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You Don't Even Read My...

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Created on 2003-06-20 22:06:10 (#1132092), last updated 2009-07-04

33,837 comments received, 30,345 comments posted

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5,613 Journal Entries, 221 Tags, 30 Memories, 1 Virtual Gift, 2 Userpics

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Name:	Tyler Massey
Website:	International Hobo

Bio

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs -- as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

- Charles Darwin - The Descent of Man, 1871

Probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed. There is grandeur in this view of life that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
- Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species

I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower from, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.
- Charles Darwin - The Descent of Man, 1871

I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.

-Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

-Blaise Pascal (Pensees, 1670)

Ubi dubium ibi libertas:

Where there is doubt, there is freedom

-Latin proverb

God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, he is weak -- and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful -- which is equally foreign to god's nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?"

-Epicurus (from "The Epicurus Reader"

Doubt everything. Find your own light.

-Last words of Gotama Buddha, in Theravada tradition

Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.

-Hippocrates

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that once ignorance is put aside that wonderment would be taken away which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

-Spinoza

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

-George Washington (address to Congress, 8 January, 1790)

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!

-John Adams (letter to Thomas Jefferson, Sept. 3, 1816)

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.

-Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

-Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not.

-James Madison

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.

-Abraham Lincoln

I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes-- a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Where I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. . . I. . . hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.

-Frederick Douglass (After the Escape)

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

-Benjamin Disraeli

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.

-Mark Twain

The bible teaches that women brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire... Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.

-Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.

-Mohandas Gandhi (Young India, 1927)

Religion is a disease. It is born of fear; it compensates through hate in the guise of authority, revelation. Religion, enthroned in a powerful social organization, can become incredibly sadistic. No religion has been more cruel than the Christian.

-Dr. George A. Dorsey

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.

-Albert Einstein

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place then, for a creator?

--Stephen W. Hawking (A Brief History of Time)

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 on how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary."

-Stephen W. Hawking (Der Spiegel, 1989)

"For to dread death, O Athenians, is nothing else than to appear to be wise, without being so: since it is for a man to appear to know that which he does not know. For no one knows but that death may be to man the greatest of goods; but they dread it, as if they well knew that it is the greatest of evils. And how is it possible that this should not be a most disgraceful ignorance, I mean for a man to suspect that he has a knowledge of that of which he is ignorant? But I, O Athenians, differ perhaps in this from the multitude of men; and if I should say that I am wiser than some one in any thing, it would be in this, that not having a sufficient knowledge of the things in Hades, I also think that I have not this knowledge. But I know that to act unjustly, and to be disobedient to one more excellent, whether God or man, is evil and base. I shall never, therefore, fear and avoid things which for aught I know may be good, before those evils which I know to be evils."

--Socrates

"Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail."

--Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."

--Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"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 (1743-1826), letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820

"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 (1743-1826), letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."

--James Madison (1751-1836), address to the Virginia General Assembly, June 20, 1785

"In 1850, I believe, the church property in the United States, which paid no tax, amounted to $87 million. In 1900, without a check, it is safe to say, this property will reach a sum exceeding $3 billion. I would suggest the taxation of all property equally."

--President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."

--Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Have not all theists painted their deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. ... Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other."

--Emma Goldman (1869-1940), The Philosophy of Atheism, 1916

"I don't believe in God, because I don't believe in Mother Goose."

--Clarence Darrow

"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, (1879-1955), "Religion and Science", New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930

"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 (1879-1955), Albert Einstein: The Human Side, 1954

"Also, what is so hard about just saying the words 'I don't know'? 'I don't know'! Of course there are questions that plague all of us: how did we get here? What happens when we die? Is there a heaven? Am I on the list? Who let the dogs out? Yes. But why would you believe what some other human being, whose brain I promise you is no bigger or better than yours--when he tells you he knows what happens you die? 'Don't masturbate now--you won't get to hang out with Jesus in heaven. How do I know? I've got a pointy hat.'"

--Bill Maher, Victory Begins at Home

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