Science, Reason and Logic Rule: August 2013

Saturday, August 31, 2013

more quotes on religion

"Religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly

to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear

most irrational, and more senseless than beats themselves."

John Locke

“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 animals. 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. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God.”
― Annie Wood Besant, Annie Besant

“Believe those who are seeking the truth; and doubt those who find it.”
― Andre Gide

“The natural is so awesome that we need not go beyond it.”
― Ruth Hurmence Green, The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible

“A man without reason is no better than a mad dog, and mad dogs must be put down for the good of everyone.”
― James L. Sutter, Pathfinder Tales: Death's Heretic

“As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo

“I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…”
― David Attenborough

“What the mysterious is I do not know. I do not call it God because God has come to mean much that I do not believe in. I find myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me. Any idea of a personal God seems very odd to me.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography with Musings on Recent Events in India

“The whole war between the atheist and the theist comes down to this: the atheist believes a 'what' created the universe; the theist believes a 'who' created the universe.”
― Criss Jami

“gods always behave like the people who created them.”
― Zora Houston

“When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.”
― Yann Martel, Self

“I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural.”
― Andy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney

It is clear that humans are quite capable of killing with or without images of gods bouncing around in their heads. If anything, however, history suggests that the concept of gods makes the idea of massacring your fellow man (and women and children, too, of course) a lot easier to act upon.”
― Guy P. Harrison

“The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“Religion was (is) always steps ahead of science; because religion lies and science can’t.”
― M.F. Moonzajer

“It is not possible to be intellectually honest and believe in gods. And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist.”
― P.W. Atkins

goodreads.com

"Theories have four stages of acceptance.

i) this is worthless nonsense
ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view
iii) this is true, but quite unimportant
iv) I always said so."
J.B.S Haldane

quotes about religion

"All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician,
and ridiculous to the philosopher."
Lucretius

"The various modes of worship which prevail in the Roman world were all considered
by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate
as equally useful."
Edward Gibbon

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“All thinking men are atheists.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magick: Book 4, Liber ABA

“Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing "Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.”
― Dan Barker, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists

“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

“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”
― Edmond De Goncourt

“We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions god's infinite love.”
― Bill Hicks

“The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”
― Émile Zola

“Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?”
― Annie Dillard

“We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.”
― Stephen Hawking

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”
― Frederick Douglass

“I studied every page of this book, and I didn't find enough love to fill a salt shaker. God is not love in the Bible; God is vengeance, from Alpha to Omega.”
― Ruth Hurmence Green

“But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,' I said.
On the contrary - we are found!' said Aesop.
But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?'
Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood.”
― Erica Jong, Sappho's Leap

“The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.”
― Sam Harris

“While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Theology is ignorance with wings.”
― Sam Harris

“If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.”
― H.L. Mencken

“We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.”
― Andy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney

“If god created man in his own image, how come I'm not invisible?”
― David Powers

“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. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”
― Albert Einstein

“A strong saying is not afraid of criticism, because it includes all the answers to criticism.”
― Ilkin Santak

goodreads.com