‘A’ is for Atheist?
Top 15 Quotes By Famous Atheists – listverse.com:
1. Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov2. I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. — Andrew Carnegie
3. All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway
4. Lighthouses are more helpful then churches. — Benjamin Franklin
5. Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche
6. The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. — George Bernard Shaw
7. Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. — Kurt Vonnegut
8. I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. — Frank Lloyd Wright
9. Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. — Denis Diderot
10. A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. — Samuel Clemens
11. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. — Sigmund Freud
12. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. — Edward Gibbon
13. The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. — Ferdinand Magellan
14. Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. — Woody Allen
15. It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous. — Gloria Steinem
Heaven is not real. Jesus, Adam & Eve, Noah, and Satan are all mythical archetypes. There was no great flood that covered the earth. Theses stories are not real and anyone who believes they are is still in the lower form of human evolution. You find these people, the ones of lower development, mostly in the South and South Eastern states of America. They don’t copulate outside their gene pool which leads to there distinctive slack jaw.
#180:
“Hey skippy glad I could make your day. But seriously they have found Christ’s tomb and Noah’s Ark.”
They did? How did they prove it? Did Jesus carve his initials in the tomb? Did the Ark say “Noah” on the side?
“Not only that but all of Christ’s prophecies have come true to this day besides the one about Him coming back to save His people that have remained faithful. aka the rapture..”
They all came true, eh? Uh huh. Which ones?
“As for proof of existence, look around you skippy and know for a fact that life is precious.”
True. That isn’t proof that it was created by a higher being.
“Life is way too complex to just evolve by chance through simple amino acids.”
Who said life evolved by chance through simple amino acids?
“Christ works at His own pace among us. He does not guarantee us our next breath, but He has given us all a chance by putting life on this earth. I don’t mean to preach because I am only 18, but He wants us to surrender to Him.”
He does, does he? How do you know for sure? Did he send you an email?
“Atheists, whether you have chosen to follow the devil or not, you have most certainly chosen to not follow Christ. Therefore you will still suffer the consequences but there is still time to fix that. Christ is all about forgiveness which is something He is still offering to anybody who reads this message to this day.”
So I will suffer consequences because I don’t pray and grovel to an imagined higher power who is so arrogant that he needs me to worship him constantly? What, does he have self-confidence issues that mean I have to constantly tell him how great he is?
Mister Mustard, we may be talking about the same thing when I talk about human error as opposed to scientific error. If a scientist puts in fictional data in his research in order to produce a result that gains him/her some kind of recognition then that is human error. The list you gave is what happens when money is tied to the amount of research publications produced and to the fame that accompanies dramatic publications. Greed and fame are human errors. By providing the list you are helping science. If a scientist uses data from a fraudulent publication, his experiments will soon show the data to be fraudulent.
For those who believe in the god of the bible, there is no such correction. How many believers know for sure the writes of the bible weren’t paid to write a work of fiction? Did any of the writers do it for fame? The god in the bible may be based on false data. How would you find out? Blind faith?
Science is not a god but a method. No worshiping required.
“How about some equal time for 15 Quotes by Famous Theologians? Dang, I forgot, liberalism is about no debate lest exposure to fraud be entertained.”
Good, so you have no objection to us going into your churches, temples, and revival tents to provide “equal time” for the sane perspective. Be sure to let Peter Popoff and the Pope know.
“Now, correct me if I’m wrong but, isn’t this America where we’re **allowed** to believe as we please?”
Really? Maybe you should tell Dubya’s daddy:
“No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.” — George Bush Sr.
#182, MM,
Your “scientific frauds” point out the honesty of modern science.
Someone makes a discovery. They submit the results along with the method they chose and any other relevant information for publishing. This is then reviewed by a panel of experts for any obvious errors. The research is either published or the concerns are addressed. Once the research is published then other researchers will try to reproduce the results. It is only when the discovery have been reproduced and verified is this now an accepted discovery. Many, if not most, discoveries have some problems discovered by impartial reviews.
Some discoveries are obvious frauds that were discovered through failed attempts to reproduce the experiment. That happened with the S. Korean human cloning. The researcher later admitted he “cooked the books”.
Others can not be explained why they failed with other people. This is what happened with Cold Fusion. Maybe we will discover in 25 or 50 years, using more sophisticated equipment, that there was a minute contaminant that prevented the experiment being reproduced. We don’t know as yet. Because the experiment can not be reproduced though, it can not be accepted. It remains only an idea.
This is what SCIENCE does. It self corrects. Religion, on the other hand, takes the tact of trying to explain away any problems with hocus pocus.
Did you notice I didn’t once use the words EVIDENCE or PROOF?
#182… Nice list of scientific frauds, Mustard. Imagine how long the list of Bible frauds would be if scripture were subject to the important scientific principle of falsifiability. Instead, we read many tales of “miracles,” and even true believers often disagree over what material is to be taken as factually true and what is allegorical.
All the while, Christians miss the big picture. The Bible clearly describes their god as a demon to anyone who reads the scripture objectively. He used and legitimized terrorism, he commanded death by torture as a punishment for trivial sins, and he inspired and assisted ethnic cleansing by his favorite race, to name but a few of his more demonic exploits. So far, I haven’t seen a single Christian with the moral courage to refuse to worship this evil demon named Yahweh (or YHWH). I have, however, seen a few Christians with the intellectual capacity to finally realize that the demon described in the Bible is so completely antithetical to the notions of goodness and justice that “He” can’t possibly exist as described. And that is the precise moment at which those Christians become infidels like me.
Merry Christmas!
SmashTheState, Its not 15 but here is a start:
Joseph Addison -To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.
John Calvin – A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.
CS Lewis – As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
Author unknown – The atheist can’t find God for the same reason that a thief can’t find a police officer.
G.K. Chesterton – If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”
Edwin Conklin – The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the Unabridged Dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory.
#182, Mustard, you just proved a very important point. No matter who tries to swindle, cheat, fake or steal in the science community, they will be exposed by the scientific method. In other words, all the science that has passed muster, Mister Mustard, and has been proven as factual as humanly possible.
The Bible, on the other hand, is 100% a fable until otherwise verified. Whereas an experiment can be exaggerated but still contain useful truth, the Bible has NOTHING of historical collaboration to back it up. Not a shred.
Tahowell… Noah’s Ark? Foolish, foolish, person. First, what evidence is there that all animal life on earth can be traced back to Turkey? 2nd, to believe in the Ark is to believe that God, mankind’s father, chose to murder his children because they were “not righteous”. It that the example you follow? Third, Noah’s Ark has been found many times but never uncovered. Why do you think that is? If the wrong person discovers how gullible you are Tahowell, you are likely to be taken advantage of in a bad way. Don’t be a fool.
Nicest post I have ever seen on this blog.
Although slightly flawed.
Some of those quoted were agnostic or deist.
But still very good quotes by very smart guys.
>>Of course not, silly. The “way the universe >>works” is the realm of science. The meaning of >>life is the realm of religion.
I’d like to think that religion and spirituality deal with meaning and the “why”, whereas science deals with facts and the “how”, but when holy texts make factual claims about the world, such as that the universe was created in a week, or that Mary was a virgin who gave birth, or that Jesus magically healed the sick, it’s hard to maintain that distinction. The Bible is not merely a book of guidelines on how to live well, it is predominantly a historical book that contains stories purported to be factually true.
Either these things actually happened, or they did not. It is up to you to decide whether such miracles are likely to be true or whether they are more likely to be ancient mythology. The authors did not leave us guidelines as to which parts of the Bible are metaphorical and which are literal. We atheists generally recognize this and realize that when assessing the claims of the Bible, we can only assume it means what it says.
Nobody has absolute knowledge, but science and (true) philosophy represent humanity’s best attempts at an honest, fair, systematic, and logical distillation of factual truth about our universe. The history of science and logical thought is full of error, but that is to be expected in any human endeavor. It also shows that we are progressing; science has built-in protocols for discarding old ideas in light of new evidence, and the latest knowledge is the standard by which we judge our past mistakes.
Let’s all maintain some humility here. Nobody is being intolerant by expressing their thoughts. Is the person intolerant, or are their ideas threatening to you? If it’s the latter, this should inspire you to think deeper rather than to attack the messenger.
Finally, let’s move beyond the whole “religion/spirituality fulfills me” thing. Please reread quote #6 by Shaw above to see why this may be nice for you, but is beside the point.
Okay, I have another “Finally”: agnosticism is the only valid position, true, but it is a generally meaningless thing to say that nobody knows if God exists. Of course they don’t. The debate is about belief, not knowledge. Atheists don’t believe, theists do, and we’re discussing which position is more rational. Only the very misguided claim to know that there is or is not a God, and these folks can be safely ignored.
This is a interesting debate, which i’m sure will go on until either Jusus returns or a huge catastrophe ends all life on earth. At any rate I think I would rather be faithful in god and have the possibility of being wrong than to be an athiest and be wrong. Christians are at least bound by some type of moral boundries with the exception of those who think they can do whatever they want as long as they ask for forgiveness before they die, however athiests are not bound by any moral obligations. the only thing keeping these people from killing, rapeing, stealing, etc, is the fear of being incarcerated. There would not be any reason for these people to think any of these activities are wrong. My point is if a chrisian is wrong, nothing happens. If an athiest is wrong, their going to hell. Which chance would you rather take?
Stop! I’ve read enough. That’s it. Not gonna read any more. Too many retarded people. Must not stoop. Moving on, ignoring the stupid people. sorry to the sensible people whose comments i could not read but take my advice, don’t argue with em, just walk away from the retards.
P.s. I am an atheist.
P.P.S. Dammit, I did it again. read the comment above and was going to reply. hot damn. no. must just fuck off and ignore it. damn stupid people and their damn comments.
i really like this quotes especially last one
jasmine
tech-chek.blogspot.com
As a neutral observer, I it is obvious that Mister Mustard wins as a whoppingingly intolerant, arrogant fool.
Thank You.
@ Mr. Mustard in General.
You always have an answer. Though often the answer requires you ignore some obvious facts.
1. I am not American, therefore USA Today (presumably a sub-standard scientific journal) is completely unknown to me.
2. I have a very scientific mind. This doesn’t mean that I enjoy learning about science. It means that I want to know how everything works. If I see some invention in a magazine, or in a blog. I instantly want to know how it works. I want to see diagrams and source code and calculations and all that stuff.
I know how the world works by applying scientific that I have been taught to what I have experienced for myself.
Difference between my logical method and an equivalent religious method is that my method can be applied to anything. And I can take the theory, expand on it, and apply it to something else. most of science meshes together well.
Think about it, what proof do theist’s have of their god(s) existence besides feelings and personal beliefs, the realm of psychologists. A person armed with scientific knowledge, can prove almost anything, the flow of electricity can be proved with simple experiments. Lightning can be scaled down to a basic electrical arc. Something that hundreds of thousands of tradesmen use all the time.
Before you claim that people that believe science are no higher than theists, think about how science got to where it is today. Where science moves at breakneck speed, religion plods along at snails pace.
Take your flashlight, go back in time 3000 years and turn it on, there you are a god, at least in the natives eyes. Just as man has discovered how to make light, what makes you think he won’t eventually discover proof of god? Just like he has discovered everything that’s amazing.
Now maybe I’m picking things apart here, but…:
# 58 – “Back to Atheist Sunday school for ya, OFLTO. “philosophy” will get you dementia and tertiary syphilis, like it did Nietzche. Faith and spirituality will get you inner peace.”
# 155 – “As to my blissful “ignorance”, what’s it to ya? According you congregants in the Church of Atheism, once you’re dead, it’s all over. Better to be blissful than to be the miserable, arrogant, confused, self-loathing, bitter, thoroughly unhappy fucks that so many Atheists seem to be.”
Oh how I long for the degree of inner peace that you have Sir.
Then we have:
# 95 – “Ho ho ho (no racism implied) Merry Christmas!”
# 106 – “Sure. Like Hwang “Human Cloning Master” Woo-Suk, the Korean guy who published is made-up research in the premiere scientific journal in the world, Science. After peer-review and all. Only the revelation by “PD Su-cheop” (the Korean equivalent of Entertainment Tonight) that he was a phony led to his eventual outing and resignation in disgrace.”
I just felt there was a significant amount of emphasis on your use of the words “the Korean guy”. Enough so, that I felt it my personal duty to reinstate that there is in fact, “no racism implied”.
You and many others should take a page from the book you hold so dearly to. Last I heard, Christianity was supposed to be a peaceful religion. Also I find it odd that so many branches of Christianity came from the same words. Where as Atheism always results in the same conclusion: There is no God.
The real evil is hiding behind your religion. How else can Fred Phelps justify his horrible and senseless rantings? You wish to “enlighten” people, we wish to educate them.
Here follows another great quatation:
“The way so many intellectual people are deliberately driven and deceived by a bunch of religious donkeys makes me strongly believe that those donkeys hide among themselves an arcane top-sectret”. –Flavioos
From what I know about the universe, it is much more complicated that we can imagine. The last few decades of physical theory and research have shown that.
I am confident that in spiritual terms that it is much more complex than either simple faith or simple denial would indicate, or that we can imagine.
Seems to me Mr.Mustard should stop paying attention to the speck in his neighbors eye, and start to remove the two by four in his own.
“Heh heh. I should just sit back and let you sink your own ship.” #31
Another problem with the response posts of the obviously dogmatic fundamental christians here is that they often forget the some of the self evident wisdom it teaches (which btw is not inspired by god, but by rational common sense).
Matt the Knife #199 seems to quote other christian fundies in an attempt to rationalize xtian views opposed to atheist ones, a jury of his own hand ultra peers as it were. Thankfully the jury selection process is not so biased(or is it?)
In any case, when i debate a dogmatic i tend to do the opposite. My last post paraphrased matthew 7:3 using bible logic which will surely be acknowledged for its wisdom by the dogmatic christian. When do we as atheists or freethinkers ever see them effectively use an atheist quote to support their own stance.
# 9 is not from D. iderot; but from tha catholic Abbot Jean Meslier