Random Notes / Quotes Flashcards
All accomplishment is transient. Strive unremittingly.
There is surprisingly little cynicism in and about work. Even the mildest scepticism about redundant meetings is likely to be dismissed as outrageously cynical. Similarly there is little overt despair at the prospect of spending so much of life in a partition-board cubicle trying to keep the number of unanswered emails to less than 500.
The idea that the Creator is on your side, guiding your footsteps, taking a personal interest in your troubles, deriving pleasure from your victories, providing solace in your defeats…
Believing in something beyond the self can have a hugely beneficial psychological impact, even if the belief is fallacious.
Break the intergenerational cycle of the transmission of religious ideas.
Is ‘science’ incomparably the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged upon’?
God is basically an invention, dreamed up by human beings to provide metaphysical and spiritual consolation (Feuerbach)
The validity of religious belief can neither be substantiated nor refuted by scientific reasoning.
Our beliefs may be shown to be justifiable, without thereby demonstrating that they are proven.
Scientific theories cannot be said to ‘explain the world’ - only to explain the phenomena which are observed within the world
One of the greatest disservices that Dawkins has done to the natural sciences is to portray them as relentlessly and inexorably atheistic.
For the gullible and credulous it is the confidence with which something is said that persuades rather than evidence offered in its support.
Religion cannot be reduced to an unambiguous good or evil. A claim to knowledge needs to be substantiated; ignorance need only be confessed.
Logic and facts can only take us so far; then we have to go the rest of the way toward belief. Human logic may be rationally adequate but it’s also existentially deficient. Faith declares there’s more to life than this. It doesn’t contradict reason but transcends it. It elicits and invites rational consent but does not compel it.
Ignorance is nothing shameful; but imposing ignorance is shameful
Decades of research has proved that groups usually come to conclusions that are more extreme than the average view of the individuals who make up the group. When like-minded people get together and talk, their existing views tend to become more extreme.
The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and superstitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity.
Nothing should be above ridicule.
You also suffer from a confirmation bias that causes you to seek out information that confirms your worldview while avoiding and ignoring threatening information. Over time, this creates a bubble in which it seems there is a monumental amount of consensus for your beliefs.
To find meaning in life through children is effectively to foist the existential dilemma on the next generation, which will presumably foist it onto the next, and no one ever has to justify why we’re here. Take individual fulfilment at the expense of parenthood to the limit, and one generation has a cracking good time, after which the entire human race disappears.
The good thing about science is that it’s true whether you believe it or not.
I dwell in possibility (Emily Dickinson)
Every unpopular scientific breakthrough in history has said that humans are not at the centre of things. The planet is in orbit around the sun. Some people still don’t want to believe the world is as old as it is because that would mean having to accept the truth that humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.
Your life will have 30,000 days in it. Make sure you remember some of them.
It’s not the length of life that matters. It’s the depth.
Mark Twain:
The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible.
The Bible – it is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
The 2 most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
It’s not the parts of the bible which I don’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do.
The early 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of existentialism. He maintained that the individual is solely responsible for giving her or his own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom.
Human beings show far too great a propensity to accept ideas that are in circulation where they happen to have grown up and reject those that are foreign or alien.
One of the most basic beliefs I have is that human beings are essentially physical animals, and that they cannot survive the death of their brain.
There is no need to gather every day to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness.
By definition, one may not be compelled into altruism.
Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell, unless it is the sorely limited mind that has failed to describe heaven - except either as a place of either worldly comfort, eternal tedium or continual relish in the torture of others.
Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then what is the source of evil?
Disagree with me in a well-informed way
We generally derive our knowledge from 4 sources: our senses, our powers of rational thought, the testimony of others, and our memory. The first obvious thing to note about all these sources is that they are fallible.
The ability of God to contravene the laws of nature in order to achieve his will is asserted by all the major religious traditions.
Theologians must affirm that God does act through miraculous interventions in nature, then they must explain why God acts on these occasions but not on numerous others; why miracles are so poorly attested; and how they are supposed to be compatible with our scientific understanding of the universe.
If God is only to be found in special occasional acts, then he must be supposed to be absent from the world the majority of the time.
Does the success of science in explaining nature in terms of such laws amount to proof that God cannot act in nature?
However generous we wish to be about the strength of evidence in favour of miracles - that is, the reports of supposed eye-witnesses to the events, such as those recorded in the scriptures and in lives of saints - that testimony will never be as strong as the evidence that supports the laws of nature.
If you have never witnessed a miracle, that will probably be the most significant obstacle to your believing that such a thing can occur.
Why is one person miraculously cured while another of equal faith and virtue suffers and dies? We might say that God moves in a mysterious way, but is that a good enough response?
Divine inaction is just as hard to explain as divine action.
Creationists base their resistance to evolution at least partly on the authority of their sacred text.
Biblical inerrancy is the view that the Bible is the Word of God and is in every detail infallible and without error.
Religion exacts maximum servility and abjection, requiring you to regard yourself as conceived and born in sin and owing a duty to a stern creator.
I presume that you have some respect for intellectual honesty and moral courage and that you would look with more favour on somebody who made an honest profession of unbelief, than on someone who acceded to belief in you in the hope of a handout. (Christopher Hitchens).
We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them as long as we persist in self-centredness, or are afraid of the dark or fear of death.
It is prudent to recall that at the end of the 19th century the general opinion amongst physicists was that nothing of any great importance remained to be done in physics. And then came radioactivity, X-rays, the discovery of the electron and the nucleus, quantum mechanics and relativity, antimatter, dark matter, black holes, the Big Bang.
The real test of a scientific theory is is not whether it’s true. The real test is if it works.
I am willing to accept conclusions that are unwelcome to me, based on the evidence – such as the entropic heat death of the universe.
Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you. (Christopher Hitchens)
The pluralism of religion is attributable to the fact that man created God and not the other way round. If you accept the postulate that man makes Gods there is no mystery in the proliferation of Gods that has always existed in human society. If you, on the other hand accept the idea that God made man, such a phenomenon is inexplicable.
If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favour (Voltaire)
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people (Karl Marx)
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived (Isaac Asimov)
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. (Richard Dawkins)
One of the most fundamental inconsistencies in theoretical physics - our inability to cast Einstein’s general relativity in a form that can be combined with laws of quantum mechanics to result in sensible predictions about how the universe behaves on its very smallest scales.
Does belief in life after death conflict with modern brain science? Is belief in the bible incompatible with believing that humans and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor? Does belief in miracles conflict with the strictly law-governed world revealed by the physical sciences? Or can belief in free will and divine action be supported and substantiated by the theories of quantum mechanics? Science-Religion debates are about the issues of intellectual compatibility.
Until an amazingly recent date, science would not have compelled you to face the absurd consequences of your faith in quite this way.
I never tire of drawing attention to society’s tacit acceptance of the labelling of small children with the religious opinions of their parents. There is no such thing as a Christian child. Only a child of Christian parents.
We should scale down our vanity to fit the tiny stage on which we play out our lives - our speck of debris from the cosmic explosion. Geology reminds us of our brief existence both as individuals and as a species.
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
Adherents of scriptural authority show distressingly little curiosity about the highly dubious historical origins of their holy books.
As we understand the great diversity of faiths in the world, the historical events and forces that shapes their doctrines and sacred texts, and the fallibility of many of their leaders, the idea that they provide direct access to absolute truth loses its credibility.
We cannot accept religious teachings unquestioningly.
In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment amongst 170 billion galaxies; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of the speck our planet Earth is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water (known as humans), of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical qualities, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.
This is a faith that a God we cannot know to exist has a purpose we cannot discern for an afterlife we have no evidence is to come.
The person who sacrifices too much enjoyment of life to serve the purpose of future wealth and security is making the mistake of overestimating the extent to which his future life will be better than that he could have now.
We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or the dark, and for as long as we persist in self-centredness.
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom in the pursuit of truth.
There are 2 ways of conquering fear: one is by persuading ourselves that we are immune from disaster, and the other is by the practice of sheer courage.
Under the influence of great fear, almost everybody becomes superstitious. Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Adults do generally believe in gods. That such beliefs begin in childhood and typically endures into adulthood places it in the same class as believing in the permanence of solid objects, the continuity of time, the predictability of natural laws, the fact that causes precede effects.
In the long run almost all religious movements fail.
One of the most persistent but hidden prejudices tied to religion is intolerance of atheists. Intolerance of atheists is driven by the intuition that people behave better if they feel that a God is watching them.
While atheists think of their disbelief as a private matter of conscience, believers treat their absence of belief in supernatural surveillance as a threat to cooperation and honesty.
One has nothing to fear and everything to gain, from the honest pursuit of truth. The desire for knowledge, for facts unvarnished by emotional prejudices and so forth, will always function for a man’s long-range benefit. It can never be against your interest to know what the truth is.
The theist asserts an affirmative proposition; he asserts that a god or gods exist. The burden of proof falls entirely upon the theist to prove or demonstrate the reasonableness of that claim. It is not up to me or to you as an atheist to demonstrate that a god does not exist.
Watched people are nice people.
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.
Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
There is involved here a certain emotional vested interest in hoping what you devoted all this time to has some merit to it. You run into this problem not only with mystics, but also professors of theology. Can you imagine going through a seminary, going through years of theological training, having your livelihood depend on it, only to say one day, “Well, I guess this is all just a waste of time. It’s nonsense.” It’s very difficult to do that kind of thing and it takes an extraordinarily independent mind to be able to go against the grain of so much vested interest.
Even if a belief in God had a reliable, positive effect upon human behaviour, this would not offer a reason to believe. Even if atheism led straight to moral chaos, this would not suggest that the doctrine of Christianity is true.
We often engage in a kind of tacit chronological exceptionalism. Unlike all those suckers who fell for the flat Earth or the geocentric universe or cold fusion, we ourselves have the great good luck to be alive during the very apex of accurate human thought.
The habit of equating one’s age with the apogee of civilisation, one’s town with the hub of the universe, one’s horizons with the limits of human awareness, is paradoxically widespread.
We ignore or resist the fact that knowledge collapses as often as it accretes, that our own most cherished beliefs might appear patently false to posterity.
Humans tend to be better at remembering evidence which is consistent with their beliefs - confirmation bias.
Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity.
My own mind is my own church. It is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself.
Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man. It is revelation to the 1st person only, hearsay to everyone else.
The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and yet it remains to reason and philosophy to abolish this amphibious fraud.
To charge the commission of things upon the Almighty which in their own nature, and by every rule of moral justice, are crimes, as all assassination is, and more especially the assassination of infants, is a matter of serious concern. The Bible tells us that those assassinations were done by the express command of God. To believe the Bible to be true, we must unbelieve all our belief in the moral justice for God. If I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous, than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.
The authenticity of the books of the Bible rests upon the certainty that they were written by the authors and the credit we give to their testimonies.
The degree of evidence necessary to establish our belief of things naturally incredible, whether in the Bible or elsewhere, is far greater than that which obtains our belief to natural and probable things.
Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity.
It has been by wandering from the immutable laws of science, and the light of reason, and setting up an invented thing called “revealed religion” that so many wild and blasphemous conceits have been formed.
Most of the people in this world believe that the Creator has written a book.
Faith is nothing more than a willingness to await the evidence. It is the search for knowledge on the installment plan: believe now, live an untestable hypothesis until your dying day, and you will discover that you were right.
The fact the unjustified beliefs can have a consoling effect on human behaviour is no argument in their favour.
Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each.
The fact of death is intolerable, and faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life beyond the grave.
We must remember that it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the germ theory of disease emerged, laying to rest much superstition about the causes of illness.
Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment.
Wherever conviction grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the very basis of human cooperation.
There need be no scheme of rewards and punishments transcending this life to justify our moral intuitions or to render them effective in guiding our behaviour in the world.
If you have ever argued with a religious devotee you’ll notice that his self-esteem and pride are involved. Allegiance is a powerful force.
To claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that’s beyond my conceit.
Christians declare me redeemed by a human sacrifice that occurred thousands of years before I was born. I didn’t ask for it but there it is. I’m claimed and saved whether I like it or not. And if I refuse this unsolicited gift? Well, there are still some vague mutterings about an eternity of torment for my ingratitude.
You may take on another man’s debt but you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own. This impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. The whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral.
If you are an enlightened individual, in Kant’s sense, then you are not cowed and afraid, mindlessly accepting the pronouncements of tradition and authority. You are courageous; you dare to apply your own powers of reason; you dare to think for yourself.
Which is more likely - that the whole natural order is suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie?
There still remain 4 irreducible objections to religious faith: it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.
Religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with authority.
We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to make way for.
We do not need any machinery of reinforcement. No spot on earth is or could be holier than another.
How much vanity must be concealed in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?
How much contortion is required to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with revelation?
Nothing optional, like adultery, is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting have a repressed desire to participate.
Scepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
Do I believe that a particular religious tradition holds accurate knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality and the purpose of human life?
There is no universally compelling, empirical or philosophical evidence for the existence of God, a purposeful universe or life after death.
Believers refuse to consider the reasonableness of doubt; nonbelievers refuse to consider the feeling of faith. There is a kind of mutual blindness as if personal affiliation with one camp or another means more than does interest in the truth.
The Socratic method is an eternal questioning. This is not relativism; there is truth to be found, but human beings may best approach it through doubt rather than conviction.
The human predicament is very difficult to hold in one’s mind; there is a natural forgetfulness that pulls one into the day-to-day works with all it’s frustration and emotional pain.
Religion was our first attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best our species could do when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that our planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that microorganisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous.
History has no record of any human being who was remotely qualified to say that he knew or understood the mind of god.
The importance of Man, which is the one indispensable dogma of the theologians, receives no support from a scientific view of the future of the solar system.
How moral is the following? I am told of a human sacrifice that took place 2000 years ago without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder my own sins are forgiven, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life. My own guilt in the matter is deemed ‘original’ and inescapable. However I am still granted free will with which to reject the offer of vicarious redemption. Should I reject this choice, however, I face an eternity of torture.
The collectivisation of guilt is immoral in itself, as religion has been occasionally compelled to admit.
If we accept biblical inerrancy we must conclude that much of what we take to be morally evil is in fact morally permissible.
The core religious teaching of Christianity takes Jesus to be a scapegoat for humanity. The practice of scapegoating contradicts the whole moral principle of personal responsibility. It also contradicts any moral idea of God.
Religious morality tends to replace the characteristically moral motives, by a purely selfish concern for God’s own happiness, the desire to avoid divine punishments and to enjoy the rewards of God’s favour, in this life or in afterlife. This divine command view can also lead people to accept, as moral, requirements that have no discoverable connection with human purposes or well-being. That is, it can foster a tyrannical, irrational morality.
There is no such reliable revelation. Even a Christian must see that the purported revelations, such as the Bible, condemn themselves by enshrining rules which we must reject as narrow, out-dated, or barbarous. The usual argument put forward is one of understanding the “context” in which it is written. And yet God is meant to be immutable and eternal, directly refuting this.
There is a strain in religion that positively welcomes sin as a precondition for salvation.
How could the Inquisition be a bad idea if the Bible is right? It was not a perversion of Christian doctrine, it was an expression of it.
We think we know what success means. It’s important to be very nuanced at defining success. Any vision of success has to admit what it’s losing out on. Where is the element of loss? The idea of what it means to be successful are sometimes not our own - chiefly our parents. We are highly open to suggestion.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful (Seneca)
I do not believe in any religion. I will have nothing to do with immortality. We are miserable enough in this life without speculating upon another (Lord Byron)
Civilisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church falls on the last priest.
The reason people believe is less to do with the idea of death and survival of death and rewards in heaven and punishments in hell and more of a cosmic loneliness. It’s hard for people to accept that we are alone and that nobody cares outside of ourselves. God is a wonderful antidote to this.
What of Copernicanism, the notion that the more we learn about the universe the less important we become? Modern science, traditionally considered guilty of reducing our existence to a pointless accident in an indifferent universe, is actually saying the opposite. We are a rare accident and thus not pointless.
Life on Earth doesn’t arise in fulfilment of a grand scheme but as a by-product of the increase of entropy in an environment very far from equilibrium.
The Earth is not in any privileged position in the solar system. There is also no reason to believe that we are specially located in time.
Science is inexorably revisionary, learning from its mistakes, erasing and rewriting even it’s most sacred texts, until the puzzle is complete.
The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.
Many people make very silly inferences, because the lack of certainty is perceived as a sign of weakness instead of being what it is - the first source of our knowledge.
The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don’t - they make and test models. Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It’s a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or destination to reach.
Is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our scepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal?
To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good for the world? And asking yourself all the while, are these really religious responsibilities, as I maintain they are? To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world, and can you name me a religion that has not done that? To insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence. To say that certain books of legend and myth, man-made and primitive, are revealed not man-made code.
On the shoulders of the kindest, best intentioned, gentle believers stand row upon row of increasingly nasty people with ‘unquestionable’ ethics, ancient books which they ‘know’ to be true and a very quiet God who likes to leave most of his ideas open to interpretation and metaphor.
For millennia, the major theories of nature have come from religion. The Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, offers explanations for much of the subject matter now studied by psychology and biology. Humans are made in the image of God and are unrelated to animals. Women are derivative of men and are destined to be ruled by them. The mind is an immaterial substance; it has powers possessed by no purely physical structure, and can continue to exist when the body dies. The mind has an innate tendency to choose sin. Mental health comes from recognising God’s purpose, choosing good and repenting sin, and loving God and one’s fellow humans for God’s sake.
An enormous proportion of all human activity is designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man. (Ernest Becker)
Thinking and feeling are what brains and bodies do. The mind should not be thought of a substance but as a kind of activity.
“In heaven, all of the interesting people are missing.” (Nietzsche)
When inventing a god the most important thing is to claim it is invisible, inaudible and imperceptible in every way. Otherwise people will become skeptical when it appears to no one, is silent and does nothing.
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
75% of our genetic make-up is the same as a pumpkin - 57% the same as a cabbage.
When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, then you understand why I dismiss yours.
I do not fear death in view of the fact that I had been dead for billion and billions of years before I was born and didn’t suffer the slightest inconvenience for it. (Mark Twain)
The 2 things that modern cosmology has taught us is that:
1/ You’re much more insignificant than you ever thought
2/ The future is miserable
Does a wafer turn into the body of a 1st century Jew once it’s been blessed by a Catholic priest?
If someone is choking do you perform the Heimlich manoeuvre or pray?
There are no absolute truths in science. Science can prove things to be absolutely false and that’s how it progresses. It will be false today and false tomorrow.
In science we get rid of all the falsehoods and what remains is an element of truth. We progress but we never say we have the absolute truth - we just say that science works.
My atheism is not a denial of anything - it’s simply a question of likelihood. I cannot prove that there is not a flying teapot that orbits Mars. Everything we know about the universe leads me to the conclusion that there is no evidence of purpose or divine intervention.
I cannot prove there is no God. I just wouldn’t want to live in a Universe where one exists.
Forget Jesus - stars died so that you could be born. We are all made of stardust.
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
There is no amount of anecdotal testimonial reports sufficient to establish the truth of a miracle - especially when these reports are found in retranslated copies of copies from anonymous authors. Your God should recognise this.
Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating and religion.
The important thing is not to be continuously lost in this mental projection away from now. Most humans are never fully present in the now because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.
On an individual level no matter how much success you may experience in your life, your eventual story will be one of failure. Your bodily organs will fail and you will die. This will be succeeded by the death of the human species and ultimately the heat death of the universe.
By all means let Abraham offer to commit filicide to prove his devotion to the Lord.
Ethics and morality are quite independent of faith and cannot be derived from it.
Christianity has never been able to evolve a tempting heaven at all.
Religious faith is, precisely because we are still evolving creatures, ineradicable.
Religion comes from the period of prehistory where nobody had the smallest idea what was going on.
It is not a “leap” which can be made once and for all. It is a leap which has to go on and on being performed in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary.
Since human beings are naturally solipsistic, all forms of superstition enjoy what might be called a natural advantage.
Our place in the cosmos is so unimaginably small that we cannot, with our miserly endowment of cranial matter, contemplate it for long at all.
Our own solipsism usually represents evolution as a kind of ladder of progression. Progress does not negate the idea of randomness.
In the future of an illusion Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death.
Natural disasters are not violations of the laws of the nature, but rather part of the inevitable fluctuations within them.
Of the thousands of possible desert religions there were, as with millions of potential species, one branch happened to take root and grow. Passing through its Jewish mutations to its Christian form, it was eventually adopted for political reasons by Emperor Constatine and made into an official faith with - eventually - a codified and enforceable form of many of its chaotic and contradictory books.
Definition of an educated person - to know the extent of your own ignorance
The voice of reason is small but very persistent. (Sigmund Freud)
I do not know for certain about death or god - but Im as certain as I can be that “you” do not know either.
Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things because to demystify supposedly ‘holy text dictated by god’ and show that they are man made and what you have to show is there internal inconsistencies and absurdities. One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority… it is an indispensable thing - people can call it blasphemy if they like, but if they call it that they have to assume there is something to be blasphemed - some divine work, well I don’t accept the premise.
Christianity: The belief that some invisible cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. (Douglas Adams)
The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. (Robert A. Heinlein)
Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear (Thomas Jefferson)
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)
Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.
This is an extraordinary time for the understanding of the human condition. Intellectual problems from antiquity are being illuminated by insights from the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution.
Religions are fossilised philosophies with the questions left out.
The weakness in our ability to be accurate in judging how much we know is called the illusion of explanatory depth.
Go to a large building with uncomfortable seating and praise Me in the presence of others for at least an hour or you’ll go to hell
What is life without the highest ambitions?
Human imperfection was a large subject. Consider just a few of the defects. S-shaped backs that easily buckled, breathing and swallowing recklessly sharing a passage, the infectious proximity of sex and excretion, child birth pure agony, weak eyesight a general affliction, and an immune system that could devour the body. And that was just the body. Among all the yearning rationales for God, the argument from design collapsed with Homo Sapiens. No God worth his salt could be so careless at the workbench. (Ian Mc Ewan)
