I'd like to meet:
Your God. Please. Humor me.
"It is better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however reassuring." [Carl Sagan]
"We are a nation of Christians, and Muslims, Jews, and Hindus — and non-believers." [Barack Hussein Obama - Inaugural Address, 20th of January, 2009]
"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." [Anne Lamott]
"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong." [Bertrand Russell]
"If there would be a single thing that we could do in the United States that would support global sustainability in the future, and the most possible options for our grandchildren and their grandchildren, it would be to bring our fellow citizens and ourselves to our senses about the fact that we live on a single planet Earth, with magnificent diversity run by people in something like 200 different nations, and that we all are managing this beautiful planet together. Promote a spirit of internationalism in the United States. Help people understand why it is that we depend on countries all over the earth, and do something about it -- in our schools, in all of our social groups, and in any way that we can." [Peter Raven (with Alan Alda on SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN FRONTIERS, "Forever Wild")]
"Faith is the determination to remain ignorant in the face of all evidence that you are ignorant." [Shaun Mason]
"Whatever we cannot easily understand we call god; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues." [Edward Abbey]
"We should allow only one kind of censorship: self-censorship. Devices for implementing self-censorship exist on all devices. TVs and radios have off-knobs; books have covers. Even the human body has built-in self-censorship devices: closed eyelids, fingers to plug ears, and closed minds to prevent one from even thinking about things." [Pelican the Politician]
"In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in god and in personal immortality." [Clarence Darrow]
"The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief." [George Bernard Shaw]
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion." [Steven Weinberg]
"Where is it written that if you don't like religion you are somehow disqualified from being a legitimate American? What was Mark Twain, a Russian? When did it become un-American to have opinions about the origin and meaning of the universe that come from sources other than the body of dogma of organizations approved by the federal government as certifiably Judeo-Christian? Is it American to believe that God ordered Tribe X to abjure port, or that he caused Leader Y to be born to a virgin, why is it suddenly un-American to doubt the prime mover of this unimaginably vast universe of quintillions of solar systems would likely be obsessed with questions involving the dietary and biosexual behavior of a few thousand bipeds inhabiting a small part of a speck of dust orbiting a third-rate star in an obscure spiral arm of one of millions of more or less identical galaxies?" [Hendrik Hertzberg]
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." [Benjamin Franklin]
"Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects." [James Madison (letter to William Bradford, Jr., January 1774)]
"As a non-believer, who do I give thanks to on Thanksgiving day? I give thanks to my parents, friends, and associates, but never to imaginary gods who have yet to produce a single benifit to mankind." [Ignots Pistachio]
"To date, despite the efforts of millions of true believers to support this myth, there is no more evidence for the Judeo-Christian god than any of the gods on Mount Olympus." [Joseph Daleiden]
"The vast majority of our universe is absolutely lethal. Our planet offers a minuscule oasis from the chaotically inhospitable conditions that exist everywhere we look. If our universe was specifically designed for intelligent life, the designer was a wasteful and incompetent moron." [John Bice]
"Religion will die out when we stop worrying about death." [Christopher Hitchens]
"Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiment in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy which has marked the present age would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination, so far that we should never again see their religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society." [George Washington]
"You can tell what's informing society by the size of the [building], what the building is, the tallest building in the place. When you approach a medieval town the cathedral's the tallest thing in the place. When you approach a 17th century city, it's the political power that's the tallest in the place. When you approach a modern city it's the office buildings and dwellings that are the tallest things in the place." [Joseph Campbell]
"Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine." [Arthur Schopenhauer]
"It used to be the case that we tended to excuse drunk drivers when they crashed because they weren't entirely in control of their faculties at the time, but now we have wisely inverted that judgment, holding drunk drivers doubly culpable for putting themselves in that irresponsible position in the first place. It is high time we inverted the public attitude about religion as well, finding all socially destructive acts of religious passion shameful, not honourable, and holding those who abet them - the preachers and other apologists for religious zeal - as culpable as the bartenders and negligent hosts who usher dangerous drivers on to the highways. Our motto should be: Friends don't let friends steer their lives by religion." [Daniel Dennett]
"What Christians love to call "New Atheism" is not new at all. It only seems new to them because atheism has been suppressed so long from their lives that they feel shocked to discover that lots of people disagree with them, people who do not own beliefs of gods and superstitions." [Ignots Pistachio]
"The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun." [Thomas Paine]
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" [Douglas Adams]
"Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived." [Oscar Wilde]
"There is a tendency for humans consciously to see what they wish to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive. For example, words that evoke anxiety, either because of an individual's personal history or because of experimental manipulation, require greater illumination before first being percieved." [Robert Trivers]
"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next." [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
"The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes." [Bertrand Russell]
"If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labelling our ignorance 'God'." [Jerry Coyne]
"I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it." [Albert Einstein]
"It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science." [Charles Darwin]
"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities." [Voltaire]
"Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one's intelligence and/or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold 'beliefs' of any kind." [Paul Bell, Mensa Magazine 2002]
"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. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism." [Albert Einstein]
"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." [Friedrich Nietzsche]
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish." [David Hume]
"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]
"Sociologists studying British children have found that only about one in twelve break away from their parents' religious beliefs." [Richard Dawkins]
"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]
"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]
"Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?" [Arthur C. Clarke]
"Feelings and thoughts concerning such a concept as race are real enough, and so, it may be pointed out, are feelings and thoughts concerning the existence of unicorns, pixies, goblins, satyrs, ghosts, Jews, blacks, Catholics, and foreigners in general. Endowing a feeling or a thought about something with a name and thereby imputing to that something a real existence is one of the oldest diversions of humankind. Humans impose on nature the limitations of their own minds and identify their views with reality itself. Pixies, ghosts, satyrs, Aryans, and the popular conception of race represent real enough notions, but they have their origin in traditional stories, myths, or imagination. Language, especially seduces us into believing that every noun is a thing, that things are enduing and permanent. Error, imagination, emotion, and rationalization are among the chief components of these notions. Facts, it should always be remembered, do not speak for themselves, but invariably through an interpreter. The word "fact" (facere) originally meant a thing made; we still make our own "facts," but fail to realize how much of ourselves we put into them or how much others have put into them." [Ashley Montagu (Dangerous Myth: the fallacy of Race)]
"Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies." [Thomas Jefferson]
"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile." [Kurt Vonnegut]
"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. . . . 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." [Bertrand Russell]
THE FOUR HORSEMEN
