|
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; 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
"And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways', Yossarian continued. 'There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'"- Joseph Heller
Catch22
"Atheism, in its basic form, is not a belief: it is the absence of belief. An atheist is not primarily a person who *believes* that a god does not exist, rather he does not believe in the existence of a god."- George Smith
Atheism: The Case Against God
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."- Carl Sagan
"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits."- Dan Barker
"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits."- Dan Barker
"Faith is not evidence."- FoxifiedNutjob
digg.com
"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense."- Chapman Cohen
"I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious."- Bertrand Russell
"I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine."- Charles Darwin
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty."- Albert Einstein
"I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil."- Albert Einstein
"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."- Galileo Galilei
"I don't see any god up here."- Yuri Gagarin
in orbit, 1961
"I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him."- Galileo Galilei
"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
"I regard [religion] as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others."- Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays
"If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."- Isaac Asimov
"It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion."- Albert Einstein
"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."- Albert Einstein
"Just because you "feel good" in your belief doesn't make it truth."- FoxifiedNutjob
digg.com
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance."- Oscar Wilde
"Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples' weakness, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate."- Mike Hermann
"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. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand."- Bertrand Russell
"Take care not to make the intellect our god; it has powerful muscles but no personality."- Albert Einstein
"There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is - in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree - it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime- the invention of Hell."- Mark Twain
Reflections on Religion
"This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves."- Robert G. Ingersoll
"This is the problem with debating creationists: You cannot reason a person out of position that they did not reason themselves into."- FoxifiedNutjob
digg.com
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."- Isaac Asimov
"Tradition is fundamentally flawed. It assumes someone, a long time ago, got things right."- M.D.
"We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship."- George Wald
U.S. biochemist
"When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion."- Abraham Lincoln
"When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?"- Thomas Sowell
|
