Positive Atheism's Big List of Quotations
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Helen H Gardener (1853-1925)
It is a significant fact that, of all the Christian countries, in those where the church stands highest, and has most power, women rank lowest, and have fewest rights accorded them, whether of personal
liberty or proprietary interest. This religion and the Bible require of woman everything, and give her nothing. They ask her support and her love, and repay her with contempt and oppression. [T]here is no book which tells of a more infamous monster than the Old Testament, with its Jehovah of murder and cruelty and revenge, unless it be the New Testament, which arms its God with hell, and extends his outrages throughout all eternity! It is thought strange and particularly shocking by some persons for a woman to question the absolute correctness of the Bible. She is supposed to be able to go through this world with her eyes shut, and her mouth open wide enough to swallow Jonah and the Garden of Eden without making a wry face.... That she [woman] does not crouch today where St Paul tried to bind her, she owes to the men who are grand and brave enough to ignore St Paul, and rise superior to his God. The bible teaches that a father may sell his daughter for a slave [Ex. xxx, 7], that he may sacrifice her purity to a mob [Judges xix, 24; Gen. xix, 8], and that he may murder her, and still be a good father and a holy man. It teaches that a man may have any number of wives; that he may sell them, give them away, or swap them around, and still be a perfect gentleman, a good husband, a righteous man, and one of God's most intimate friends; and that is a pretty good position for a beginning. It teaches almost every infamy under the heavens for woman, and it does not recognize her as a self-directing, free human being. It classes her as property, just as it does a sheep: and it forbids her to think, talk, act, or exist, except under conditions and limits defined by some priest. Every injustice that has ever been fastened upon women in a Christian country has been "authorized by the Bible" and riveted and perpetuated by the pulpit. Do you think that was kind? Do you think it was godlike? What would you think of a physician, if a woman came to him distressed and said, "Doctor, come to my daughter, she is very ill. She has lost her reason, and she is all I have!" What would you think of the doctor who would not reply at all at first, and then, when she fell at his feet and worshiped him, answered that he did not spend his time doctoring dogs? Would you like him as a family physician? Do you think that, even if he were to cure the child then, he would have done a noble thing? Is it evidence of a perfect character to accompany a service with an insult? Do you think that a man who could offer such an indignity to a sorrowing mother has a perfect character, is an ideal God? |
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John W Gardner
In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent community and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today we cannot count on any such inheritance. People run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more -- not in this transient, rootless society. Your identity is what you have committed yourself to. You build meaning into your life through your commitments -- whether to your religion, to your conception of an ethical order, to your family, group or community, to the rights of others, to unborn generations. |
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Martin Gardner When reputable scientists correct flaws in an experiment that produced fantastic results, then fail to get those results when they repeat the test with flaws corrected, they withdraw their original claims. They do not defend them by arguing irrelevantly that the failed replication was successful in some other way, or by making intemperate attacks on whomever dares to criticize their competence. |
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Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither justice nor freedom can be permanently maintained. Its interests are intrusted to the States and the voluntary action of the people. Whatever help the nation can justly afford should be generously given to aid the States in supporting common schools; but it would be unjust to our people and dangerous to our institutions to apply any portion of the revenues of the nation or of the States to the support of sectarian schools. The separation of Church and State in everything relating to taxation should be absolute. In my judgment, while it is the duty of Congress to respect to the uttermost the conscientious convictions and religious scruples of every citizen ... not any ecclesiastical organization can be safely permitted to usurp in the smallest degree the functions and powers of the national government. |
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Gene Garman
From its beginning the principle has often been expressed in terms of "separation of church and state." However, those are not the terms used in the Constitution; rather, the word in the Constitution is "religious" and the word in the First Amendment is "religion." As a strict constructionist of the Constitution, I submit it is a "religious" test for public office which is prohibited (not a church test) and it is "religion" which is prohibited from being established by law (not a church). The Court has effectively rewritten the Establishment Clause from "no law respecting an establishment of religion," to "no law respecting establishment of an excessive entanglement with religion." The distortion approved in Lemon (403 US 602, 1971) should be rejected, but that is another essay. In America, every citizen may believe about religion whatever he or she chooses, but no one has a right to actions in the name of religion which violate the law. The last version of the religion clauses as presented by the House is worded as follows: "Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience." The last version of the Senate reads: "Congress shall make no law establishing articles of faith or a mode of worship, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion." Neither final proposal uses the word national. In fact, the House version speaks of establishing "religion," and the Senate speaks of establishing "articles of faith." The majority of members of the First Congress intended that Congress would have no authority to make any law establishing "religion" or "articles of faith," terms much broader than merely a "national" church. The majority in the First Congress intended for the Establishment Clause to prohibit more than an official church or a national religion. The record of history shows that a majority in the First Congress wanted the Establishment Clause to read that "Congress shall make no law" establishing religion, articles of faith, or a mode of worship. The historical record does not support Justice Rehnquist's notion that the Framers of the Establishment Clause simply intended to "prohibit the designation of any church as a 'national' one." Through their representatives, the American people amended the Constitution to read that "religion" would not be established by law, a term that, though including a prohibition on a "national church," certainly extends beyond it. When Christian fundamentalists want to appear open-minded they refer to America as a Judeo-Christian nation or a nation built on Judeo-Christian principles. However, there is not one Christian fundamentalist who believes that Jews are going to Heaven or that Judaism is worthy of spiritual respect in this world -- because Judaism rejects the divinity of Jesus. Christian fundamentalists use the Jewish name only to abuse it. |
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The totalitarian church-state is always intolerant. Staking its very existence upon the hypothesis that everybody within its jurisdiction must conform to the approved patterns, it uses whatever means seem to be necessary to secure that end. |
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Bill Gates
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning. |
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Edwin S Gaustad, PhD Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other. What good deed can government do for religion? The best deed of all: leave it free and unencumbered, burdened by neither enmity nor amity. Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion -- natural religion, that is -- as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete. In America, religious dissent is as vital as it is elusive. Like the secretions of the pituitary, the juices of dissent are essential to ongoing life even if we do not always know precisely how, when or where they perform their tasks, and the not knowing -- the flimsy, filmy elusiveness -- is supremely characteristic of America's expressions of religious dissent. For in the United States no stalwart orthodoxy stands ever ready to parry the sharp thrust or clever feints of dissent. No National Church resists or restrains the indigenous as well as the imported gift for schism. |
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Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
To the philosophical eye the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues. The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her natural purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings. The fierce and partial writers of the times, ascribing all virtue to themselves, and imputing all guilt to their adversaries, have painted the battle of the angels and the demons. |
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André Gide (1869-1951)
The very act of sacrifice magnifies the one who sacrifices himself to the point where his sacrifice is much more costly to humanity than would have been the loss of those for whom he is sacrificing himself. But in his abnegation lies the secret of his grandeur. |
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
The soaring, imaginative minds of men, constructing lofty, shimmering piles of abstract thought, and taking as their postulate a revelation from God, gaveus relgions which coule not possible maintained without belief and obedience: ... we find them most permanent and changeless among people who make the least effort to swquare their beliefs with the laws of life. If we once admit that our life is here for the purpose of race-improvement, then we question any religion which does not improve the race, or the main force of which evaporates, as it were, directing our best efforts toward the sky.... Improvement in the human race is not accomplished by extracting any number of souls and placing them in heaven, or elsewhere. It must be established on earth, either through achievement in social service, or through better children. [Let us inquire] what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants? One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man's original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race. A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world. What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women? We grovel and "worship" and pray to God to do what we ourselves ought to have done a thousand years ago, and can do now, as soon as we choose. The peculiarity of all death-based religions is that their subject-matter is entirely outside of facts. Men could think and think, talk and argue, advance, deny, assert, and controversy, and write innumerable books, without being hampered at any time by any fact.... One and all, religions have their original prophets, their sacred books, their traditions of ages gone. One and all require us to accept without question what other people long dead have said or written; to obey without question the commands of those behind us.... No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, "This is our best thought, go on, think farther!" then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate. There's heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People, free to come together, and in beauty -- for growth. |
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If a person holds irrational ideas and insists that others should accept them because of their authoritative source, he should never agree to be questioned about them. |
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Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944)
Only the mediocre are always at their best. |
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Josiah William Gitt (1884-1973) Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have know little progress, indeed. |
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Glanville, Joseph (1636-1680) And the will therin lyeth, which dyeth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things through the nature of its intentness. Man doth not yeild himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. |
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John Stuart Glennie In ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, we find the worship of a divine mother and child. In ancient Osirianism as in modern Christianism, there is a doctrine of atonement. In ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, we find the vision of a last judgment, and resurrection of the body. And finally, in ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, the sanctions of morality are a lake of fire and torturing demons on the one hand, and on the other, eternal life in the presence of God. |
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The Subtle Fulmination of the Encircled Sea Please Feel Free Grab some quotes to embellish your web site, Use them to introduce the chapters of a book or Poster your wall! Graffiti your (own) fence. That's what this list is for! In using this resource, however, keep in mind that If you decide to build your own online
There's something to be said | |||||||||||
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