- Feb 9, 2007
- 1,841
- 25
A few great quotes from freethinkers and scientists
http://www.nobeliefs.com/great-quotes.htm
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)
---------------------------
Religion is the Greatest Evil the Black World has ever Known and been defeated by, yet we have not the courage to read the sign of the Time that is revealing such a Divine Truth to the Black World. (Osiris)
------------------------
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)
----------------------
Religion is now the first obstacle to women's advancement. Religion pulls human beings backwards, it goes against science and progressiveness. Religion engulfs people with a fear of the supernatural. It bars people from laughing and never allows people to exercise their choice.
-Taslima Nasrin (from her newspaper column, reported in Free Inquiry, Fall, 1994, Vol 14, No. 4, p9)
-------------
No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible.
-Steve Allen (More Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
-------------
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
-Steven Weinberg (quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999)
-------------
The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can argue with it.
-Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent at the Behavioral Science Institution and Research Unit of the FBI Academy (from Carl Sagan's, The Demon-Haunted World)
--------------
Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?
-Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
--------------------
Religion, society and state* from none of these do women get their proper honour. It is religion which has created an unparalleled disparity between men and women.
-Taslima Nasrin
----------
I don't agree with those who think that the conflict is simply between two religions, namely Christianity and Islam... To me, the key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational, logical minds.
-Taslima Nasrin (in an interview in Free Inquiry magazine, winter 1998/1999, Vol. 19 No. 1)
--------------------
I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.
-Daniel C. Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea)
----------------------
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)
-------------------
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
-Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
----------------------------
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my church.
-Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
------------------
During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have 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 (from Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, 1785)
-----------------
My only wish is. . . to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own procession and admission, are "half animal, half angel" into persons, into whole persons.
-Ludwig Feuerbach (Lectures on the Essence of Religion)
-----------------------
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 and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman's emancipation.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton
--------------------
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
-----------------------------------
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.
-Leo Tolstoy (On Life and Essays on Religion)-
-------------------------
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
----------------
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
-Bertrand Russell (Why I Am Not a Christian)
-------------------------------------------------------------
It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
-Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1950
--------------------------------
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
-Stephen Jay Gould (Dinosaur in a Haystack)
-----------
And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.
-Robert A. Wilson (Prometheus Rising, 1986)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
-Robert A. Wilson (Right Where You Are Sitting Now)
-----------------------
Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.
-Robert A. Wilson (Cosmic Trigger II, 1991)
------------
One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism.
-Steve Allen (Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
------------
There are hundreds of millions who believe the Messiah has come. If he did, then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and death have had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might have been expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond question, that we Christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en masse, as non-Christians.
-Steve Allen (Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
---------------------------
The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.
-Steve Allen (Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
----------------------------
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 (The World as I See It, 1949)
-------------------------------------
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)
-----------
FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
-Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)
------------
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
-Richard Dawkins (River out of Eden)
-----------------
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
-Richard Dawkins (On debating religion)
-------------
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
-Biologist P.B. Medawar
-----------
There is no Energy Shortage. There is no Energy Crisis. There is a Crisis of Ignorance.-R. Buckminster Fuller
--------------------------------------
I report. You decide.
http://www.nobeliefs.com/great-quotes.htm
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)
---------------------------
Religion is the Greatest Evil the Black World has ever Known and been defeated by, yet we have not the courage to read the sign of the Time that is revealing such a Divine Truth to the Black World. (Osiris)
------------------------
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)
----------------------
Religion is now the first obstacle to women's advancement. Religion pulls human beings backwards, it goes against science and progressiveness. Religion engulfs people with a fear of the supernatural. It bars people from laughing and never allows people to exercise their choice.
-Taslima Nasrin (from her newspaper column, reported in Free Inquiry, Fall, 1994, Vol 14, No. 4, p9)
-------------
No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible.
-Steve Allen (More Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
-------------
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
-Steven Weinberg (quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999)
-------------
The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can argue with it.
-Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent at the Behavioral Science Institution and Research Unit of the FBI Academy (from Carl Sagan's, The Demon-Haunted World)
--------------
Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?
-Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
--------------------
Religion, society and state* from none of these do women get their proper honour. It is religion which has created an unparalleled disparity between men and women.
-Taslima Nasrin
----------
I don't agree with those who think that the conflict is simply between two religions, namely Christianity and Islam... To me, the key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational, logical minds.
-Taslima Nasrin (in an interview in Free Inquiry magazine, winter 1998/1999, Vol. 19 No. 1)
--------------------
I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.
-Daniel C. Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea)
----------------------
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)
-------------------
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
-Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
----------------------------
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my church.
-Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
------------------
During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have 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 (from Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, 1785)
-----------------
My only wish is. . . to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own procession and admission, are "half animal, half angel" into persons, into whole persons.
-Ludwig Feuerbach (Lectures on the Essence of Religion)
-----------------------
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 and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman's emancipation.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton
--------------------
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
-----------------------------------
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.
-Leo Tolstoy (On Life and Essays on Religion)-
-------------------------
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
----------------
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
-Bertrand Russell (Why I Am Not a Christian)
-------------------------------------------------------------
It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
-Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1950
--------------------------------
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
-Stephen Jay Gould (Dinosaur in a Haystack)
-----------
And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.
-Robert A. Wilson (Prometheus Rising, 1986)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
-Robert A. Wilson (Right Where You Are Sitting Now)
-----------------------
Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.
-Robert A. Wilson (Cosmic Trigger II, 1991)
------------
One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism.
-Steve Allen (Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
------------
There are hundreds of millions who believe the Messiah has come. If he did, then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and death have had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might have been expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond question, that we Christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en masse, as non-Christians.
-Steve Allen (Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
---------------------------
The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.
-Steve Allen (Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality)
----------------------------
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 (The World as I See It, 1949)
-------------------------------------
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)
-----------
FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
-Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)
------------
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
-Richard Dawkins (River out of Eden)
-----------------
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
-Richard Dawkins (On debating religion)
-------------
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
-Biologist P.B. Medawar
-----------
There is no Energy Shortage. There is no Energy Crisis. There is a Crisis of Ignorance.-R. Buckminster Fuller
--------------------------------------
I report. You decide.
... please make yourself at home ... 