Quotes
ATHEISM = Liberation through Reason and Knowledge.
No Gods – No Masters.
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
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 count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride.
The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
No Gods – No Masters.
To YOU I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.
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 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.
Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.
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.
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?
It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.
ATHEISM = Liberation through Reason and Knowledge.
To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride.
ATHEISM = Liberation through Reason and Knowledge.
It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It’s about power.
Religion is against women’s rights and women’s freedom. In all societies women are oppressed by all religions.
A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if no one believes it.
Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
“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?”
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.
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.