"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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
--Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)
[R]eligious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable.
--Daniel Dennett (Is religion a threat to rationality and science?)
If Jesus were alive today, he'd probably be an atheist.
--Richard Dawkins
Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.
--Steven Weinberg (The Atheism Tapes)
The purpose of education is actually not to validate ignorance, but to overcome it.
--Lawrence Krauss, physicist (discussion with Richard Dawkins)
If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges - mixed blessings, in fact - has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.
--Daniel Dennett (Is religion a threat to rationality and science?)
When the power of love overpowers the love of power, we will know peace.
--Jimi Hendrix
The inspiration of the bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it.
--Robert G. Ingersoll
We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc.
--Julian Huxley
It used to be the case that we tended to excuse drunk drivers when they crashed because they weren't entirely in control of their faculties at the time, but now we have wisely inverted that judgment, holding drunk drivers doubly culpable for putting themselves in that irresponsible position in the first place. It is high time we inverted the public attitude about religion as well, finding all socially destructive acts of religious passion shameful, not honourable, and holding those who abet them - the preachers and other apologists for religious zeal - as culpable as the bartenders and negligent hosts who usher dangerous drivers on to the highways. Our motto should be: Friends don't let friends steer their lives by religion.
--Daniel Dennett (Is religion a threat to rationality and science?)
Mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields … galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars … The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent and hostile zoo … the universe wants to kill us all.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist
We don’t know the final laws yet, but as far as we have been able to see, they are utterly impersonal and quite without any special role for life.
--Steven Weinberg
The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.
--Lawrence Krauss, physicist (discussion with Richard Dawkins)
A person in a uniform is merely an extension of another person's will.
--Philip Slater
Religion is like farting: we like our own but hate everyone elses.
--Homer Simpson
The laws of evolution can also determine the initial state. The universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing... we think we have solved the mystery of creation.
--Stephen Hawking
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.
–Julia Ward Howe
To be a pacifist regarding war, you must be an activist against religion.
--Erik Victory
During my recent trip to Iraq, just before the latest outbreak of violence, a senior U.S. military officer told me that when he asked an Iraqi official, “Why is it that we’re using our U.S. dollars to pay your people to clean up your towns instead of you using your funds?”, the Iraqi replied, “As long as you are willing to pay for the clean-up, why should we do it?”
--Sen. Carl Levin (in his statement in the Senate Hearing with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, 8 Apr. 08)
Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of the astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.
--Carl Sagan
If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
--Steve Allen
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.
--Emo Philips
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
--Victor Hugo
Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of "inspiration." It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge that is to say, of science. When man becomes great and grand enough to admit that all have equal rights; when thought is untrammeled; when worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellowmen, then, and not until then, will the world be civilized."
--Source: Reply to questions from the Indiannapolis clergy, printed in "The Iconoclast", Indiannapolis Indiana
Religion is the one place where people are honored for their ignorance.
--Ignots Pistachio
Either by designer you have something particular in mind, a god who is benevolent or jealous, or humorous, or you have nothing in mind. If you have nothing in mind, lets not talk about it, and if you have something in mind, then the question arises: well why is that true? So I don't see that having a designer puts us at rest. I think we're in the tragic position of not being able to understand, at the deepest possible level, why things are the way they are, and we'll just have to live with that. But saying, well, there's a designer doesn't settle it. It doesn't help.
--Steven Weinberg (The Atheism Tapes)
Religion may demark how far we have come. The point is not to free religion of encumberances, but to free ourselves of the condition which makes religion possible.
--Christopher Elliot Gray
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
--Arthur C. Clarke
[I]t is the least secure societies that tend to be most fundamentalist.
--David Sloan Wilson (Where angels no longer fear to tread)
The war in Iraq might be remembered as one of the five biggest blunders in history.
--Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator
And on that Friday, the people wept with joy at the revelation that Christ, that irritating little bastard, was about to die on the cross. And they felt Good that day, so they called it Good Friday. Amen.
--John 18:41 (a discovered lost verse of the Bible)
I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.
--Arthur C. Clarke, Address to US Congress, 1975
The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and ironically, the more real.
--Lucian Freud
If you really believe that death leads to eternal bliss then why are you wearing a seat belt?
--Doug Stanhope
Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.
--David Chalmers
What Christians love to call "New Atheism" is not new at all. It only seems new to them because atheism has been suppressed so long from their lives that they feel shocked to discover that lots of people disagree with them, people who do not own beliefs of gods and superstitions.
--Ignots Pistachio
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."
Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there. How can anything creative, anything vital, useful and beautiful come from the poor in spirit? The idea conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the teachings of Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this virtue by reward and punishment. Every intelligent being realizes that our worst curse is the poverty of the spirit; that it is productive of all evil and misery, of all the injustice and crimes in the world. Every one knows that nothing good ever came or can come of the poor in spirit; surely never liberty, justice, or equality.
--Emma Goldman (The Failure of Christianity)
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 on pseudoscience
Even wild beasts are not as ferocious as these Christians in their hatred for one another.
--Ammianus, 4th century Roman historian
Religion will die out when we stop worrying about death.
--Christopher Hitchens (Christmas with Christopher Hitchens)
I am a little baffled as to why it is called the "New Atheism." There is a very long tradition of free thinking, and the arguments made against religion tend to be the same but made over and over again. But I think what has happened is that there have been a number of good, articulate books--Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Sam Harris, and so on. What they have discovered to their own great surprise is that in the United States, and right across the South too, there are an enormous number of people who also think this way. I don't think they have suddenly been persuaded by this rash of books--the feelings were there anyway--but they didn't have a voice, they didn't have a focus. When Hitchens took his book across the Bible Belt and debated with Baptist ministers in churches, there were huge audiences, most of whom, it seems, from when they spoke to him afterwards, were somewhat irritated that the place in the United States that they lived in was called the Bible Belt. I think there was something there that people had not taken into account. Quite heartening really, given that America is meant to be a secular republic with a strong tradition of upholding all freedom of thought.
--Ian McEwan (in an interview with The New Republic)
The belief in God is not therefore based on the perception of design in nature. Belief in design in nature is based upon the belief in God. Things are as they are whether there is a God or not. Logically, to believe in design one must start with God. He, or it, is not a conclusion but a datum. You may begin by assuming a creator, and then say he did this or that; but you cannot logically say that because certain things exist, therefore there is a God who made them. God is an assumption, not a conclusion. And it is an assumption that explains nothing.
--Chapman Cohen (Deity And Design)
Evil never feels safe unless it wears the mask of divinity.
--Walter Wink
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 to many things of great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by so doing 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. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
--Bertrand Russell (from the introduction to "History of Western Philosophy")
There are, of course, many sins one can commit in the eyes of religion. Among the greatest is the sin of having an original thought. Religion disapproves of original thought the way Dracula disapproves of sunlight.
--Pat Condell
So you discard the old testament? But not the new? You can't have it both ways, all or none. You can't pick and choose what to believe in. Well, you can, but then that makes it basically your own religion, and by definition that makes it your own imagination.
--nick260682
Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of the people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindoos; Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other.
--Emma Goldman (The Philosophy of Atheism)
To the believers it is true.
To the wise it is false.
To the leaders it is useful.
--Senaca, on religion
Faith and knowledge are related as the two scales of balance; when the one goes up, the other goes down. . . . The power of religious dogma, when inculcated early, is such as to stifle conscience, compassion, and finally every feeling of humanity. . . . For, as you know, religions are like glow worms; they shine only when it's dark. A certain amount of ignorance is the condition of all religions, the element in which alone they can exist.
--Arthur Schopenhauer (Parerga and Paralipomena,1851)
You know, this war is so fucking illegal.
--SPC Pat Tillman
Don't get me wrong. I’m not saying religion doesn’t have its uses. Personally I turn to it whenever I want my intelligence insulted. And the holy scriptures come in very handy when I need to justify behaviour I’m ashamed of.
--Pat Condell
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.
--Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man "Knowledge or Certainty")
The intellectual freedom of Europe died with the establishment of the Christian Church. Bible in hand, the Church met every new idea with a "Thus saith the Lord." On the ruins of the ancient civilisation, she placed the flag on an interested dogmatism, and opened one of the most hideous chapters in the history of mankind. Enquiry was forbidden, freedom of speech was taboo, a premium was offered for cowardice and hypocrisy, a tax was placed upon intellectual sincerity. Intolerance became a virtue and persecution a habit.
--Chapman Cohen (The Meaning and Value of Freethought)
If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests.
--Baron d'Holbach
The Bible has been used for centuries by Christians as a weapon of control. To read it literally is to believe in a three-tiered universe, to condone slavery, to treat women as inferior creatures, to believe that sickness is caused by God's punishment and that mental disease and epilepsy are caused by demonic possession. When someone tells me that they believe the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God, I always ask, 'Have you ever read it'?--Bishop John Shelby Spong
Those who know, know-- and those who know not will simply not believe.
--Robert Anton Wilson (email to the universe)
We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient - that we are only 6 percent of the world's population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind; that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity; and therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.--John F. Kennedy
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
--Charles Darwin
Certain ideals that are prominent elsewhere are rather conspicuously absent from the synoptic gospels. These include beauty, truth, knowledge, and reason...
--Richard Robinson (as quoted from Christopher Hitchens', The Portable Atheist)
A conservative government is organized hypocrisy.
--Benjamin Disraeli
Never can Christianity, under whatever mask it may appear -- be it New Liberalism, Spiritualism, Christian Science, New Thought, or a thousand and one other forms of hysteria and neurasthenia -- bring us relief from the terrible pressure of conditions, the weight of poverty, the horrors of our iniquitous system. Christianity is the conspiracy of ignorance against reason, of darkness against light, of submission and slavery against independence and freedom; of the denial of strength and beauty, against the affirmation of the joy and glory of life.
--Emma Goldman (The Failure of Christianity)
Considerable progress was made in the old Greek and Roman civilisations in the way of establishing freedom of thought. Neither had anything in the shape of a sacred book warning men not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, and, in Greece particularly, every question of religion, ethics, science and philosophy was discussed with the freedom that Europe subsequently lost and has never altogether regained. Indeed if it were possible to revive an Athenian of, say, the time of Socrates and place him in the centre of Europe at any date from the 5th to the 16th century, and if he had seen the prison, the stake and the torture chamber being used to prevent criticisms of religion, he would have thought that the world had been overtaken with an epidemic of insanity.
--Chapman Cohen (The Meaning and Value of Freethought)
The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.
--Samuel P. Huntington
Religion also flatters our solipsism, and our selfishness, and our self-centeredness, while pretending to teach us to be modest. That's the joke of it. By pretending to say, "Be modest and humble," it promotes the most fantastic arrogance and self-centeredness and conceit.
--Christopher Hitchens (Christmas with Christopher Hitchens)
I have far more reason to blame Stalin's killings on Christianity than on atheism. Why? Because Stalin's education and upbringing came from Christianity and atheism has nothing at all to do with morality or immorality. Atheism doesn't produce right and wrong choices. Atheism simply means an absence of a belief in gods. Period. However, Stalin had to get his morality (or immorality) from somewhere, and where else except Christianity could he have gotten it? Stalin grew up as a Christian. He even went to a seminary! But since I don't have direct evidence that his former Christianity caused his atrocities, I should not make the claim. I do, however, have some evidence that his immoral actions resulted from his paranoia. But to blame Stalin's actions on atheism has no bases from evidence at all. At all.
--Ignots Pistachio
Scientology and all the other cults are one-dimensional, and we live in a three-dimensional world. Cults are as dangerous as drugs. They commit the highest crime: the rape of the soul.
--L. Ron Hubbard Jr. (the son of the founder of Scientology)
About the gods I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist or what they are to look at. Many things prevent my knowing. Among others, the fact that they are never seen.
--Protagoras (Essay on the Gods, 5th Century B.C.E.)
Had there been a Lunatic Asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.
--Havelock Ellis (Impression and Comments)
If ignorance of Nature gave birth to gods, then knowledge of Nature is calculated to destroy them.
--Baron d'Holbach
The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.
--Emma Goldman (The Failure of Christianity)
If, as the true believers claim, the word 'gospel' means good news, then the good news for me is that there is no gospel, other than what I can define for myself, by observation and conscience. As a freethinking human being, I have come not to favor or fear religion, but to face and fight it as an impediment to civilized advancement.
--Steve Benson (From Latter-Day Saint to Latter Day Ain't)
My 'morals' were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against dancing I rebelled. By the time of graduation I was still a 'believer' in orthodox religion, but had strong questions which were encouraged at Harvard. In Germany I became a freethinker and when I came to teach at an orthodox Methodist Negro school I was soon regarded with suspicion, especially when I refused to lead the students in public prayer. When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer, . . . I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.
--W.E.B. Du Bois (from The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois)
Is not the Church to-day a masculine hierarchy, with a female constituency, which holds woman in Bible lands in silence and in subjection? No institution in modern civilization is so tyrannical and so unjust to woman as is the Christian Church. It demands everything from her and gives her nothing in return.
--Josephine K. Henry (letter responding to Frances Willard's praise of the bible)
Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.
--James Russell Lowell (Literary Essays, Witchcraft)
. . . the mysteries, on belief in which theology would hang the destinies of mankind, are cunningly devised fables whose origin and growth are traceable to the age of Ignorance, the mother of credulity.
--Edward Clodd
Isn’t it amazing how self-pitying and self-aggrandizing the religious freaks in this country are? It’s not enough that they can make straight-faced professions of “faith” at election times and impose their language on everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the currency. It’s not enough that they can claim tax exemption and even subsidy for anything “faith-based.” It’s that when they are even slightly criticized for their absurd opinions, they can squeal as if being martyred and act as if they are truly being persecuted.
--Christopher Hitchens
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 (from "An Outline in Intellectual Rubbish," Unpopular Essays,1950)
Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value.
--Ayn Rand (character John Galt in Atlas Shrugged,1957)
...the ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs.
--F.A. Hayek
Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiment in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy which has marked the present age would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination, so far that we should never again see their religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.
--George Washington (letter to Sir Edward Newenham, Oct. 20, 1792)
. . . Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws. The ever-sleepless sea in its bed, crying out 'How long?' to Time; million-formed and never motionless flame; the contemplation of these two aspects alone, affords me sufficient food for ten spans of my expected lifetime. It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.
--Zora Neale Hurston ("Religion," from Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942)
[N]ow at least, in our immediate day, we hear a Pope saying slave trading is wrong, and see him sending an expedition to Africa to stop it. The texts remain; it is the practice that has changed. Why? Because the world has corrected the Bible. The Church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession--and take the credit of the correction. As she will presently do in this instance.
--Mark Twain (Europe and Elsewhere, 1923)
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
--Bertrand Russell
It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality.
--Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789)
Compared with Socrates and Bruno, with the great martyrs of Russia, with the Chicago Anarchists, Francisco Ferrer, and unnumbered others, Christ cuts a poor figure indeed. Compared with the delicate, frail Spiridonova who underwent the most terrible tortures, the most horrible indignities, without losing faith in herself or her cause, Jesus is a veritable nonentity. They stood their ground and faced their executioners with unflinching determination, and though they, too, died for the people, they asked nothing in return for their great sacrifice.
--Emma Goldman (The Failure of Christianity)
Since genetic diversity roughly correlates with time available for evolutionary change, genetic variety among Africans alone exceeds the sum total of genetic diversity for everyone else in the rest of the world combined! How, therefore, can we lump "African blacks" together as a single group, and imbue them with traits either favorable or unfavorable, when they represent more evolutionary space and more genetic variation than we find in all non-African people in all the rest of the world?
--Stepthen Jay Gould (I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History)
You see, these misguided creatures [the Christians] start with the general conviction that they are immortal for all time, which explains the contempt of death and voluntary self-devotion which are so common among them; and then it was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws. All this they take quite on trust, with the result that they despise all worldly goods alike, regarding them merely as common property. Now an adroit, unscrupulous fellow, who has seen the world, has only to get among these simple souls, and his fortune is pretty soon made; he plays with them.
--Lucian (The Death of Peregrinus, circa 165 C.E.)
Interestingly, every practicing religious person out there only seems to refer to their own religion in the debate. There's never any mention of all the others. My whole take on the situation is that while every religion claims to be the truthful one, not every one can be. Thus, they all must be a fraud.
--Creeper Rangoon
It is a fine thing to face machine guns for immortality and a medal, but isn't is a fine thing too, to face calumny, injustice and loneliness for the truth which makes men free?
--H. L. Mencken
Historically, freethought has become identified with the rejection of religious doctrines. This is because it is from the side of religion that the impulse to intolerance has come. Human society is born in the shadow of religious fear, and in that stage the suppression of heresy is a sacred social duty. Then comes the rise of a priesthood, and the independent thinker is met with punishment in this world and the threat of eternal damnation hereafter. Even to-day it is from the religious side that the greatest danger to freedom of thought comes. Religion is the last thing man will civilise.
--Chapman Cohen (The Meaning and Value of Freethought)
Priests should be held accountable for their prayerful success rate just as any CEO of a corporation holds responsibility for his or her performance. After paying tithing fees for years, Christians might be shocked to discover the dismal performance record of prayer.--Ignots Pistachio
The point I'm making is that not only is there no evidence that atheists do, as a matter of fact, kill in the name of atheism, it would not be rational for anybody to do so whereas it would be very easy to be rational to kill in the name of religion.
--Richard Dawkins (at AAI 07)
There is, then, nothing mysterious about the fact of morality. There is no more need for supernaturalism here than there is room for it in any of the arts and sciences. Morality is a natural fact; it is not created by the formulation of "laws"; these only express its existence and our sense of value. The moral feeling creates the moral law; not the other way about. Morality has nothing to do with God; it has nothing to do with a future life. Its sphere of application and operation is in this world; its authority is derived from the common sense of mankind and is born of the necessities of corporate life. In this matter, as in others, man is thrown back upon himself and if the process of development is a slow one there is the comforting reflection that the growth of knowledge and of understanding has placed within our reach the power to make human life a far greater and better thing. If we will!!
--Chapman Cohen (Morality Without God)
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?
--Ayn Rand
Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.
--Emma Goldman (The Failure of Christianity)
As a non-believer, who do I give thanks to on Thanksgiving day? I give thanks to my parents, friends, and associates, but never to imaginary gods who have yet to produce a single benifit to mankind.
--Ignots Pistachio
Even if Hitler and Stalin were atheists, they didn't do their terrible deeds in the name of their atheism anymore than they did them in the name of their moustaches. But I want to make an additional point. It's extremely hard to think of any rational person killing in the name of atheism, but it's very easy to think of a rational person killing in the name of religion. How could it ever be rational to kill in the name of atheism? It would not be rational for anybody to do so whereas it would be very easy to be rational to kill in the name of religion.
--Richard Dawkins (at AAI 07)
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, 1789)
If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?
--Justin Brown
To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.
--Oscar Wilde
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their rediness to doubt.
--H.L. Mencken
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 (Of Miracles, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748)
If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
--Anatole France
It is said that men may not be the dreams of the Gods, but rather that the Gods are the dreams of men.
--Carl Sagan
Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.
L. Ron Hubbard in 1949 (the science fiction writer who later founded the Church of Scientology)
If the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would be neither created nor destroyed. It would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
--Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe)
Women, who are the prime victims of religion and, perhaps, in some Stockholm syndrome effect, often form the most fervent advocates of the very thing that degrades them. I believe that, in the end, it will be women who will turn this around. This should be the final stage of feminism. For a feminist to still believe in god is like a freed slave still living on the plantation.
--Matthew Chapman (in a speech at the AAI 07 conference)
Vietnam should remind conservatives that whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.
--Karl Hess
Whoever sincerely aims at a radical change in society, whoever strives to free humanity from the scourge of dependence and misery, must turn his back on Christianity, on the old as well as the present form of the same.
--Emma Goldman (The Failure of Christianity)
There's no point of having faith if you have evidence.
--Richard Dawkins (Deschner Preis acceptance speech)
Faith is not the result of fuzy thinking. It is the cause of it.
--Dan Barker (Losing Faith in Faith)
The first point to remember is that there is no such thing as good in the abstract. A thing is good in relation to its consequences, or as it realizes the end at which we are aiming. . . . These ethical and religious philosophers who "blather" about the "reality" of good in itself, are talking nonsense. It is not possible to do right in scorn of consequences because it is the consequences that make the action either good or bad. It may be unpleasant or dangerous to do what is right, and we admire the one who does right in such circumstances, but this does not affect our standard.
--Chapman Cohen (Morality Without God)
God hated the world so much that he sent his only son so that whoever does not believe in him will perish and be denied eternal life.
--God's Ex-wife
Historically, the most terrible things--war, genocide and slavery--have resulted from obedience, not disobedience.
--Howard Zinn
What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.
--Leo Tolstoy
Whoever sincerely aims at a radical change in society, whoever strives to free humanity from the scourge of dependence and misery, must turn his back on Christianity, on the old as well as the present form of the same.
--Emma Goldman (The Failure of Christianity)
Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich.
Belief may have had an evolutionary use in young children to help them quickly assimilate their parents protective ideas, but only to the extent similar to drinking their mother's milk to help them grow muscle and fat. After weaning, milk drinking no longer serves a purpose and, similarly, beliefs don't either.
--Ignots Pistachio
So morality existed in fact long before it was defined or described in theory. Man did not first discover the laws of physiology in order to realize the need for eating or breathing, to digest food or to inhale oxygen. Nor did the rules, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, etc., first make stealing and killing wrong. A moral law makes explicit in theory what is implicit in fact. The fact creates the rule; it is not the rule that creates the fact.
--Chapman Cohen (Morality Without God)
Perhaps surprisingly, the omission of God was not a major source of controversy at the Constitutional Convention.
--Susan Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism)
We are back again with the old and simple issue of the natural versus the supernatural. This is one of the oldest divisions in human thought, and there is no logical compromise between them. Morality either has its foundations in the natural or in the supernatural. In asserting the first alternative I do not mean to imply that there is a morality in nature at large. There is not. Nature takes no more heed of our moral rules and judgements than it does of our tastes in art or literature. A man is not blessed with good health because he is an example of lofty morality, nor is he burdened with disease because he is a criminal in thought and act. Nature is neither moral or immoral. Such terms are applicable only when there is conscious action to a given end. Nature is amoral, that is, it is without morality. The common saying that nature "punishes" us or "rewards" us for this or that is merely a picturesque way of stating certain things; it has no literal relation to actual fact. In nature there are no rewards or punishments, there are only actions and consequences. We benefit if we act in one way; we suffer if we act in another. That is the natural fact; there is no ethical quality in natural happenings. Laws of morals are human creations; they are on all fours with "laws" of science -- that is, they are generalizations from experience.
--Chapman Cohen (Morality Without God)
The money man gives to get him into heaven is what he ought to use to improve the earth.
--Lemuel K. Washburn
The superstitions of religion are the most powerful ideas ever created and produces the environment that allows other superstitions to grow, including astrology, pseudo-science, and quack medicine.
--Ignots Pistachio
Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partiy with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself.
--Emma Goldman (The Philosophy of Atheism)
From Afghanistan the holy order was given to annex two famous achievements of modernism – the high-rise building and the jet aircraft – and use them for immolation and human sacrifice. The succeeding stage, very plainly announced in hysterical sermons, was to be the moment when apocalyptic nihilists coincided with Armageddon weaponry. Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these things and use them as a negation.
--Christopher Hitchens
Oh you much knowing tube, more valuable than any scepter.
--Johannes Kepler, astronomer (in an ode about the telescope)
What was it God revealed to man? He did not reveal science. The whole structure of physical science was built up very gradually and tentatively by man. He did not teach man geology, or astronomy, or chemistry, or biology. He did not teach him how to overcome disease, or its nature and cure. He did not teach him agriculture, or how to develop a wild grass into a life-nourishing wheat. He did not teach man how to drain a marsh or how to dig a canal so that it might carry water where it was needed. He did not teach him arithmetic or mathematics. He taught him none of the arts and sciences. Man had no revelation that taught him how to build the steam engine, or the aeroplane, or the submarine, the telegraph or the wireless. All these and a thousand other things which we regard as indispensable, and without which civilization would be impossible, man had to discover for himself.
--Chapman Cohen (Morality Without God)
Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.
– Lao Tzu
You can make anybody believe what you want them to believe. People want to believe. We have to be very careful because as we all know, in the word believe is another word, and that word is: lie.
--Criss Angel, illusionist
Where Are They?
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
No great dependence is to be placed on the eagerness of young soldiers for action...fighting is agreeable to those who are strangers to it.
--Vegetius
Much as I am opposed to every religion, much as I think them an imposition upon, and crime against, reason and progress, I yet feel that no other religion had done so much harm or has helped so much in the enslavement of man as the religion of Christ.
--Emma Goldman (The Failure of Christianity)
A Church without a lightning conductor is at a disadvantage with a brothel that possesses one.
--Chapman Cohen (Morality Without God)
I’ve been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world. Everywhere you go, you meet volunteers who are giving up their lives for other people. Most of them are secular. I don’t think that proves anything about secularism. But the ordinary action of helping a fellow creature in distress doesn’t require faith at all. It just doesn’t.However, the evil things missionaries do are definitely done because of religion. When Mother Teresa said abortion and contraception were equivalent to murder and were the greatest threat to world peace—nobody could have said anything with such wicked consequences! She tried to demolish the only cure for poverty that we know for sure exists, which is the empowerment of women. I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise. And if you throw a handful of seeds and some credit to these ladies, the village will be transformed in a couple of years.
--Christopher Hitchens (Transcending God)
During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.
--Howard Thurman
Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
--George Washington
What can one say... about a religion that describes its adherents as a flock?
--Christopher Hitchens
No Catholic-born Nazi-- not Goebbels, Himmler, or Bormann; not even Adolf Hitler, who died with his name still on the rolls of the Catholic Church, and for whom the Catholic primate of Germany ordered the Requiem sung after his suicide-- was ever excommunicated for being a Nazi. But, as Hans Kung observed, Pius XII "did not show the slightest inhibitions after the war, in 1949, about excommunicating all Communist members throughout the world at a stroke."
--James Carroll (Constantine's Sword : The Church and the Jews: A History)
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an Agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means.
--Clarence Darrow
If you perform a rain dance and it rains doesn't mean that your dance caused the rain. The same goes with "answered" prayers. Confusing correlations with causations represents one of the most common human errors of logic.
--Ignots Pistachio
Brain development is under genetic control and it is known that some brains are more prone to religious belief and experience than others. For example, people with unstable temporal lobes are more likely to report mystical, psychic and religious experiences, and to believe in supernatural powers, than those with stable temporal lobes.
--Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine)
But most remarkable of all are those patients who have deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communion with God. Everything around them is imbued with cosmic significance. They may say, "I finally understand what it's all about. This is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. Suddenly it all makes sense." Or, "Finally have insight into the true nature of the cosmos." I find it ironic that this sense of enlightenment, this absolute conviction that Truth is revealed at last, should derive from limbic structures concerned with emotions rather than from the thinking, rational parts of the brain that take so much pride in their ability to discern truth and falsehood.
--V.S. Ramachandran (Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind)
[T]hose who know, know-- and those who know not will simply not believe.
--Robert Anton Wilson (Email to the Universe)
As always, in one of the great and enduring ironies of American history, secularists stood in the forefront of efforts to uphold the constitutional rights of disdained religious minorities.
--Susan Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism)
… 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)
Why, as a moral or practical matter, did Pius XII excommunicate all Communists in the world in 1949, including millions who never shed blood, but not excommunicate a single German or non-German who served Hitler-- or even the Catholic-born Hitler himself-- as the millionfold willing executioners of the Jewish people?
by Daniel J. Goldhagen (A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair)
If you are one of those who think that free will is only really free will if it springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision into your motor cortex, then given what you mean by free will, my view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you think free will might be morally important without being supernatural, then my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably thought it was.
--Daniel C. Dennett (Freedom Evolves)
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
--Abraham Lincoln
In reality, and ironically, it is absolute moralities that leave us with nothing but conflicting opinions and no moral compass. Nowhere is this problem more evident than in religion.
--Michael Shermer (The Science of Good and Evil)
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
Have you read Camus’s La Peste? At the end, the plague is over, the nightmare has dissipated, the city has returned to health. Normality has resumed. But he ends by saying that underneath the city, in the pipes and in the sewers, the rats were still there. And they’d one day send their vermin up again to die on the streets of a free city.
That’s how I feel about religion. Thanks to advances of science, education, political tolerance, pluralism and so on, religion can now be one option among many—who cares who’s a Unitarian or who’s a Congregationalist? But in the texts, the actual texts, there is always this toxin that’s ready to be revived. What I say is, “Do you believe this stuff or don’t you?” In other words, “In what respect are you different from a humanist?” The authority of the texts is always on the side of the extremists, because they do say what they say. So be aware of this danger. That’s all I’m arguing.
--Christopher Hitchens (Transcending God)
Philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions to ask are.
--Daniel C. Dennett (Susan Blackmore interviews Daniel Dennett)
The West is endangered, primarily, by the religious fragmentation of the human community, by religious impediments to clear thinking, and by the religious willingness of millions to sacrifice the real possibility of happiness in this world for a fantasy of a world to come. We are living in a world where untold millions of grown men and women can rationalize the violent sacrifice of their own children by recourse to fairy tales. We are living in world where millions of Muslims believe that there is nothing better than to be killed in defense of Islam. We are living in a world in which millions of American Christians hope to soon be raptured into the sky by Jesus so that they can safely enjoy the holy genocide that will inaugurate the end of human history. We are living in a world in which a silly old priest, by merely giving voice to his religious inanities, could conceivably start a war with 1.4 billion Muslims who take their own inanities in deadly earnest. These are real dangers. And they are not dangers for which more “Biblical faith” is a remedy.
--Sam Harris (Pope ‘Rottweiler’ Barks)
One thing that Christians are constantly fooled by: The characters God and Satan are one in the same in the Bible. Without the rose colored glasses of faith, this is very apparent. If there is a Devil, what better way to convince people than to create a book where the main character is disguised as a god and to push faith over reason?
--The Heretic Hermit
Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.
Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there.
Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there and shouting “I found it!”
--Unk the unknown
Here is my challenge. Let Gerson name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first -- I have been asking it for some time -- awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.
--Christopher Hitchens (An Atheist Responds)
You can see the future of U.S. citizens when Bush allows the abuse of Iraqi civilians. As he slowly chips away our freedoms protected by the Constitution, eventually he will be able to treat us the way he treats Iraqis.
--Pelican the Politician
Atheism is a necessary condition for emancipation of the mind, but it’s not a sufficient one. You can free yourself from superstition and still end up a nihilist or a hedonist or a Stalinist. What’s innate in our species isn’t the fault of religion. But the bad things that are innate in our species are strengthened by religion and sanctified by it. The fact is, we are a mammalian species one half-chromosome away from chimpanzees, and it shows. Curing ourselves of religion is only a small step along the road. Fortunately, our brains seem to be evolving.
--Christopher Hitchens (Transcending God)
Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. 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 (A Memorial and Remonstrance 1785)
The only thing that the church has saved so far is itself.
--Lemuel K. Washburn
America’s favorite religion is scientifically unsupported, philosophically suspect at best, disreputable at worst, and historically fraudulent.
--Delos B. McKown, Ph.D., Former clergyman
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.
--James Madison (letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774)
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
--William Faulkner
[T]here doesn't need to be a God for me...
--Angelina Jolie
You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.
--Erma Bombeck
We're no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave; we're the land of the fearful and the home of Big Brother. We're no longer the shining beacon of democracy that inspired nascent democracies for over 200 years; we're now the example repressive dictatorships use to justify espionage against and torture of their own citizens. We're no longer a land of laws governed by We, The People, protected from our government by our Constitution; we're now a land of "leaders" who claim they owe "no accountability" to Congress or the people who elect them.
Very quickly, under the radar but in a deep and real way, we're moving from being a liberal democracy to a conservative theocratic corporatist/fascist state.
--Thom Hartman ('You Have No Rights')
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
--Arthur C. Clarke
Worship God. It’s easier than thinking.
--Chapman Cohen (1868-1954)
I believe there is something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government.
--Woody Allen
A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.
--Thomas Jefferson
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
--Delos B. McKown, Ph.D., U.S. professor, philosopher, author, former clergyman
In the world of religion, the gods always appear tiny compared to the universe of science. The Judeo-Christian war-god resembles a crude, jealous, hormone driven entity, very much in the image of the Bronze-Age people who created him, whereas science reveals the grander and solemnity of an immense universe, far beyond the comprehension of monotheists and their flat, dimensionless world. And if the quantum theorists prove correct, even a creation god universe pails in comparison to the multi-universes created by unintelligent chance within the sub-atomic structure of spacetime.
--Ignots Pistachio
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 (A Memorial and Remonstrance, addressed to the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1785)
[P]hilosophy consists of the history of failed models of the brain.
--E.O. Wilson (E.O. Wilson + Daniel Dennett)
There is something feeble and contemptible about a man who cannot face life without the help of comfortable myths.
--Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
We [scientists] don't reject the supernatural merely because we have an overweening philosophical commitment to materialism; we reject it because entertaining the supernatural has never helped us understand the natural world. Alchemy, faith healing, astrology, creationism—none of these perspectives has advanced our understanding of nature by one iota.
--Jerry Coyne (Don't Know Much Biology)
I can only reiterate that their [Muslim males] problem is not so much that they desire virgins as that they are virgins; their emotional and psychic growth irremediably stunted in the name of god, and they safety of many others menaced as a consequence of this alienation and deformation.
--Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great)
The comforts that we enjoy are entirely the results of man’s wisdom. They did not come about from reading the Bible or praying to God.
--Farell Till; Former clergyman, Editor of The Skeptical Review
To be an atheist requires strength of mind and goodness of heart found in not one of a thousand.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet, critic, journalist, philosopher
No theory is too false, no fable too absurd for acceptance when embedded in common belief. Men will submit to torture and death, mothers will immolate their children [for] beliefs they accept.
--Henry George (1839-1897)
Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.
--Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D.
The Bible doesn’t forbid suicide. It’s Catholic directive, intended to slow down their loss of martyrs.
--Ellen Blackstone
The silly, sickly superstition of the sacrifice of Jesus should be left to die. It sprang from falsehood and has no basis in fact, in reason or in truth.
--Lemuel K. Washburn
[I]t really is important to know the history of philosophy if you're going to do philosophy, and the reason is actually very simple. The history of philosophy is a history of very tempting mistakes, and the people that we study in the history of philosophy—Plato and Aristotle and Kant and all the rest—they were not dummies. They were really smart people and they made stunning errors. These are very tempting mistakes. So you really have to learn the history of philosophy if you're going to do it well. Or you have to learn some of it. Because otherwise you just reinvent the wheel. You end up falling in the same old traps.
--Daniel C. Dennett (E.O. Wilson + Daniel Dennett)
[A]s many Israeli religious courts have confirmed. . . an easy way to spot an inhumane killer was to notice that he was guided by a sincere and literal observance of the divine instruction.
--Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great)
The problem with Christians, Jews, and Muslims is that when they finely get around to stopping to think about something, they just stop, they never really get to the thinking part.
--Ignots Pistachio
Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.
--John F. Kennedy
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.
--Richard Dawkins
If you seem to witness such a thing [a miracle], there are two possibilities. The first is that the laws of nature have been suspended (in your favor). The second is that you are under a misapprehension, or suffering from a delusion. Thus the likelihood of the second must be weighed against the likelihood of the first.
--Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great)
I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it...
--John Stuart Mill (Autobiography)
All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is--marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it as you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.
--Joseph Conrad (Author's note to The Shadow-Line)
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
The story is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John; its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately before and after); and it includes a large number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is unavoidable: this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.
--Barton Ehrman (on John 8:3-11, about the woman taken in adultery)
His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatesgt enemy of morality: first, but setting up factitious excellencies--belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind--and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue: ball above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishies indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.
--John Stuart Mill (on his father, in the "Autobiography")
I’ve invented a few collective nouns, which I think is a distinct service to the language. (A collective noun is one that designates a group of specific things. For example, the collective noun for “sheep” is “flock,” and for “geese” – when not flying! – is “gaggle.”) I choose to refer to a gathering of psychics as a “giggle,” for conmen, it’s a “fleece,” and for prophets, a “failure.” One wag on the JREF Forum came up with “Congress” as a collective for conmen, but that was unkind. I use an “absence” for a group of homeopaths, I refer to a “confusion” of parapsychologists, and a “cackle” of witches. Palmists are gathered as a “handful,” it’s a “struggle” of astrologers, and more than three phrenologists become a “bump.” And a group of spoonbenders can be called, a “desperation.”
--James Randi (James Randi Newsletter)
Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody's mom in that she knows what's best for us. But if you look at the historical record -- Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages -- you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?
--Barbara Ehrenreich
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.
--Richard Dawkins
I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, 'Look how beautiful it is,' and I'll agree. But then he'll say, 'I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.' I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
--Richard P. Feynman
The priests of the different religious sects . . . dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.
--Thomas Jefferson (letter to Correa de Serra, April 11, 1820)
The plan was for Jesus to come to Earth two thousand years ago with a pocketful of miracles and souls for the people who were then alive. After his return to heaven from Earth (it is about twelve septillion miles from Earth to the edge of our galaxy with four hundred billion suns to dodge) he is going to build those mansions, come back before his generation dies out, finally put an end to the world which has been such a rotten disappointment, and deposit most of these souls in hell. No wonder heaven is only 12,000 furlongs wide, long, and high.
--Ruth Hurmence Green ( "What I Found When I 'Searched the Scriptures,'" from The Book of Ruth,1982)
No one should force religion from existing; everyone should have the freedom of expression. However, the history of religion demonstrates that it does not deserve respect, nor should it be allowed to influence governments or to force unbelievers to their ways.
--The Heretic Hermit
Science does something that religion never does, and never will do: science welcomes and incorporates facts as they are presented, whether they agree with the theory to which they apply, or not, and adjusts any discovery to incorporate the newly-discovered evidence – thus growing and improving the view we have of reality. Science is never “proven” – it offers a view that explains the world as we see it, a view that is subject to improvement, adjustment, or even reversal, if the facts require that to be done; science gets better by discrete steps, getting closer to the truth, with each step. Religion, on the other hand, is set, hardened, incorrigible, dogmatic, and incapable of changing its notions. It rules as a dictator, denying any and all facts that oppose its dogma. It does not grow.
--James Randi (James Randi Newsletter)
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
Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.
--James Madison (letter to William Bradford, Jr., January 1774)
Christians think nothing of condemning nonbelievers to eternal suffering, but will forgive the most atrocious crimes committed by themselves.
--Ignots Pistachio
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
Prayer is like a pump in an empty well, it makes lots of noise, but brings no water.
--Lemuel K. Washburn
God said: "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus 3:14)
Popeye said: "I yam what I yam." (Popeye song, the original)
Therefore, God and Popeye are the same.--From "Syllogisms Gone Wild"
Many persons seem to make themselves quite easy about immortality & the existence of a personal God by intuition; & I suppose that I must differ from such persons, for I do not feel any innate conviction on any such points.
--Charles Darwin (in a letter to Charles Lyell)
Poets are always complaining that scientists take away from the beauty of the stars. Mere globs of gas atoms! Nothing is mere. I too can see the stars on a desert night and feel them. Stuck on this tiny carousel my little eye can catch million year old light. But what of the pattern, the meaning, the why? For far more awesome is the truth than any artists of the past could imagine. Where are the poets of the present to speak of it? Who are the poets who can speak of Jupiter as if he was a man - and when it is a huge spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must remain silent?
--Richard P. Feynman
When religion comes in at the door common sense goes out at the window.
--Lemuel K. Washburn
Mythology is where all gods go to die.
--Sam Harris (God's dupes)
Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.
--Thomas Jefferson
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest:
"If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
"No," said the priest, "not if you did not know."
"Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"
--Annie Dillard (from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
Religion is not a nice thing. It is potentially a very dangerous thing because it involves a heady complex of emotions, desires, yearnings and fears.
--Karen Armstrong
It seems that schizoid tendencies are revered in Christianity. You couldn’t be a Saint unless you demonstrate what are now known to be several symptoms of Schizophrenia: Hearing voices and knowing them to be real, projective charisma, supernormal strength or agility, preternatural sensitivity to other’s thoughts, and so on. The bible and chronology of Saints document many textbook cases of schizophrenia. It usually manifests in women at the onset of adolescence (e.g: Joan of Arc) or men at the end of adolescence (pick anyone from Moses forward).
--Dangerous Intersection.org
Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
--Sam Harris (An Atheist Manifesto)
People who rely most on God rely least on themselves.
--Lemuel K. Washburn
Christians argue that we can't see God because he is immaterial, invisible, and unknowable. Hey, that’s the same meaning as nonexistence!
--Ignots Pistachio
What has been the fruits of Christianity? ...Superstition, bigotry and persecution.
--James Madison, 4th president of the U.S.
I think that religion stops people from thinking. I think it justifies crazies. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder. If you look at it logically, it's something that was drilled into your head when you were a small child. It certainly was drilled into mine at that age. And you really can't be responsible when you are a kid for what adults put into your head
--Bill Maher
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 some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.
--Ludwig von Mises
How religioius believers justify war: Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who teaches my hands to wage war, and my fingers to do battle.
--The Bible, Psalms 144:1
The gods of men are sillier than their kings and queens, and emptier and more powerless.
--Maxwell Anderson
When religion gets into the driving seat, all hell breaks loose.
--Salman Rushdie (in a talk at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 11 Oct. 2006)
Every injustice that has ever been fastened upon women in a Christian country has been "authorized by the Bible" and riveted and perpetuated by the pulpit.
--Helen H Gardener, Men, Women and Gods
Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?
--Robert G. Ingersoll
Christians are atheists too: a conversation
Atheist: You’re an atheist too.
Christian: No I’m not, I believe in God.
Atheist: Oh yes you are and I can prove it.
Christian: OK then, go ahead and prove it. <chuckle>
Atheist: I am your God. Do you believe it?
Christian: Of course not!
Atheist: See? I told you so.
Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought.
--Annie Besant (Why I Do Not Believe in God, 1887)
A clarification of Christianity: Thou shalt not kill, except in the name of God, Jesus Christ, or the Holy Ghost.
--Xavier Cross
[W]hen you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.
--Stephen Pinker (The Mystery of Consciousness)
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.
--Voltaire (attributed)
I am fond of saying that reading the Bible turned me into an atheist.
--Ruth Hurmence Green (Preface to The Born-Again Skeptic's Guide To The Bible)
All those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand...
--Kurt Vonnegut
When you grow up in America things like Christianity waters down your feeling... When you're taught to love everybody, taught to love you're enemies, what value does that put on love?
--Marilyn Manson
Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword
Like punching under water
You never can hit who you're trying for--John Mayer (Belief)
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.
--Stephen Pinker (The Mystery of Consciousness)
An alliance or coalition between Government and religion cannot be too carefully guarded against....Every new and successful example therefore of a PERFECT SEPARATION between ecclesiastical and civil matters is of importance....religion and government will exist in greater purity, without (rather) than with the aid of government.
--James Madison (in a letter to Livingston, 1822)
While travelling near Tampa, Florida I passed the "Jehovah's Witness Assembly Hall" and was struck by the fact that that must be where they make them.
--Unknown
Because morality is a social necessity, the moment faith in god is banished, man's gaze turns from god to man and he becomes socially conscious. Religious belief prevented the growth of a sense of realism. But atheism at once makes man realistic and alive to the needs of morality.
--Gora (Atheism and Morality)
There is no sadder grief than that which lies at the bottom of a life that has been wrecked through deception.
--Lemuel K. Washburn
One of the most persistent fallacies about the Christian Church is that it kept learning alive during the Dark and Middle Ages. What the Church did was to keep learning alive in the monasteries, while preventing the spread of knowledge outside them.... Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, nine-tenths of Christian Europe was illiterate.
--Margaret Knight ("Gentle Jesus" in "Christianity: The Debit Account",1975)
[T]he unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings--the core of morality.
--Stephen Pinker (The Mystery of Consciousness)
It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range in time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different plants, and all these atoms with all their motions and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama. So I believe its not the right picture.
--Richard P. Feynman (Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, from the "Beaten Track")
We must remember that "thought" means abstraction.
--Robert Anton Wilson (Email to the Universe)
The belief that one's faith is the only true religion too often leads to a disturbing level of intolerance, and this intolerance includes the assumption that nonbelievers cannot be as moral as believers.
--Michael Shermer (The Science of Good and Evil)
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize [sic], every expanded prospect.
--James Madison (in a letter to William Bradford, April 1,1774)
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, 1893)
Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time.
--Robert Anton Wilson (TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution)
It takes more guts to stop a war than it does to start one.
--Ignots Pistachio
Christians tell me that they have a higher destiny than the lower animals, because Homo Sapiens can reason. But the Bible tells me that this gift of reason, which they call god-given, may be the match that lights the fires of hell for all who dare to use it, since whatever is not of faith is sin.
--Ruth Hurmence Green ("What I Found When I 'Searched the Scriptures,'" from The Book of Ruth, 1982)
[Creeds] have been the bane and ruin of the Christian church, its own fatal invention, which, through so many ages, made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and at this day divides it into castes of inextinguishable hatred to one another.
--Thomas Jefferson (letter to Thomas Whitmore, June 5, 1822)
A theologian is a person who uses the word "God" to hide his ignorance.
--Lemuel K. Washburn
From Augustine down, theologians have tried to compel people to accept their special interpretation of the Scripture, and the tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials of heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts of infidel and atheist, have all been for this purpose.
--Matilda Joslyn Gage
I may grow rich by an art I am compelled to follow; I may recover health by medicines I am compelled to take against my own judgment; but I cannot be saved by a worship I disbelieve and abhor.
--Thomas Jefferson (notes for a speech, ca. 1776, quoted from Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, The Harper Book of American Quotations, 1988)
Wars of aggression are the most barbarous of all human endeavors and are, more often than not, the instruments of insane tyrants who hear voices.
--Rodrigue Tremblay
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
[I]t may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points. The tendency to unsurpastion on one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them, will be best guarded agst. by an entire abstinence of the Gov't from interfence in any way whatsoever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order, and protecting each sect agst. trespasses on its legal rights by others.
--James Madison (letter to Rev. Jasper Adams, Spring, 1832)
The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.
--Susan B. Anthony
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.
--Annie Besant (The Freethinker's Textbook Part II -- Christianity, 1876)
Notwithstanding the general progress made within the two last centuries in favour of this branch of liberty, & the full establishment of it, in some parts of our Country, there remains in others a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Gov' & Religion neither can be duly supported: Such indeed is the tendency to such a coalition, and such its corrupting influence on both the parties, that the danger cannot be too carefully guarded agst.. And in a Gov' of opinion, like ours, the only effectual guard must be found in the soundness and stability of the general opinion on the subject. Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between 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 shewing that religion & Gov will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together;
--James Madison (Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822)
The Gish Principle -- If a gap exists between two fossil species, and an intermediate fossil species is discovered, then two gaps are present now and evolution is disproved even more.
--Graham Kendall
Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion.
--Lemuel K. Washburn
It is thought strange and particularly shocking by some persons for a woman to question the absolute correctness of the Bible. She is supposed to be able to go through this world with her eyes shut, and her mouth open wide enough to swallow Jonah and the Garden of Eden without making a wry face.... Of all human beings a woman should spurn the Bible first.
--Helen H. Gardener (Men, Women and Gods)
The military has the policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” That means a man who openly admits to homosexuality can’t serve in the military. From this I can make a safe prediction that if Congress ever allows a military draft, we will see a surge of homosexuality in America.
--Ignots Pistachio
If my interlocutor desires to convince me that Jupiter has inhabitants, and that his description of them is accurate, it is for him to bring forward evidence in support of his contention. The burden of proof evidently lies on him; it is not for me to prove that no such beings exist before my non-belief is justified, but for him to prove that they do exist before my belief can be fairly claimed. Similarly, it is for the affirmer of God's existence to bring evidence in support of his affirmation; the burden of proof lies on him.
--Annie Besant (Why I Do Not Believe in God, London, 1887)
Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Govt in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history [attempts where religious bodies had already tried to encroach on the government].
--James Madison (Detached Memoranda, 1820)
Scarecrow: Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking don't they?
Dorothy: Why yes.. I suppose they do...--Wizard of Oz
The good part of Christmas is not always Christian -- it is generally Pagan; that is to say, human, natural.
--Robert G. Ingersoll
Interpersonally, we don't challenge everyone's crazy beliefs about medical therapies or alien abduction or astrology or anything else. Yet if the president of the U.S. started talking about how Saturn was coming into the wrong quadrant and is therefore not a good time to launch a war, one would hope that the whole White House press corps would descend on him with a straitjacket. This would be terrifying--to hear somebody with so much power basing any part of his decision-making process on something as disreputable as astrology. Yet we don't have the same response when he's clearly basing some part of his deliberation on faith.
--Sam Harris (in an interview)
Hypothesis is a toll which can cause trouble if not used properly. We must be ready to abandon our hypothesis as soon as it is shown to be inconsistent with the facts.
--W. I. B. Beveridge (The Art of Scientific Investigation)
So, I'll out myself. I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren't, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection.
--Natalie Angier (Confessions of a Lonely Atheist)
This religion and the Bible require of woman everything, and give her nothing. They ask her support and her love, and repay her with contempt and oppression.
--Helen H. Gardener (Men, Women and Gods)
Whatever else I might have thought of [President George W] Bush's call, with its assumption that prayer is some sort of miracle Vicks VapoRub for the national charley horse, it's clear that his hands were reaching for any hands but mine.
--Natalie Angier, "Confessions of a Lonely Atheist," in New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001
Religion is evolutionary dangerous to Homo sapiens. Although it had its start from social conditioning that began only a few thousand years ago, it is dangerous because it eventually kills off its members through war, suicide, or ignoring scientific ideas which could save lives. The weeding out has already begun. Only a couple of hundred years ago, almost everyone had religious beliefs. But today, China, Scandinavian and many European are mostly atheistic. Unfortunately, biological evolution is slow so it will take a few thousand years or more before total religious extinction occurs. Of course if a religious faction starts a thermonuclear war, it could cause the extinction of the entire human race in an instant.--Ignots Pistachio
If a person really believes that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. It may even be reasonable to kill them. If a person thinks there is something that another person can say to his children that could put their souls in jeopardy for all eternity, then the heretic next door is actually far more dangerous than the child molester. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism or politics.
--Sam Harris (An Atheist Manifesto)
Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it’s not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
--Salman Rushdie when asked, “Does religion play a constructive role in any democratic society?” (in a talk at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 11 Oct. 2006)
The mind is not like a wax tablet. On a tablet you cannot write the new till you rub out the old; on the mind you cannot rub out the old except by writing in the new. Beware of the idols of the mind, the fallacies into which undis