Positive Atheism's Big List of Quotations
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Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshiping mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group, they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action. They had rejected the soul-body dichotomy, with its two corollaries: the impotence of man's mind and the damnation of this earth; they had rejected the doctrine of suffering as man's metaphysical fate, they proclaimed man's right to the pursuit of happiness and were determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man's proper existence, by the "unaided" power of their intellect. If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.... The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind. Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves -- or whether it should be ours here and now and on this Earth. Do you believe in God, Andrei? Ferris: Are you going to be as impractical as that?
Bernstein: Rand Is One Of Our Greatest Heroes
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James Randi
To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage. I am in a very peculiar business: I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know. Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work. Religion is based upon blind faith supported by no evidence. Science is based upon confidence that results from evidence -- and that confidence can be modified and/or reversed by further observations and experimentation. Science approaches truth, closer and closer, by hard dedicated work. Religion already has it all decided, and it's "in the book. It's dogma, unchangeable, and unaffected by reality and whatever facts we come upon in the real world. There was a small boy on crutches. I do not know his name, and I suspect I never will. But I will never forget his face, his smile, his sorrow. He is one of the millions robbed of hope and dignity by charlatans discussed in this book. Wherever and whoever he is, I apologize to him for not having been able to protect him from such an experience. I humbly dedicate this book to him and to the many others who have suffered because the rest of us began caring too late. |
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Jonathan Rauch
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Its hero [Prometheus] was their friend, benefactor, creator, and savior, whose wrongs were incurred in their behalf, and whose sorrows were endured for their salvation. He was wounded for their transgressions, and bruised for their iniquities; the chastisement of their peace was upon him, and by his stripes they were healed. |
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Chet Raymo
I am a cautious pilgrim of the night, a tentative wanderer among the stars. My awareness of my home in the universe is fleeting and incomplete. Into the homeless home of the sun-faced buddha I have stepped but briefly. My quest, such as it is, is rewarded with faint lights and scrawny cries, a trait here and trait there, a hint of the infinite and a tingle in the spine. Of "minute particulars" I will make my way. |
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W Winwood Reade (1838-1875) One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature -- a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man. We live between two worlds; we soar in the atmosphere; we creep upon the soil; we have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds. There can be but one explanation of this fact. We are passing from the animal into a higher form, and the drama of this planet is in its second act. Christians believe themselves to be the aristocracy of heaven upon earth, they are admitted to the spiritual court, while millions of men in foreign lands have never been presented. They bow their knees and say they are 'miserable sinners,' and their hearts rankle with abominable pride. Poor infatuated fools! Their servility is real and their insolence is real but their king is a phantom and their palace is a dream. To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient
to faith, will inevitably fall. Buried cities are beneath our feet; the ground on which we tread is the pavement of a tomb. See the pyramids towering to the sky, with men, like insects, crawling round their base; and the Sphinx, couched
in vast repose, with a ruined temple between its paws. Since those great monuments were raised the very heavens have been changed. When the architects of Egypt began their work, there was another polar star in the northern sky, and the southern cross shone
upon the Baltic shores. How glorious are the memories of those ancient men, whose names are forgotten, for they lived and labored in the distant and unwritten past. Too great to be known, they sit on the height of centuries and look down on fame.... The
men are dead, and the gods are dead. Naught but their memories remain. Where now is Osiris, who came down upon earth out of love for man, who was killed by the malice of the evil one, who rose again from the grave and became the judge of the dead? Where
now is Isis the mother, with the child Horus in her lap? They are dead; they are gone to the land of the shades. To-morrow, Jehovah, you and your son shall be with them. If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed. |
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Probably in all history there is no instance of a society in which ecclesiastical power was dominant which was not at once stagnant, corrupt and brutal. |
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Salomon Reinach (1858-1932) Religion is a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties. As early as the second century BC, the Jews perceived the error and pointed it out to the Greeks; but the Church knowingly persisted in the false reading, and for over fifteen centuries she has clung to her error.. |
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John E Remsberg • Check our Big List of John E Remsberg Quotations While Jesus was at Jerusalem there came a voice from heaven. For what purpose was the voice sent? For the sake of those who stood by. "Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes" (John xii, 30). The Christ is a myth. The Holy Ghost Priestcraft overshadowed the harlot Superstition; this Christ was born; and the Joseph of humanity, beguiled by the Gabriel of credulity, was induced to support the family. But the soldiers of Reason have crucified the illegitimate impostor, he is dead; and the ignorant disciples and hysterical women who still linger about the cross should take his body down and bury it. The supernatural Christ of the New Testament, the god of orthodox Christianity, is dead. But priestcraft lives and conjures up the ghost of this dead god to frighten and enslave the masses of mankind. The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused. The darkest wrongs are still inspired by it. The wails of anguish that went up from Kishenev, Odessa, and Bialystok still vibrate in our ears. There is one element in Christianity which was not borrowed from Paganism -- religious intolerance. Referring to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taouism, a writer on China says: "Between the followers of the three national religions there is not only a total absence of persecution and bitter feeling, but a very great indifference as to which of them a man may belong.... Among the politer classes, when strangers meet, the question is asked: 'To what sublime religion do you belong,' and each one pronounces a eulogium, not on his own religion, but on that professed by the others, and concludes with the oft-repeated formula 'Religions are many; reason is one; we are all brothers.'" |
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Ernest Renan (1823-1892)
As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost. To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed. Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul. ("O Dieu, s'il y a un Dieu, sauvez mon âme, si j'ai une âme!")
For the historian, the life of Jesus finishes with his last sigh. But such was the impression he had left in the heart of his disciples, and of a few devoted women, that during some weeks more it was as if he were living and consoling them. Had his body been taken away or did enthusiasm, always credulous, create afterwards the group of narratives by which it was sought to establish faith in the resurrection? In the absence of opposing documents this can never be ascertained. Let us say, however, that the strong imagination of Mary Magdalene played an important part in the circumstance. Divine power of love! Sacred moments in which the passion of one possessed gave to the world a resuscitated God.
Sometimes they reasoned thus: "The Messiah ought to do such a thing, now Jesus is the Messiah, therefore Jesus has done such a thing." At other times, by an inverse process, it was said: "Such a thing has happened to Jesus; now Jesus is the Messiah; therefore such a thing was to happen to the Messiah." |
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Jules Renard (1864-1910) I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't. |
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Fredric L Rice
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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
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It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity.
If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a "moral commandment" is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
"In my judgment, Ayn Rand is one of the greatest heroes in the history of mankind. What makes her so? Look at the facts of her life: born, raised, educated in a dictatorship, she yearns for political freedom and, alone, defects to America. Raised in a culture dominated by Christianity, by the doctrine of man's sinfulness, she rejects it and fights for the glory of man's mind. Through years of exhausting effort, she writes two of the greatest novels in the history of world literature, struggles to get The Fountainhead published, sees Atlas Shrugged attacked by every major critic, without exception, but breaks through the hostility to achieve great commercial success. She formulates a revolutionary philosophy of reason and individualism, then gives lectures, writes essays and newspaper columns, appears on television and radio, publishes works of non-fiction and more -- in an attempt to reach out to her fellow man with what she knows is a life-giving philosophy. But many of her fellow men are uninterested or antagonistic. The Humanities professors, the literary critics, the educators, are almost unanimously opposed to her books and ideas; they attempt to stonewall her, to shut her out of the universities by means of silence or virulent attack -- but Ayn Rand's words can't be silenced and the philosophical movement she founded continues to slowly but surely grow in influence."
No amount of belief makes something a fact.
In a liberal scientific society, to claim that you are above error is the height of irresponsibility.
The new advocates of ID [Intelligent Design] ask that their ideas be judged by scientific, not religious, criteria. OK, let's see how well ID stacks up as a scientific alternative to Darwinism. To gauge how well ID is doing as a platform for scientific research, I logged into the best database of the biological literature. A search for keyword ''evolution'' yielded 24,000 hits in the last decade. A search for ''intelligent design'' yielded not a single piece of research. Evolution by natural selection remains the basis of every successful biological research program.
No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe them.
Human cruelty took the form of a pact with the deity. A solemn oath was made to kill everything, in which people forbade themselves any display of reason or compassion. A city or a land was devoted to destruction and it was believed an insult to God if one did not observe the abominable oath.
It is evident, indeed, that such a doctrine, taken by itself in a literal manner, had no future. The world, in continuing to exist, caused it to crumble. One generation of man at the most was the limit of its endurance. The faith of the first Christian generation is intelligible, but the faith of the second generation is no longer so. After the death of John, or of the last survivor, whoever he might be, of the group which had seen the master, the word of Jesus was convicted of falsehood.
His perfect kingdom of killing,
one you serve;
It's often been suggested that I, the Chairman of The Skeptic Tank, have an unhealthy obsession with what is negative and ignore the positive. Well that just may be true. From a historical perspective it can be undeniably stated that history teaches us that history teaches us nothing... that we are doomed to repeat history regardless of whether we learn the history of the world or not. It's also undeniably true that human nature, imbued upon the species through its evolutional development, seems Hell-bent upon willful self-deception and willful self-destruction simply because it feels good.... Indeed: I know of no more worthwhile effort than exposing destructive beliefs and ideologies and working to educate ignorance out of existance.... I hope that by exposing all that is destructive to humanity I can help others decide whether to ... reject human nature and strive for something beyond His petard.