Quotes
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.
At a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
No Gods – No Masters.
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.
Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.
No Gods – No Masters.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish (Muslim) Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.
Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It’s about power.
Hast thou reason? I have.
Why then dost not thou use it?
For if this does its own work,
what else dost thou wish?
It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.
It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.
Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will – and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.
Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It’s about power.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.
Scientific research confirms that humans are a link in the evolutionary life chain. There is no credible evidence for the existence of an immortal supernatural element. Our only life is here and now. Make it worthy of a moral person.