Quotes
If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.
It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.
Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if no one believes it.
I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.
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.
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.
Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It’s about power.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
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.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
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.
Hast thou reason? I have.
Why then dost not thou use it?
For if this does its own work,
what else dost thou wish?
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
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.
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.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
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?
At a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.
No Gods – No Masters.
“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?”