*** Under Construction In Evolution ***
Albert Einstein
Stephen Hawking
Thomas Jefferson
Richard Dawkins
Carl Sagan
Bertrand Russell
Christopher Hitchens
Voltaire
Friedrich Nietzsche
Noam Chomsky
Sigmund Freud
Penn Jillette
Others
Comical Atheist Slogans
The Heretic (joke)
Animated Flying
Spaghetti Monster (What is the Flying Spaghetti
Monster?)
What does it all
look like?
It was, of
course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which
is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and
I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is
in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration
for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
-Albert Einstein
The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of
human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still
primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No
interpretation, no matter how subtle, can for me change this.
-Albert Einstein
Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short
visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From
the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know:
that man is here for the sake of other men.
-Albert Einstein
I cannot imagine a god who rewards and punishes the objects of his
creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own... a god, in short,
who is but a reflection of human frailty.
-Albert Einstein
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics
to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind
it.
-Albert Einstein
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy,
education, and social ties and needs... no religious basis is necessary.
Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of
punishment and hope of reward after death.
-Albert Einstein
It seems to me that the idea of a personal god is an anthropological
concept which I cannot take seriously.
-Albert Einstein
Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place
is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action
of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined
to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer... that is by a
wish addressed to a supernatural being.
-Albert Einstein
I cannot conceive of a personal god who would directly influence the
actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of
his own creation.
-Albert Einstein
My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior
spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and
transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the
highest importance... but for us, not for god.
-Albert Einstein
Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body,
although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous
egotisms. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and
with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the
existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a
portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in
nature.
-Albert Einstein
I am convinced that some political and social activities and practices of
the Catholic organizations are detrimental and even dangerous for the
community as a whole, here and everywhere. I mention here only the fight
against birth control at a time when overpopulation in various countries
has become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle
to any attempt to organize peace on this planet.
-Albert Einstein
To be sure, the doctrine of a personal god interfering with the natural
events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this
doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific
knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.
-Albert Einstein
For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but
only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with
incalculable harm to human progress.
-Albert Einstein
The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the
rampant growth of the so-called theosophy and spiritualism, is for me no
more than a symptom of weakness and confusion.
-Albert Einstein
Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combinations of
sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to
be empty and devoid of meaning.
-Albert Einstein
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain
it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through
the fears of life or death, and blind faith, but through striving after
rational knowledge.
-Albert Einstein
But there is only one true immortality, on a cosmic scale, and that is
the immortality of the cosmos itself. There is no other.
-Albert Einstein
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre
minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly
submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his
intelligence.
-Albert Einstein
One thing I have learned in a long life... that all our science measured
against reality is primitive and childlike, and yet it is the most
precious thing we have.
-Albert Einstein
Religion, on the other hand, is concerned only with evaluating human
thought and actions. It is not qualified to speak of real facts and the
relationships between them.
-Albert Einstein
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison,
restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons
nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our
circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature
in its beauty.
-Albert Einstein
The whole
history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not
happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying
order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
-Stephen Hawking
We could call order by the name of god, but it would be an impersonal
god. There's not much personal about the laws of physics.
-Stephen Hawking
All that my work has shown is that you don't have to say that the way the
universe began was the personal whim of god.
-Stephen Hawking
I do not believe in a personal god.
-Stephen Hawking
I put a lot of effort into writing 'A Briefer History [of time]' at a
time when I was critically ill with pneumonia because I think that it's
important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in
cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.
-Stephen Hawking
But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no boundary or
edge, it would neither be created nor destroyed. It would simply be. What
place then for a creator?
-Stephen Hawking
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very
average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something
very special.
-Stephen Hawking
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe
began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not
be necessary to appeal to god to decide how the universe began. This
doesn't prove that there is no god, only that god is not necessary.
-Stephen Hawking
One does not have to appeal to god to set the initial conditions for the
creation of the universe, but if one does He would have to act through
the laws of physics.
-Stephen Hawking
Religions
are all alike founded upon fables and mythologies.
-Thomas Jefferson
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
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
I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature.
-Thomas Jefferson
Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.
-Thomas Jefferson
The Christian god is a three headed monster: cruel, vengeful, and
capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging three headed
beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say
they serve him. They are always of two classes: fool and
hypocrites.
-Thomas Jefferson
The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and
doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such
tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other
books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to
entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament
there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an
extraordinary man, and that other parts are of the fabric of very
inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out
diamonds from dunghills.
-Thomas Jefferson
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to
liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in
return for protection to his own.
-Thomas Jefferson
My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had
never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the
purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence
and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that
system only what is really there.
-Thomas Jefferson
Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his
biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality,
and of the most lovely benevolence, and others again of so much
ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and
imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should
have proceeded from the same being.
-Thomas Jefferson
Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against
absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the
sport of every wind.
-Thomas Jefferson
And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the
supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with
the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may
we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United
States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us
the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of
human errors.
-Thomas Jefferson
It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and
I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor
capable of explanation than the incoherencies of our own nightly
dreams.
-Thomas Jefferson
If by religion, we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of
them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just: that this
would be the best of worlds if there were no religion in it.
-Thomas Jefferson
Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of
Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we
have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of
coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half
hypocrites... to support roguery and error all over the earth.
-Thomas Jefferson
Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state" therefore, is
absolutely essential in a free society.
-Thomas Jefferson
The common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time
when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced or knew that
such a character existed.
-Thomas Jefferson
But every state, says an inquisitor, has established some religion. No
two, say I, have established the same.
-Thomas Jefferson
The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and engrafted into
the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the
civil and religious rights of man.
-Thomas Jefferson
The law for religious freedom has put down the aristocracy of the clergy
and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind.
-Thomas Jefferson
The declaration that religious faith shall be unpunished does not give
immunity to criminal acts dictated by religious error.
-Thomas Jefferson
If anything pass in a religious meeting seditiously and contrary to the
public peace, let it be punished in the same manner and no otherwise than
as if it had happened in a fair or market.
-Thomas Jefferson
The natural course of the human mind is certainly from credulity to
skepticism.
-Thomas Jefferson
Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every
opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god, because, if
there be one, he must approve the homage of reason rather than of
blind-folded fear. Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of
its consequences. If it end in a belief that there is no god, you will
find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in
its exercise and in the love of others it will procure for you.
-Thomas Jefferson
It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational
beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand
the test of truth and reason.
-Thomas Jefferson
Every Christian sect gives a great handle to atheism by their general
dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of
the being of god.
-Thomas Jefferson
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
On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all
mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been
quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions
unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the
comprehension of the human mind.
-Thomas Jefferson
I am not afraid of the priests. They have tried upon me all their various
batteries, of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying, and slandering,
without being able to give me one moment of pain.
-Thomas Jefferson
I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives. It is in our
lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the
same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the
priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent, to all their
interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an
infidel, if there had never been a priest.
-Thomas Jefferson
To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the
human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or
that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise ...
without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am
satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without
tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of
which I have no evidence.
-Thomas Jefferson
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme
being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the
fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
-Thomas Jefferson
We find in the writings of his [Jesus] biographers a groundwork of vulgar
ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and
fabrications.
-Thomas Jefferson
That sect [Judaism] had presented for the object of their worship, a
being of terrific character: cruel, vindictive, capricious and
unjust.
-Thomas Jefferson
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth
who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.
-Thomas Jefferson
I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of
atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being
worshiped by many who think themselves Christians.
-Thomas Jefferson
To explain the origin of the DNA protein machine by invoking a
supernatural designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves
unexplained the origin of the designer. You have to say something like
'god was always there', and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way
out, you might as well just say 'DNA was always there', or 'life was
always there', and be done with it.
-Richard Dawkins
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths
and faiths are not, and do not.
-Richard Dawkins
Any god capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the
DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and
organized as that machine itself. Far more so if we suppose him
additionally capable of such advanced functions as listening to prayers
and forgiving sins.
-Richard Dawkins
Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile
thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality. We
must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave
ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.
-Richard Dawkins
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to
believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane. Or
wicked, but I'd rather not consider that.
-Richard Dawkins
The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't
stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want
to believe in a particular one of them: teapots, unicorns, tooth fairies,
Thor, or Yahweh, the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The
onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists
are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have
to bother saying so.
-Richard Dawkins
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
-Richard Dawkins
Faith is the great cop - out, the great excuse to evade the need to think
and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because
of, the lack of evidence.
-Richard Dawkins
I don't think god is an explanation at all. It's simply re-describing the
problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world,
and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we
explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs
together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, god is not an
explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to
do all the things he is supposed to do.
-Richard Dawkins
If people think god is interesting, the onus is on them to show that
there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up
about it.
-Richard Dawkins
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all
decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this
sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are
running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being
devoured from within by rasping parasites… thousands of all kinds are
dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is
a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase
in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is
restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical
forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other
people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in
it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the
properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no
purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
-Richard Dawkins
People sometimes try to score debating points by saying, "evolution is
only a theory." That is correct, but it's important to understand what
that means. It is also only a theory that the world goes round the sun...
it's just a theory for which there is an immense amount of
evidence.
-Richard Dawkins
You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution.
The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to
believe in evolution.
-Richard Dawkins
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is
science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those
scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do
science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and
resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized
ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake
of reason and sanity. Of course, excellent organizations already exist
for raising funds and deploying them in service of reason, science, and
enlightenment values. But the money that these organizations can raise is
dwarfed by the huge resources of religious foundations such as the
Templeton Foundation, not to mention the tithe bloated, tax exempt
churches.
-Richard Dawkins
Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists
whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn
out to be identical to those of other scientists who straightforwardly
call themselves atheists.
-Richard Dawkins
To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science
is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.
-Richard Dawkins
The idea that evolution itself is a random process is a most
extraordinary travesty. I wonder if it's deliberately put about
maliciously or whether these people honestly believe such a preposterous
absurdity. Of course evolution isn't random. It is driven by natural
selection, which is a highly non-random force.
-Richard Dawkins
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest
experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic
passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is
truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if
anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for
living is quite finite.
-Richard Dawkins
Over the centuries, we've moved on from scripture to accumulate precepts
of ethical, legal and moral philosophy. We've evolved a liberal consensus
of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea
that we don't approve of slavery or discrimination on the grounds of race
or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All
of these things that have become second nature to our morals today owe
very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the
teeth of religion.
-Richard Dawkins
Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with
religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also
incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is
interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true,
inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a
single heading.
-Richard Dawkins
More generally it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many
others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf,
restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural
presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of
universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific
difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific
claims.
-Richard Dawkins
There is something dishonestly self serving in the tactic of claiming
that all religious beliefs are outside the domain of science. On the one
hand, miracle stories and the promise of life after death are used to
impress simple people, win converts, and swell congregations. It is
precisely their scientific power that gives these stories their popular
appeal. But at the same time it is considered below the belt to subject
the same stories to the ordinary rigors of scientific criticism… these
are religious matters and therefore outside the domain of science. But
you cannot have it both ways. At least, religious theorists and
apologists should not be allowed to get away with having it both ways.
Unfortunately all too many of us, including nonreligious people, are
unaccountably ready to let them.
-Richard Dawkins
In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with
extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and
our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time,
our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus,
evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of
childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.
-Richard Dawkins
Who'd go back to astrology when they've sampled the real thing…
astronomy?
-Richard Dawkins
You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core
of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time
intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You
also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the
privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick
and their colleagues.
-Richard Dawkins
You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a
highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial
book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.
-Richard Dawkins
If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is
the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring
cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories, and parables help a bit. But
by far the most important variable determining your religion is the
accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would
have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of
convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different
place.
-Richard Dawkins
Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I
shall label them the know-nothings, the know-alls, and the
no-contests.
-Richard Dawkins
Biblical archaeology was developed early in this century in an effort to
substantiate the authenticity of the Biblical account. It's by now
generally recognized in Biblical scholarship that it has done the
opposite. The Bible is not a historical text, and has only vague
resemblances to what took place, as far as can be reconstructed.
-Richard Dawkins
I think there is a serenity that comes from understanding, from being
able to solve a mystery. And the bigger the mystery, the greater the
serenity. When you think about the diversity, complexity, and beauty of
life -- the elegance of the apparent design of life - it adds up to a
colossal mystery. And the solution, Darwin's solution, is quite
remarkably simple. My serenity comes from the satisfaction of seeing a
really, really neat, elegant explanation that can explain so much.
-Richard Dawkins
It comes, I'm sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You
won't find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated,
educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive
version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an
epidemic in the United States.
-Richard Dawkins
My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic
Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of
educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America.
Unfortunately, at present, it's slightly outnumbered by the ignorant,
uneducated people who voted Bush in.
-Richard Dawkins
It's said that the only rational stance is agnosticism because you can
neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural creator. I
find that a weak position. It is true that you can't disprove anything
but you can put a probability value on it. There's an infinite number of
things that you can't disprove: unicorns, werewolves, and teapots in
orbit around Mars. But we don't pay any heed to them unless there is some
positive reason to think that they do exist.
-Richard Dawkins
Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned
argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in
religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other
means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists
disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements.
They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same
is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
-Richard Dawkins
People brought up to believe in faith and private revelation cannot be
persuaded by evidence to change their minds. No wonder religious zealots
throughout history have resorted to torture and execution, to crusades
and jihads, to holy wars and purges and pogroms, to the Inquisition and
the burning of witches.
-Richard Dawkins
I suspect that today if you asked people to justify their belief in god,
the dominant reason would be scientific. Most people, I believe, think
that you need a god to explain the existence of the world, and especially
the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such
that many people don't know it.
-Richard Dawkins
A universe with a god would like quite different from a universe without
one. A physics, a biology where there is a god is bound to look
different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion
is a scientific theory.
-Richard Dawkins
We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in
it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humoring it as a
piece of harmless fun.
-Richard Dawkins
Consider this: If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal
demonstration of telepathy - precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation,
whatever it is - he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle
unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that
links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new fundamental force that
moves objects around a tabletop, deserves a Nobel Prize and would
probably get one. 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
The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd
enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans. The public
appetite for wonder can be fed, through the powerful medium of
television, without compromising the principles of honesty and
reason.
-Richard Dawkins
The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more
we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an
immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the
universe, and look around you and realize that before you die you have
the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and
about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the
opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors
ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to
blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to
understand.
-Richard Dawkins
I think it's important to realize that when two opposite points of view
are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie
exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply
wrong.
-Richard Dawkins
The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner
conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous… a conviction
that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which,
nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors
refer to such a belief as faith.
-Richard Dawkins
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only
theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the
existence of organized complexity.
-Richard Dawkins
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened
our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with
life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an
enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at
understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is
how I answer when I am asked - as I am surprisingly often - why I bother
to get up in the mornings.
-Richard Dawkins
What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When
has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not
obvious? What makes you think that theology is a subject at all?
-Richard Dawkins
Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense... it can be lethally dangerous
nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in
their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to
kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing
others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labeled only by a
difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all
bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal
criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!
-Richard Dawkins
Bush and Bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and
violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable
faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when
he dies, he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the
other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The
delusional next world is welcome to both of them. This world would be a
much better place without either of them.
-Richard Dawkins
It would be deeply depressing if the only way children could get moral
values was from religion. Either from scripture - and god knows we don't
want them to get it from scripture - I mean, just look at scripture. Or,
from being afraid of god, being intimidated by god. Anybody who is good
for only those two reasons is not really being good at all.
-Richard Dawkins
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are
never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential
people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never
see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly
those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater
than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by
our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of
these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are
here.
-Richard Dawkins
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the
theory that the earth goes round the sun.
-Richard Dawkins
Each generation is a filter, a sieve, good genes tend to fall through the
sieve into the next generation, bad genes tend to end up in bodies that
die young or without reproducing.
-Richard Dawkins
The genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants
and bacteria. All earthly living things are certainly descended from a
single ancestor.
-Richard Dawkins
There is no spirit - driven life force, no throbbing, heaving,
pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and
bytes of digital information.
-Richard Dawkins
I want to examine that dangerous thing that's common to Judaism and
Christianity as well: the process of non - thinking called faith.
-Richard Dawkins
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through
the power of institutions and the passage of time.
-Richard Dawkins
One of the things that are wrong with religion is that it teaches us to
be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
-Richard Dawkins
You've just said a very revealing thing. Are you telling me that the only
reason you don't steal and rape and murder is that you're frightened of
god?
-Richard Dawkins
There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of
reality.
-Richard Dawkins
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.
Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent
than their common ancestor with the Asian apes: the gibbons and
orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees,
gorillas, and orangutans but excludes humans.
-Richard Dawkins
I'm not a very good politician, and it doesn't really occur to me to
think about what's the best way to achieve something politically. If you
look at the historical struggle for women's suffrage, for example, women
who militantly campaigned for the right to vote were written off as
strident extremists, and people accused them of alienating the very
people whose support they should have been courting. But today, the idea
of women not being allowed to vote is preposterous. Would you be
moderate? Would you be respectful? You wouldn't.
-Richard Dawkins
Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently
damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and
unquenchable fires of hell?
-Richard Dawkins
If somebody believes that the world is only a few thousand years old,
when the true age of the Earth is of the order of a few billion years
old, which means they are out by a factor of a million... which is not a
trivial error.
-Richard Dawkins
Faith is belief in spite of evidence. I am against religion because it
teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
-Richard Dawkins
The god of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in
all fiction: jealous and proud of it: a petty, unjust, unforgiving
control-freak, a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a
misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal,
pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent
bully.
-Richard Dawkins
Life makes the wonders of technology seem commonplace. So where does life
come from? What is it? Why are we here? What are we for? What is the
meaning of life? There's a conventional wisdom which says that science
has nothing to say about such questions. Well, all I can say is that if
science has nothing to say, it's certain that no other discipline can say
anything at all. But in fact, science has a great deal to say about such
questions.
-Richard Dawkins
In any case, all creation, all design, all machines and houses and
paintings and computers and airplanes, everything designed and made by
us, everything made by other creatures, is only made possible because
there are already brains put together as designoid objects - and
designoid objects come about only through gradual evolution. Creation,
when it does occur in the universe, is an afterthought. When creation
appeared on this planet it came locally, and it came late. Creation does
not belong in any account of the fundamentals of the universe. Creation
is something that, rather late in the day, grows up in the
universe.
-Richard Dawkins
The truth
may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be
counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be
consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences
do not determine what's true.
-Carl Sagan
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some
thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I
want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural
traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it
is more than wishful thinking.
-Carl Sagan
The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there
is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's
little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is
to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but
magnificent opportunity that life provides.
-Carl Sagan
Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open
mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who
says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and
never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
-Carl Sagan
The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest
contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine,
a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of
falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of
-Carl Sagan
If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do
about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions
and by the depth of our answers.
-Carl Sagan
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to
suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
-Carl Sagan
The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right.
You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a
possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the
way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical.
I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about
every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're
called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.
-Carl Sagan
Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to god. God for
you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the
challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say god
did it.
-Carl Sagan
You see, the religious people - most of them - really think this planet
is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or
other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives,
giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children,
telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say,
making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why
can't the gods leave well enough alone?
-Carl Sagan
Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have
some privileged position in the Universe:, are challenged by this point
of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping
cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint
that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
-Carl Sagan
In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe.
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and
concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger
than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be
even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a
little god, and I want him to stay that way."
-Carl Sagan
It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in
delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
-Carl Sagan
Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy.
Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however
unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been
a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?
-Carl Sagan
A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even
simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the
freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from
authority are unacceptable.
-Carl Sagan
Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that
religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame
of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to
understand all things as a part of nature.
-Carl Sagan
I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience.
And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science
has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being
true.
-Carl Sagan
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a
really good argument... my position is mistaken," and then they would
actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them
again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should,
because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it
happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that
happened in politics or religion.
-Carl Sagan
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which
deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
-Carl Sagan
In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific
method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain
decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that
we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between
us and the enveloping darkness.
-Carl Sagan
Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum
star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe
in which there are far more galaxies than people.
-Carl Sagan
My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An
agnostic is somebody who doesn't believe in something until there is
evidence for it, so I'm agnostic.
-Carl Sagan
Religion
is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the
terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind
of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes.
Fear is the basis of the whole thing... fear of the mysterious, fear of
defeat, fear of death. Science can help us to get over this craven fear
in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us,
and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look round for
imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to
look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live
in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries
have made it.
-Bertrand Russell
If everything must have a cause, then god must have a cause. If there can
be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as god, so
that there cannot be any validity in that argument.
-Bertrand Russell
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who
cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that
he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face
this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his
opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are
disputed.
-Bertrand Russell
We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is
round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for
evidence.
-Bertrand Russell
It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish,
but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws. The power you acquire in
this way is much greater and more reliable than that formerly supposed to
be acquired by prayer.
-Bertrand Russell
The power of science has no known limits. We were told that faith could
remove mountains, but no one believed it. We are now told that the atomic
bomb can remove mountains, and everyone believes it.
-Bertrand Russell
To allow oneself to entertain pleasant beliefs as a means of avoiding
fear is not to live in the best way. In so far as religion makes its
appeal to fear, it is lowering to human dignity
-Bertrand Russell
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage. It does not need a
regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free
intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
-Bertrand Russell
Stalin's language is full of reminiscences of the theological seminary in
which he received his training. What the world needs is not dogma, but an
attitude of scientific inquiry, combined with a belief that the torture
of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity
imagined in the likeness of the believer.
-Bertrand Russell
Religion is based mainly on fear... fear of the mysterious, fear of
defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is
no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand.
-Bertrand Russell
What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
-Christopher Hitchens
Faith is the surrender of the mind. It's the surrender of reason. It's
the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other
mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and
our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith
in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me.
-Christopher Hitchens
I will not play with the toys. Don't bring the toys to my house. Don't
say my children must play with the toys. Enough with clerical and
religious bullying and intimidation.
-Christopher Hitchens
They [Islamo-fascists] gave us no peace and we shouldn't give them any.
We can't live on the same planet as them and I'm glad because I don't
want to. I don't want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and
murderers and rapists and torturers and child abusers. It's them or me.
I'm very happy about this because I know it will be them. It's a duty and
a responsibility to defeat them. But it's also a pleasure. I don't regard
it as a grim task at all.
-Christopher Hitchens
The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most
devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot
agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or
did.
-Christopher Hitchens
My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it
defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any
time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line,
and kiss my ass.
-Christopher Hitchens
I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title
again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and
its creator... that's beyond my conceit. I therefore have no choice but
to find something suspect even in the humblest believer. Even the most
humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit
in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke
Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick - Commanded to be
well."
-Christopher Hitchens
The death toll is not nearly high enough... too many Jihadists have
escaped.
-Christopher Hitchens
Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry
begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.
-Christopher Hitchens
My own
view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of
fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
-Voltaire
Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion
that has ever infected the world.
-Voltaire
Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in
horror.
-Voltaire
Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and
common sense.
-Voltaire
If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
-Voltaire
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-Voltaire
All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a
knowledge of god.
-Voltaire
All
religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual
immaturity of the human race, before it had learned the obligations to
speak the truth.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Faith means not wanting to know what is true.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner
of life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be
any answer to the question: What is truth?
-Friedrich Nietzsche
The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of
all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit... it is at the
same time subjection, a self-derision, and self-mutilation.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash
my hands.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
I'm what's
called here a "secular atheist," except that I can't even call myself an
"atheist" because it is not at all clear what I'm being asked to
deny.
-Noam Chomsky
How do I define god? I don't. Divinities have been understood in various
ways in the cultural traditions that we know. Take, say, the core of the
established religions today: the Bible. It is basically polytheistic,
with the warrior god demanding of his chosen people that they not worship
the other gods and destroy those who do -- in an extremely brutal way, in
fact. It would be hard to find a more genocidal text in the literary
canon, or a more violent and destructive character than the god who was
to be worshipped.
-Noam Chomsky
Do I believe in god? Can't answer, I'm afraid. I'm not being flippant,
but I don't understand the question. What is it that I am supposed to
believe or not believe in?
-Noam Chomsky
I don't see how one can "believe in organized religion." What does it
mean to believe in an organization? One can join it, support it, oppose
it, accept its doctrines or reject them. There are many kinds of
organized religion. People associate themselves with some of them, or
not, for all sorts of reasons, maybe belief in some of their
doctrines.
-Noam Chomsky
Religion
is comparable to childhood neurosis.
-Sigmund Freud
The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to
anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that
the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view
of life.
-Sigmund Freud
Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret
of being an out-and-out unbeliever.
-Sigmund Freud
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it
falls in with our instinctual desires.
-Sigmund Freud
Believing
there's no god means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and
faulty memories. That's good... it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I
have to try to treat people right the first time around.
-Penn Jillette
But we [Penn & Teller] are pro-science, and when you're pro-science,
that means you're an atheist, by definition, because religion... no
matter how much they put "10 Top Scientists Talk About Why They Believe
In God" on the cover of TIME magazine, you kind of have to look and go,
"How come these 10 top scientists are all teaching at community
colleges?"
-Penn Jillette
I think religion is a deadly threat to the survival of the species and to
the continued evolution of the brain.
-Penn Jillette
An atheist can still say he wishes it was true. It would be nice if it
was true. I can't see why it would be nice if it was true. I simply can't
see that. To have pre-cradle to post-grave round the clock supervision
and surveillance by someone with a very devious form of morality... who
wants this to be true? I'm delighted that there's no reason to think that
it's true. It's humanity's most obvious falsification.
-Penn Jillette
Atheists do look for answers to existence itself. They just don't make
them up.
-Penn Jillette
Others
Noteworthy intellectuals and public figures
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws,
to reputation... all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue,
even if religion vanished. But religious superstition dismounts all these
and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
-Francis Bacon
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours.
-Stephen Roberts
The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my profession. I could never
give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.
-Abraham Lincoln
When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my
religion.
-Abraham Lincoln
All thinking men are atheists.
-Ernest Hemmingway
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for
every noble enterprise.
-James Madison
I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious
theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals or of a
personal god.
-Thomas Edison
Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
The Bible and the church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the
way of women's emancipation.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails
of the last priest.
-Diderot
People should reject god defiantly in order to pour out all their loving
solicitude upon mankind.
-Albert Camus
I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many other of
the postulates of the orthodox church to which I cannot subscribe.
-William Howard Taft
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of
the improbable. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never
had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere
ass... he is actually ill.
-Henry Louis Mencken
I turned to speak to god,
About the world's despair,
But to make bad matters worse,
I found god wasn't there.
-Robert Frost
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing, all-powerful
god, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own
mistakes.
-Gene Roddenberry
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I
consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
-Kurt Vonnegut
Faith is believing something you know ain't true.
-Mark Twain
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false,
and by rulers as useful.
-Lucious Seneca
The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make
their dissent from religion known.
-John Stuart Mill
When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever
writing anything to equal it.
-Oscar Wilde
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or
Turkish appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify
and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
-Thomas Paine
At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human
malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity,
idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or
political idols.
-Aldous Huxley
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very
efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
-Bill Gates
A deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an
atheist.
-Diderot
It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is
proved.
-Galileo Galilei
Nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which
necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question,
much less condemned, upon the testimony of biblical passages.
-Galileo Galilei
It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the
Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and
experiment.
-Galileo Galilei
Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one
has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats
his feelings as tools of cognition.
-Ayn Rand
I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absented
myself from Christian assemblies.
-Benjamin Franklin
-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.
-Gene Roddenberry
At present there is not a single credible established religion in the
world.
-George Bernard Shaw
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for
every noble enterprise.
-James Madison
In many instances they have been upholding the thrones of political
tyranny. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the
liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty
have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries.
-James Madison
Where do we find a precept in the Bible for Creeds, Confessions,
Doctrines and Oaths, and whole carloads of other trumpery that we find
religion encumbered with in these days?
-John Adams
This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion
in it.
-Mark Twain
The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I
have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than
in the church.
-Ferdinand Magellan
It [the Bible] is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it, and some
clever fables, and some blood-drenched history, and some good morals, and
a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
-Mark Twain
The idea of god is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive
mankind.
-Marquis de Sade
The inspiration of the Bible depends on the ignorance of the person who
reads it.
-Robert Ingersoll
Fear believes, courage doubts. Fear falls up the earth and prays, courage
stands erect and thinks. Fear is barbarism, courage is civilization. Fear
believes in witchcraft, devils and ghosts. Fear is religion, courage is
science.
-Robert Ingersoll
Why should I allow that same god to tell me how to raise my kids, who had
to drown his own?
-Robert Ingersoll
I was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about
what god wants them to do to their fellows.
-Susan B. Anthony
I can very well do without god both in my life and in my painting, but I
cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I
am, which is my life, the power to create.
-Vincent Van Gogh
Religion is all bunk.
-Thomas Edison
I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul... No, all this talk of
an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is
born of our tenacity of life... our desire to go on living... our dread
of coming to an end.
-Thomas Edison
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have
never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
-Thomas Paine
it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a
proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that
certainty.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is
yielding to ignorance and false pretenses
-H. L. Mencken
In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating
the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as
originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of
thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge,
and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
-John Dewey
In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost
every case gotten at second hand, and without examination, from
authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but
have taken them at second hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions
about them were not worth a brass farthing.
-Mark Twain
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things
and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things,
that takes religion.
-Steven Weinberg
The world holds two classes of men: intelligent men without religion, and
religious men without intelligence.
-Abu'l Alaal Ma'arri
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours.
-Stephen Roberts
If there is a god, atheism must seem to him as less of an insult than
religion.
-Edmond de Goncourt
It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are
atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would
remain so.
-Ernestine Rose
I'm a polyatheist... there are many gods I don't believe in.
-Dan Fouts
I'm not an atheist. How can you not believe in something that doesn't
exist? That's way too convoluted for me.
-A. Whitney Brown
The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the
slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors! For my part, I would
say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! They convert the very name of
religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to
confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of
Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!
-Frederick Douglass
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of
nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts,
reflection combines them, experimentation verifies the result of that
combination.
-Diderot
Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in your name, and
beyond the grave they will find only death. But we will keep the secret,
and for their own happiness we will entice them with a heavenly and
eternal reward. Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No
science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they
will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves,
but feed us."
-The Grand Inquisitor to his savior in The Brothers Karamazov
Where knowledge ends, religion begins.
-Benjamin Disraeli
All religion is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination,
and poetry.
-Edgar Allen Poe
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.
-Benjamin Franklin
Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and
willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then
why call him god?
-Epicurus
If we go back to the beginning, we shall find that ignorance and fear
created the gods, that fancy enthusiasm or deceit adorned 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. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods,
the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
-Baron d'Holbach
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever
conceived.
-Isaac Asimov
I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god -
in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I
see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It's easier to
say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it,
have thought about it a great deal, and that it's an opinion I hold
seriously. It's funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a
view expressed so strongly.
-Douglas Adams
I do not believe in god, but as I sat there in the damaged capsule,
hopelessly vulnerable to the slightest shift in weather or mechanical
fault, I could not believe my eyes.
-Richard Branson
When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to
stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated
claims, religion.
-George Carlin
Organized religions in general, in my opinion, are dying forms. They were
all very important when we didn't know why the Sun moved, why weather
changed, why hurricanes occurred, or volcanoes happened, but modern
religion is the end trail of modern mythology. But there are people who
interpret the Bible literally. Literally!
-Bruce Willis
I'm not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific
elements of Christianity are not something I'm a huge believer in.
-Bill Gates
I don't believe in Heaven and Hell. I don't know if I believe in god. All
I know is that as an individual, I won't allow this life, the only thing
I know to exist, to be wasted.
-George Clooney
I'm completely a-religious... atheist. I find that people seem to think
religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it
detracts from both. It gives people the excuse to say, "Oh, nature was
just created", and so the act of creation is seen to be something
miraculous. I appreciate the fact that, "Wow, it's incredible that
something like this could have happened in the first place." I think we
can have morals without getting religion into it, and a lot of bad things
have come from organized religion in particular. I actually fear
organized religion because it usually leads to misuses of power.
-Linus Torvalds
I find it kind of distasteful having religions that tell you what you can
do and what you can't do. Catholicism is an example of that kind of
non-permissiveness, and I think that is very easy to get into if you are
an organized religion. Religion is a very strange idea. In Finland,
nobody cares.
-Linus Torvalds
I am an atheist. I don't understand religion at all. I'm sure I'll offend
a lot of people by saying this, but I think it's all nonsense.
-Andy Rooney
Christian fundamentalism is a result of a lack of education. They haven't
been exposed to what the world has to offer.
-Andy Rooney
No, of course I don't [believe in god] and anyone who tells you that
there is a god who make his or her presence known to him or her is
hallucinating or not telling the truth."
-Andy Rooney
Death is death, and the ego can't handle the consequences. We should all
struggle to the last to hold on to life, and religion encourages people
to give up on making this life work because the supposed next life will
be fairer. Religion is the source of too many of the world's worst
problems.
-Billy Joel
I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it
distorted by miracle stories. And so I gradually came to disbelieve the
whole religion.
-Richard Feynman
Another godless atheist for peace and world harmony
Atheism: a non-prophet organization.
Creationism? Holy shit.
Don't pray in my school. I won't think in your church.
Faith means not wanting to know what is true.
For Lent, I gave up superstitious mumbo jumbo.
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime. Give a man religion, and he will die praying for a fish.
I wouldn't trust your god even if he did exist.
If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing.
If god wanted people to believe in him, then why did he invent logic?
If we were made in his image, when why aren't humans invisible too?
Intelligent design: helping stupid people feel smart since 1987.
Jesus is coming? Don't swallow that.
Jesus saves… you from thinking for yourself.
People who don't want their beliefs laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs.
Praying is popular schizophrenia.
The family that prays together is brainwashing the children
There's a reason why atheists don't fly planes into buildings.
Too stupid to understand science? Try religion.
Worship me, or I will torture you forever. Have a nice day. -god
You say “heretic” like it was a bad thing.
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. I ran over and said, "Stop! Don't do it!"
He said, "Why shouldn't I?"
I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
He said, "Like what?"
I said, "Well, are you religious or atheist?"
He said, "Religious."
I said, "Me too! Are your Christian or Buddhist?"
He said, "Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
He said, "Protestant."
I said, "Me too! Are your Episcopalian or Baptist?"
He said, "Baptist!"
I said, "Wow! Me too! Are your Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?"
He said, "Baptist Church of God!"
I said, "Me too! Are your Original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"
He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God!"
I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?"
He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!"
I said, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed him off.
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