"Something to think about" archive
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Note: The following quotes got chosen for the message and not for historical purposes. Unlike other areas in the Freethinkers site, no one here has thoroughly checked the sources. If you wish to use these quotes as reliable sources, please research them for accuracy, especially the quotes without citations. Just to keep you on your toes, you'll see a few colorful characters making brilliant and noteworthy statements. Ed.
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
Fuck religion, even the Bible tells you you're all sheep. Did you ever stop to think what that meant?
--Ben Sanger
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
--Napoleon
Distilled from an enormous mass of data in half a dozen disciplines, the conclusion emerges that the traits supposedly differentiating distinct racial types—skin color, hair texture, nostril size, eye shape—are, both literally and figuratively, superficial. They constitute surface adaptations to climatic differences rather than thoroughgoing distinctions in basic qualities and they involve "most likely only a small bunch of genes." (p. 13). Nor do these adaptations occur in sharply defined types but rather they vary across the world along many gradients. Despite the various visible and invisible differences among groups, the genetic similarities among today's billions of descendants of those ancient Africans outweigh the surface differences so overwhelmingly that genetically "homogeneous races do not exist."
--Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (Genes, Peoples, and Languages)
I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
--James Buchanan
The other animals hated Moses because he told tales and did no work, but some of them believed in Sugarcandy Mountain, and the pigs had to argue very hard to convince them that there was no such place.
--Animal Farm, George Orwell
We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.
--Barack Obama (Obama in a Turkey press conference, 2009)
In a flat universe the total energy of the universe is precisely zero. Because gravity can have negative energy so the negative energy of gravity balances out the positive energy of matter. What's so beautiful about a universe with a total energy of zero? Only such a universe can begin from nothing. . . the laws of physics allow the universe to begin from nothing. You don't need a deity. You have nothing, zero total energy, and quantum fluctuations can produce a universe.
--Lawrence Krauss (A Universe From Nothing)
There is a direct relationship between warfare and religion.
--Malcolm Potts (Ask a Scientist: Sex and War)
If science disappeared from human memory, we would soon be living in caves again. If theology disappeared from human memory, no one would notice.
--Terry Sanderson (Theology – truly a naked emperor)
Almost every week, I go and debate with spokesmen of religious faith. Invariably and without exception, they inform me that without a belief in supernatural authority I would have no basis for my morality. Yet here is an ancient Christian church that deals in awful certainties when it comes to outright condemnation of sins like divorce, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality between consenting adults. For these offenses there is no forgiveness, and moral absolutism is invoked. Yet let the subject be the rape and torture of defenseless children, and at once every kind of wiggle room and excuse-making is invoked. What can one say of a church that finds so much latitude for a crime so ghastly that no morally normal person can even think of it without shuddering?
--Christopher Hitchens (Tear Down That Wall)
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here today.
--Lawrence Krauss (A Universe From Nothing)
The Bible is a pretty rotten guide as to how we should treat each other.
--Stephen Pinker (The Stuff of Steven Pinker: Language, Dignity, and Thought)
Race is a social concept, not a scientific one.
--Craig Venter
Had Christianity not interrupted the intellectual advance of mankind and put the progress of science on hold for a thousand years, the Scientific Revolution might have occurred a thousand years ago, and our science and technology today would be a thousand years more advanced.
--Richard Carrier, PhD (The Christian Delusion)
Just because nobody complains doesn't mean all parachutes are perfect.
--Benny Hill
"Always" and "never" are two words you should always remember never to use.
--M. Kendig (Wendell Johnson)
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
--Jeff Burroughs
Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.
--Albert Szent-Gyorgi
Prayer has no place in public school, just like facts have no place in organized religion.
--Superintendent Chalmers
What do you call a man who knowingly allows a malevolent individual to prey on children? What term can be coined for a man who