Posts

ATHEISM = Liberation through Reason and Knowledge.

That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.

A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if no one believes it.

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.

My mother was Southern Irish, and I was brought up as a devout Catholic. In fact, at one point I thought I'd become a priest, but I'd have made an appalling priest anyway... At 16, I asked all these monks some serious questions and they didn't come up with the answers, and I just decided I didn't believe in God.

Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power.

My neurologist once told me that people with temporal lobe epilepsy are very often intensely religious. Certainly just before I have a grand mal fit I have a 'vision' of such peace, joy and significance that I can only call it God. What does this say about the whole nature of religious vision? Certain episodes in the lives of the saints have acquired a new meaning for me. When Theresa of Avila had her three-day vision of hell, was she simply having a temporal lobe attack? The horrors she saw are similar to those I have experienced, but in her case informed by the religious imagery of her time. Like other saints who have 'seen' hell she describes an appalling stench, which is part of an epileptic aura. Is it possible that the feeling I have had all my life that something - God, perhaps? - is just over the horizon, something unimaginable but almost tangibly present, is simply the result of an electrical irregularity in my brain? It is a question that can't yet be answered, unless it be that God, if He exists, could have created us with that capacity for Him, glimpsed at only when the brain is convulsed. What I can say, however, is that if my 'visions' have sometimes let me into 'Hell' they have also given me possible intimations of a Heaven which I would not have been without.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.