be said to be valid. That message was received with enthusiastic approval in many circles throughout the world. Warm congratulations were offered to John Paul, just as they had been in 1979. In that year he declared that the Roman Catholic Church had been mistaken when it sentenced a 70-year-old Galileo to house arrest (with threats of the tortures of The Inquisition) for insisting that the Earth orbits the Sun, not vice versa. Mistaken?! No, not mistaken. A mistake is when you slip the wrong key into your front door. The Church's treatment of Galileo, one of the world's few geniuses, was viciously cruel and betrays the unenlightened, progress-impeding attitude that has dominated the Church since its inception. And they were as wrong as it is possible to be.
Judith Hayes, "The Papacy Comes of Age!" The Happy Heretic February 1998
Why is it that almost every human culture yet discovered has found it necessary to believe in an afterlife of some sort, but not a 'before-life?' Why are there so many versions of Heaven, Paradise and The Great Beyond, but almost none about The Great Before …
Judith Hayes, "Where Were You Before You Were You?"
Why is it when we talk to God, we're said to be praying - but when God talks to us, we're schizophrenic?
[Lily Tomlin (b. 1939) American comedy actress]
Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.
Lt Gen William Boykin, speaking of G. W. Bush, New York Times, 17 October 2003
Why me?"
"For the good of the university. For the honour of wizardry. For the sake of the world. For your heart's desire. And I'll freeze you alive if you don't." Rincewind breathed a sigh almost of relief. He wasnt good on bribes, or cajolery, or appeals to his better nature. But threats, now threats were familiar. He knew where he was with threats.
(Terry Pratchett, Sourcery)
Why should an atheist pay more taxes so that a church which he despises should pay no taxes? That's a fair question. How can the apologists for the church exemption answer it?
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
Why should the residence of a preacher be untaxed? Useful citizens must pay taxes on their homes. Yet the Preacher — actually and notoriously the least useful member of the community — lives in a tax-free dwelling.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
[George Bernard Shaw]
Why were these texts buried — and why have they remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned documents, and their burial on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity. The Nag Hammadi texts, and others like them, which circulated at the beginning of the Christian era, were denounced as heresy by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century. We have long known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by other Christians as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote attacking them.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. xviii.
Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only by incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infintesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness…
[Leslie Stephen, "An agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876]
Will The Rapture be like The Night of the Living Dead with freshly arisen rotting Christians bumbling about?
William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt.' … What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
[Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays, 1928]
With her new book Treason, Ann Coulter proves that a parent having a lesbian daughter is something to celebrate in lieu of having a daughter in the skeletal body of a blond Christian slut with a football lodged in her larynx who can't decide whether she is the incarnation of Joe McCarthy or Torquemada.
With its fears and superstitions and prejudices, religion poisons the mind of any one who believes in it — and even the best man, under the influence of religion, cannot reason wholesomely. Atheism, on the contrary, opens the mind to the clean winds of truth and establishes a fresh-air sanity.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of Atheism"]
With most people unbelief in one thing is founded upon blind belief in another.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
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.
Richard Dawkins
With soap, baptism is a good thing.
[Robert G. Ingersoll]
With the deaths of two saints within six days of one another, you would think that the minds of every psychic and astrologer in the world would have been zapped by the rent in the cosmos. But not one, even Princess Di's own personal astrologer who was consulted a few days before the accident, predicted the awesome events of the past week.
Vic Stenger, writing a week after Princess Diana's death
With the judgment of the angels and the sentence of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse and cast out Baruch de Spinoza, the whole of the sacred community assenting, in presence of the sacred books with the six hundred and thirteen precepts written therein, pronouncing against him the malediction wherewith Elisha cursed the children, and all the maledictions written in the Book of the Law. /…/ Let him be accursed by day, and accursed by night; let him be accursed in his lying down, and accursed in his rising up; accursed in going out and accursed in coming in. May the Lord never more pardon or acknowledge him; may the wrath and displeasure of the Lord burn henceforth against this man, load him with all the curses written in the Book of the Law, and blot out his name from under the sky.
[excommunication of Spinoza, 27 July 1656, quoted by Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy; also George Seldes, The Great Quotations, 1983]
With the Virgin Mary's image appearing in churches and auto parts stores all over the country this holiday season, it was bound to happen. Now Dan Quayle has turned up in the bathroom sink of Horschmeyer's Philly Cheesesteak Parlor in El Cerrito. … The eerie manifestation was first spotted last Tuesday by Elvira Banks, 35, the establishment's pickled tomato slicer. 'I recognized him right away,' Miss Banks, a past president of the El Cerrito Dan Quayle Fan Club, told reporters. … The mysterious image in the sink bowl looks like a large brown stain. It surrounds the drain, which Miss Banks insists is 'the vice president's mouth opened in a call to all Americans to support the president in the current Middle East crisis.' … So far, there has been no scientific explanation of the phenomenon. The closest anyone has come was the admission by janitor 'Foggy' Phelps that he had poured a cup of the parlor's coffee in the sink the night before the image was first seen. 'I guess I forgot to rinse it down,' he said.
[Arthur Hoppe, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 December 1990]
Without cultural sanction, most or all our religious beliefs and rituals would fall into the domain of mental disturbance
[John F. Schumaker, "Corruption of Reality, Unified Theory of Religion, Hypnosis and Psychotherapy"]
Without the intervention of the civil authority what would our percepts become?- Platonic laws.
[Melanchthon, as quoted in Frans Funck-Brentan, Luther (London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd. 1939) P. 260]
Woman's world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.
[Adolph Hitler, quoted in Lucy Komisar, The New Feminism]
Women have babies and men provide the support. If you don't like the way we're made you've got to take it up with God.
[Phyllis Schlafly, hypocrite who has had a successful business career and run for public office, who would apparently deny that to other women]
Women should unite upon a platform of opposition to the teaching and aim of that ever most unscrupulous enemy of freedom — the Church.
Matilda Joslyn Gage, "" (1890, Women Without Superstition ed. Annie Laurie Gaylor, Madison, WI: FFRF, 1997), p.
Words are the litmus paper of the minds. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say "Enter", don't stop to pack.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Worm 6:9 Our father who are'nt in heaven, Hollow be thy name. Thy kingdom dead, thy will be read. On earth as if there were a heaven. Give us this day our daily dream and deliver us from reality. for thine is the falsehood, the corruption and the Horror forever. Hy-men
Christian D. Seaver, "The Book of Worm"
Wormwood : Calvin, how about you?
Calvin : Hard to say ma'am. I think my cerebellum just fused.
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
Worship the gods as if they were present.
[Motto inscribed on door of Chinese temple]
Would raise a glass of champagne, but I don't drink… won't thank the great Mojo since I'm an atheist. But there's always chocolate.
[J. Michael Straczynski]
Would you sing 'Krishna bless America' or pledge allegience to 'One nation under Allah'? If not, would that make you unpatriotic?
[Chris Lee]
Would you tax God?" asks a defender of church tax exemption. Well, if there were a God he should be able to pay his own way and support his own business. If not, then he should do like other business men and close up shop.
[E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life"]
Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dolars, the best way would be to start his own religion.
[Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, 1949, then just a writer]
Xander: "Giles lived for school. He's actually still bitter that there are only twelve grades."
Buffy: "He probably sat in math class thinking, 'There should be more math. This could be mathier.'"
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Xianity HAD to invent hell. The smarter Jews of the time were beginning to figure out what it would be like to spend eternity with religious fanatics, and the Xians needed to invent someplace worse. They failed.
[Brent Yaciw, 1995]
Xtian (at crucifixion): "<snif> It's a shame he has to die" Jesus (shouting from cross): "Well maybe I wouldn't have to die if somebody would get a LADDER and a pair of PLIERS!!"
[Kinison, 0:0]
Y.T. is supposed to be on her way to a Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates franchise. If she screws up this delivery, that means she's double-crossing God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of obedience.
[Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash]
Yekaterinburg, Russia. Three-quarters of a century after Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by Bolsheviks in this Ural Mountain city, people are flocking to the site of the killings, drawn by reports of miraculous cures… A drive is under way to build an imposing cathedral in an empty field near the execution site, where a second cross and a small wooden chapel already have been constructed.
[James P. Gallagher, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Examiner, 29 August 1993]
Yes God has spoken, and He has not stuttered. The God of truth has given us the Word of Truth, and it does not contain any untruth in it. The Bible is the unerring Word of God. "Inspiration includes not only all that the Bible explicitly teaches, but also everything the Bible touches. This is true whether the Bible is touching upon history, science, or mathematics. Whatever the Bible declares, is true — whether it is a major point or a minor point.
Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, When Critics Ask, pp.12-13.
Yet Robertson fails to follow up the implications of what he has written about moral decline. If Americans are Christian — in fact, if they are by dint of church membership more Christian than they were a hundred years ago, and vastly more Christian than they were in the eighteenth century — then how do we explain the decline of religiously based morality?
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), pp. 155-56.
Yet scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects. And statistical analysis eliminates the suspicion (or at least measures the likelihood) that the apparent effect might have happened by chance alone.
Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the $740,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe. Why don't the television editors insist on some equivalently rigorous test? Could it be that they believe the alleged paranormal powers would evaporate and bang go the ratings?
Richard Dawkins
Yet the final indictment against the television decision-makers is more profound and more serious. Their recent splurge of paranormalism debauches true science and undermines the efforts of their own excellent science departments. The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans. The public appetite for wonder can be fed, through the powerful medium of television, without compromising the principles of honesty and reason.
Richard Dawkins
You [Behe] read a quote and you pretended it meant something else. The quote you that you read was: 'Mutations in the early stage are less likely to survive.' Not impossible. And then you pretended to say that it meant that they couldn't survive. … The fact that something is less likely does not rule it out. I agree with that, Alberts would agree with that, and I think everyone in the audience would agree with it.
Ken Miller in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 26.
You are going to see again the child about which you read in the Terrible Judgment, that it was condemned to hell. See! it is a pitiful sight. The little child is in this red hot oven. Hear the fire! It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. You can see on the face of this little child what you see on the faces of all in hell despair, desperate and horrible… This child committed very bad mortal sins, knowing well the harm of what it was doing, and knowing that hell would be the punishment. God was very good to this child. Very likely God saw that this child would get worse and worse, and would never repent, and so it would have to be punished much more in hell. So God, in His mercy, called it out of the world in its early childhood.
[from Tracts for Spiritual Reading, an officially approved Catholic Children's book. In his Approbation, William Meagher, Vicar-General of Dublin, states "I have carefully read over this Little Volume for Children and have found nothing whatever in it contrary to the doctrines of the Holy Faith; but on the contrary, a great deal to charm, instruct and edify the youthful classes for whose benefit it has been written."]
You are the devil's gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man.
[Tertullian, De Culta Feminarum 1.1, on women]
You call me a victim of insanity, whilst you claim to be an authority governed by the hand of God. The main difference between you and I is that I don't promote my illness.
Elias Nichols 1821 (Nichols was imprisoned in a mental institution after he was caught desecrating a Christian monument. Upon his arrest, he claimed he was being harrassed by Christian zealots who tried to convert him on a number of occasions.)
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill; I will choose a path that's clear- I will choose Free Will.
[Rush, "Free Will"]
You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.
Oliver Goldsmith
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
[Anne Lamott]
You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.
Hunter S. Thompson
You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.
[Carl Sagan]
You can't kill the truth…Actually you can kill the truth, but it always comes back to haunt you
Sheridan, Babylon 5.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
You cannot stuff your minds with the lives of saints and grow good on the stuffing.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911]
You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.
Richard Dawkins
You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.
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
You don't believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of your works seems to be a quest for God." "Yes, in a way—a quest for ultimate values, whatever they are. My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents…
[Arthur C. Clarke, in Playboy interview with Ken Kelly, 1986, from Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography by Neil McAleer, Contemporary Books, 1992]
You don't have to be a scientist - you don't have to play the bunsen burner - in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.
Richard Dawkins
You don't need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds.
Robert A. Wilson (Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, 1994)
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. 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 (Why I Am Not a Christian)
You have no right to erect your toll-gate upon the highways of thought.
[Robert G. Ingersoll, The Ghosts]
You have picked a few squabbles with evolution, but you haven't even suggested for a moment what the mechanism is with which you would replace it.
Barry Lynn in "Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation" Firing Line, 4 December 1997, p. 35.
You know what we need, Hobbes? We need an attitude. Yeah, you can't be cool if you don't have an attitude.
Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
You know, it seems to me that if one were to take the sex out of religion, there might actually be enough reasonable content in it to have a look.
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
[Aldous Huxley]
You read the Bible in your own special ways you're fond of quoting certain things it says Mouth full of righteousness and wrath from above When do we hear about forgiveness and love?
[Bruce Cockburn, "Gospel of Bondage"]
You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.
[Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, January 14, 1991]
You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life - all living things- is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. 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. And that is what is so exciting for me.
Richard Dawkins
You see, one thing is, 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 uncertainty about different things, but I am 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 an answer. I don't feel frightened 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 P. Feynman]
You see, the religious people — most of them — really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition.
Sol Hadden in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 285.
You sir, are the one who is an affront to the Lord. I trust He is attuned to you at this very moment, His fists clenched in anger for how you have represented His word. With that, I take leave of your clergy, and can only pray that you will see the ills of your ways. It is you who have given the unbeliever a more firm leg to stand upon.
Jules Vernon-Renquist [18th Century Theologian.] {1794} (Renquist was speaking to a Christian clergyman after a debate over Christian ideology)
You want to see some serious flag waving patriotism? Watch a clip of one of Hitler’s Nuremberg Rallies!
You who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?
[Friedrich Nietzsche, addressing anti-semitic Christians]
You will do me the justice to remember that I have always supported the right of every man to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right makes a slave of himself to present opinion because he precludes himself the right of changing it. The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
You will find men like him in all of the world's religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
[Arthur C. Clarke, "Childhood's End"]
You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religiosity of the naive man. For the latter, God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands, so to speak, in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe. But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation… There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection… It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.
[Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934]
You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of the Church, Rome has always favored the doctrine which most completely subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason.
[Voltaire]
You've got to put in your pew time and come by your disdain for religion honestly, like us.
[Doonsbury cartoon]
Your article on the wiles of the creationists states that in Alabama all biology texts must now carry stickers advising the reader that evolution is an 'unproven belief' and 'should (only) be considered a theory.' One assumes, in the interests of fair play, that the creationists similarly insist that these stickers be affixed to Bibles.
John R. Harris, Letter to the Editor, L.A. Times
Your DNA may be destined to mingle with mine. Salutations!
Richard Dawkins
YOUR PETITIONERS ARE ATHEISTS and they define their life-style as follows. An Atheist loves himself and his fellowman instead of a god. An Atheist knows that heaven is something for which we should work now — here on earth — for all men together to enjoy. An Atheist thinks that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue, and enjoy it. An Atheist thinks that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellowman can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment. Therefore, he seeks to know himself and his fellowman rather than to know a god. An Atheist knows that a hospital should be build instead of a church An Atheist knows that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man to understand and love man. He wants an ethical way of life. He knows that we cannot rely on a god nor channel action into prayer nor hope for an end to troubles in the hereafter. He knows that we are our brother's keeper and keepers of our lives; that we are responsibile persons, that the job is here and the time is now.
[Madalyn Murray (later O'Hair), preamble to Murray v. Curlett, April 27, 1961]
Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.
[Zarathustra, in Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra]
Your sweet little book is a bizarre collection of out-of-context quotations, misquotations, misleading quotations, non sequiturs, errors of fact and just about every other dirty intellectual trick known to man.
[Tim O'Neill, on the JW's anti-evolution book]