"the human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves."
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a compilation of ideas,"religions demand faith and discourage attempts to verify their claims through test and experiment, and this fact is less surprising under atheism than theism.
rarely, if ever, do religious evangelists win converts by presenting the evidence for their faith in a rational manner. instead, they largely appeal to emotion and the bandwagon, encouraging others to join their belief system because it feels good to do so, regardless of whether it is supported by the facts. new members are then taught to maintain their belief not through continual testing, but through faith, which can be defined as belief in a proposition without sufficient justifying evidence. indeed, not only are believers not encouraged to test their faith, but they are generally taught that it is outright wrong to do so - that it is a sin to carry out an experiment whose results would enable them to distinguish whether their belief was true or untrue. such activities are generally grouped under the label "putting god to the test", and most holy books carry stern warnings against attempting it. some religions go even further by commanding their followers not to read arguments critical of the faith or have any contact with people who were once members but have since left the church. throughout human history, people have believed a great many ideas that in retrospect turned out to be wrong. however, what is most striking is the source of many of these incorrect ideas: with few exceptions, they ultimately emanated from religious scripture. the geocentric theory of the solar system; the Noachian deluge as an explanation for the geological record; the age of the earth estimated as 6000 years old; the separate ancestry and simultaneous appearance of all species; the belief in epidemic diseases as caused by human sin rather than poor hygiene; the intellectual inferiority of non-european races; all these and many more mistaken ideas trace their origins to religious beliefs arrived at through faith without testing."SIGMUND FREUD-
"religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.""spirits and demons, as i have shown in the last essay, are only projections of man's own emotional impulses. he turns his emotional cathexes into persons, he peoples the world with them and meets his internal mental processes again outside himself - in just the same way as that intelligent paranoic, Schreber, found a reflection of the attachments and detachments of his libido in the vicissitudes of his confabulated "rays of god."NIETZSCHE-
"what is the ape to men? a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. and just so shall man be to the superman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. you have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape."ANDRE COMTE-SPONVILLE-
"your life is not lying in wait in the future like a wild animal or some ominous destiny. nor is it hidden in the heavens, like a paradise or promise. nor is it shut up in the cave or the prison of your past. it is here and now; it is what you live and what you do. at the heart of being; at the heart of the present; at the heart of everything – in the great current of life, of reality."
kurt vonnegut sigmund freudgeorge carlinedgar morin