Great Minds.
Inspiring quotes from the minds of humanity's greatest thinkers.
An agglomeration of ageless wisdom and a labor of love by Layth Barzangi.
Last updated on 18 Mar 2008
Hit 500 quotes mark on 10 Jan 2007!
Hit 600 quotes mark on 01 Sep 2007!
Retrieved a total of 147 authors and 616 quotes.
Adams, John (1735-1826)
Second President of the United States (1797-1801).
- When philosophic reason is clear and certain by intuition or necessary induction, no subsequent revelation supported by prophecies or miracles can supersede it.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality - Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.
Freethought • Secular Humanism - This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.
Religion/Faith - The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles.
Nature • Religion/Faith
al-Ma'arri, Abu-al-Ala (973-1057)
Arabic poet and philosopher.
- The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - As for religion, all men unquestioningly accept the creed of their fathers out of habit, incapable of distinguishing the true from the false.
Religion/Faith - Religion is a fable invented by the ancients, worthless except for those who exploit the credulous masses.
Religion/Faith - Religions have only resulted in bigotry and bloodshed, with sect fighting sect, and fanatics forcing their beliefs onto people at the point of a sword. All religions are contrary to reason and sanity.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith
Allen, Ethan (1738-1789)
American Revolutionary.
- In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; But in those parts of it that are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith • Science
Allen, Steve (1921-2000)
American musician, comedian, writer and original host of the The Tonight Show (1953-1957).
- Once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy -- and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational -- the powers of reason are suprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind.
Religion/Faith - If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
Reason/Rationality
Anthony, Susan B. (1820-1906)
American feminist leader and suffragist.
- The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.
God • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
Ethics • God • Religion/Faith
Archer, William (1856-1924)
Scottish critic.
- I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring.
God - Theocracy has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained tyranny.
Religion/Faith
Aristotle (ca. 384-322 B.C.)
Greek philosopher.
- Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
God
Asimov, Isaac (1920-1992)
Russian-born American scientist and prolific writer.
- Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
Religion/Faith • Secular Humanism - To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
God • Religion/Faith - The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."
Science - Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
Religion/Faith • Science - I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
Reason/Rationality • Science
Attenborough, Sir David Frederick (b. 1926)
World renown British broadcaster and naturalist. Widely considered one of the pioneers of the nature documentary, he has written and presented eight major series surveying nearly every aspect of life on Earth.
- I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature, to which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the almighty, always quote beautiful things, they always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old, and I reply and say, "Well presumably the god you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful god with that action, and therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Nature
Bacon, Sir Francis (1561-1626)
English philosopher and statesman, one of the pioneers of modern scientific thought.
- Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not, but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Ethics • Religion/Faith
Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814-1876)
Russian anarchist and political theorist.
- All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers.
Religion/Faith - The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
God • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
God • Liberty/Freedom - God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Liberty/Freedom - Religion is a collective insanity.
Religion/Faith - This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: "God and the liberty of man," "God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men" — regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty — by ceasing to exist.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Liberty/Freedom - All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.
God • Religion/Faith
Baldwin, James A. (1924-1987)
American writer and outspoken critic of racism.
- Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
Nature • Religion/Faith - If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Liberty/Freedom
Barker, Dan (b. 1949)
American author and critic, former preacher, co-founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
- Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
Religion/Faith - Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god -- both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter.
Atheism/Agnosticism - If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?
God • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - Prayer never changes the laws of nature.
Nature • Religion/Faith - Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, "Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.
Science - Some theists, observing that all "effects" need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.
God • Reason/Rationality - Theists claim that there is a god; atheists do not. Religionists often challenge atheists to prove that there is no god; but this misses the point. Atheists claim god is unproved, not disproved. In any argument, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim. If a person claims to have invented an antigravity device, it is not incumbent on others to prove that no such thing exists. The believer must make a case. Everyone else is justified in refusing to believe until evidence is produced and substantiated. Some atheists feel the argument is pointless until the term "god" is made understandable. Words like "spirit" and "supernatural" have no referent in reality, and ideas like "all-knowing" and "omnipotent" are self-contradictory. Why discuss a meaningless concept?
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - Religious claims have not withstood the tests of reason. Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil--you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Reason/Rationality - There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling -- absolutely essential to mental health and happiness.
Freethought - Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.
Freethought • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith
Berry, Matt
American author and philosopher.
- Faith is the fatigue resulting from the attempt to preserve God's integrity instead of one's own.
Religion/Faith - In response to the fear of our unknowable future we would rather freeze ourselves into a single stage of growth at the expense of the entire metamorphosis.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith
Boorstin, Daniel Joseph (1914-2004)
American historian and writer, Librarian of Congress (1975-1987).
- I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith
Bradlaugh, Charles (1833-1891)
Atheist writer and member of Parliament.
- The atheist does not say, "There is no God," but he says, "I know not what you mean by God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation."
Atheism/Agnosticism • God - Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.
Liberty/Freedom - Will any one, save the most bigoted, contend, that it is not certain gain to humanity to spread unbelief in the terrible doctrine that eternal torment is the probable fate of the great majority of the human family?
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith
Branden, Nathaniel (b. 1930)
Canadian psychotherapist and author of psychology books and multiple articles on ethical and political philosophy. Famous for his work on the psychology of self-esteem.
- Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.
Religion/Faith - If, in any culture, children are taught, "We are all equally unworthy in the sight of God." If, in any culture, children are taught, "You are born in sin and are sinful by nature." If children are given a message that amounts to "Don't think, don't question - believe!" If children are given a message that amounts to "Who are you to place your mind above that of the priest?" If children are told, "Submission to what you cannot understand is the beginning of morality." If children are informed, "In any clash between your judgement and that of your religious authorities, it is your authorities you must believe." If children are informed, "Self-sacrifice is the foremost virtue and the noblest duty." - then consider what will be the likely consequences for the practice of living consciously, or the practice of self-assertiveness, or any of the other pillars of healthy self-esteem.
Ethics • Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith
Bukowski, Charles (1920-1994)
American poet and novelist.
- For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
Freethought • God • Secular Humanism
Burbank, Luther (1849-1926)
American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science.
- I have learned from Nature that dependence on unnatural beliefs weakens us in the struggle and shortens our breath for the race.
Nature • Reason/Rationality - The idea that a good God would send people to a burning Hell is utterly damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed! I don't want to have anything to do with such a God. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to me.
God - Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature... Do not terrify them in early life with the fear of an afterworld. Never was a child made more noble and good by the fear of a hell.
Ethics • Freethought • Nature • Religion/Faith - As a scientist I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired. As for their prophets, there are as many today as ever before, only now science refuses to let them overstep the bounds of common sense.
Religion/Faith • Science
Burroughs, John (1837-1921)
American naturalist and writer.
- Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
God - Hence when the man of science says, 'There is no God,' he only gives voice to the feeling of the inadequacy of the old anthropomorphic conception, in the presence of the astounding facts of the universe.
God • Science - Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe.
Science - Under the old dispensation, before the advent of science, when this little world was all, and the sun, moon, and stars were merely fixtures overhead to give light and warmth, the conception of a being adequate to create and control it all was easier. The storms were expressive of his displeasure, the heavens were his throne, and the earth was his footstool. But in the light of modern astronomy one finds himself looking in vain for the God of his fathers, the magnified man who ruled the ancient world. In his place we have an infinite and eternal power whose expression is the visible universe, and to whom man is no more and no less than any other creature.
God • Nature • Science - I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed.
God • Nature • Science - Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it.
Nature • Religion/Faith • Science
Celsus (c. 2 B.C.)
Greek philosopher.
- Christians [Religionists], it is needless to say, utterly detest each other. They slander each other constantly with the vilest forms of abuse and cannot come to any sort of agreement in their teaching. Each sect brands its own, fills the head of its own with deceitful nonsense, and makes perfect little pigs of those it wins over to its side.
Religion/Faith
Channing, William (1810-1884)
American writer and philosopher.
- It is an important truth that the ultimate reliance of a human being must be on his own mind.
Reason/Rationality
Cioran, Emil M. (1911-1995)
Romanian-born French philosopher.
- The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
Ethics • Religion/Faith - Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith
Clarke, Arthur C. (b. 1917)
British science fiction writer.
- A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith - It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
God - Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
Religion/Faith - One of the greatest tragedies in human history was the hijacking of morality by religion.
Ethics • Religion/Faith - They [Religionists] know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
Science - We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.
Evolution - Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.
Freethought • Religion/Faith
Clifford, William Kingdon (1845-1879)
English mathematician and philosopher.
- If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.
Religion/Faith - The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
Religion/Faith
Cohen, Chapman (1868-1954)
British Freethought advocate and writer.
- Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
God - Regularity in Nature is not proof of the control of Nature by a divine intelligence; it is rather the reverse. If something - call it matter, or ether, or x - exists, it must operate in accordance with its innate qualities; and so long as this x remains uncontrolled, its manifestations will continue unchallenged - in other words, there will be "order". The same causes, the same results. That is the manifest signs of a natural "order" that knows nothing of God.
God • Nature - The belief in God may continue awhile in virtue of the lack of intelligence of some, of the carelessness of others, and of the conservative character of the mass. But no amount of apologizing can make up for the absence of genuine knowledge, nor can the flow of the finest eloquence do aught but clothe in regal raiment the body of a corpse.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God - The defenders of godism are now shrieking against the growing number of Atheists, and there is a call to the religious world to enter upon a crusade against Atheism. The stage in which heresy meant little more than all exchange of one god for another has passed. It has become a case of acceptance or rejection of the idea of God, and the growth is with those who reject.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Religion/Faith
Comte, Auguste (1798-1857)
French philosopher.
- All good intellects have repeated, since [Francis] Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.
Reason/Rationality • Science
Darrow, Clarence Seward (1857-1938)
American lawyer who made a name for himself fighting capital punishment as well as championing the underdog and so-called lost-cause defendants.
- If there is a soul, what is it, and where did it come from, and where does it go? Can anyone who is guided by his reason possibly imagine a soul independent of a body, or the place of its residence, or the character of it, or anything concerning it? If man is justified in any belief or disbelief on any subject, he is warranted in the disbelief in a soul. Not one scrap of evidence exists to prove any such impossible thing.
Nature • Reason/Rationality - I feel as I always have, that the earth is the home and the only home of man, and I am convinced that whatever he is to get out of his existence he must get while he is here.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Freethought • Secular Humanism - Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt!
Philosophy • Religion/Faith • Skepticism - I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means.
Atheism/Agnosticism - The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.
God • Religion/Faith • Skepticism
Darwin, Charles (1809-1882)
English naturalist, founder of the revolutionary theory of evolution and the principle of common descent through natural selection.
- When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
Evolution - Doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.
Ethics • Science • Secular Humanism - Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith • Science - It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science.
Freethought • Religion/Faith • Science - It is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.
Religion/Faith - False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
Science • Skepticism
Dawkins, Richard (b. 1941)
East African-born British Zoologist; the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
- 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.
Religion/Faith - Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.
Ethics • Religion/Faith - The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion. If a physicist says God is another name for Planck's constant, or God is a superstring, we should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the nature of superstrings or the value of Planck's constant is a profound mystery. It has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable of forgiving sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about whether or not the Sabbath begins at 5pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil or have a bit of arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable of imposing a death penalty on His son to expiate the sins of the world before and after he was born.
God • Religion/Faith - Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.
Religion/Faith - I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Religion/Faith - The Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe...It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality - Blind faith can justify anything. If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die - on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - Most people have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
Evolution - Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Religion/Faith - Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Evolution - We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they're never going to be born. The number of people that could be here in my place outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here - the number of events that had to happen in order for you or me to exist. We are privileged to be alive, and we should make the most of our time on this world.
Evolution • Nature • Secular Humanism - I would, like any other scientist, willingly change my mind if the evidence led me to do so. So I care about what's true, I care about evidence, I care about evidence as the reason for knowing what is true. It is true that I come across rather passionate sometimes — and that's because I am passionate about the truth. I do get very impatient with humbug, with cant, with fakery, with charlatans.
Science - Religion is unusual among divisible labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might had to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.
Religion/Faith
de Unamuno, Miguel (1864-1936)
Spanish writer and philosopher.
- Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
Skepticism
Dennett, Daniel (b. 1942)
Prominent American philosopher and atheist activist. His research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
- The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight -- that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God - When we replace the traditional idea of God the creator with the idea of the process of natural selection doing the creating, the creation is as wonderful as it ever was. All that great design work had to be done. It just wasn't done by an individual, it was done by this huge process, distributed over billions of years.
Evolution • God - If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection – ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein. Because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: The world of purposeless, meaningless matter-in-motion, on the one side, and the world of meaning, and purpose, and design on the other. He understood that what he was proposing was a truly revolutionary idea.
Evolution - But where are the examples of religious orthodoxy being simply abandoned in the face of irresistible evidence? Again and again in science, yesterday's heresies have become today's new orthodoxies. No religion exhibits that pattern in its history.
Religion/Faith • Science
Descartes, René (1596-1650)
French philosopher and mathematician.
- I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I doubt.
Skepticism
Dewey, John (1859-1952)
Prominent American philosopher and educator.
- Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing.
Ethics • Reason/Rationality
Diderot, Denis (1713-1784)
French philosopher and writer of L'Encyclopédie (1751-1772).
- Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Liberty/Freedom - Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: "My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly." This stranger is a theologian.
Religion/Faith - To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an
absurdity by something contrary to nature.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.
Ethics • Religion/Faith - When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith
Dillard, Annie (b. 1945)
American author. Pulitzer Prize winner (1975) for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
- Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
Priest: "No, not if you did not know."
Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
(from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (1821-1881)
Russian novelist.
- For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it... For the sake of common worship, they've slain each other with the sword.
Religion/Faith
Druyan, Ann (b. 1949)
American author and media producer known for her involvement in many projects aiming to popularize and explain science.
- I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to know.
Religion/Faith • Science - People think that if you are a scientist you have to give up that joy of discovery, that passion, that sense of the great romance of life. I say that's completely opposite of the truth.
Science
Eco, Umberto (b. 1932)
Italian novelist and philosopher.
- Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
Religion/Faith - If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.
Reason/Rationality - When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us--and rightly--that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed.
Religion/Faith
Edison, Thomas Alva (1847-1931)
Prolific American inventor, who patented more than a thousand inventions.
- To those searching for truth -- not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction -- faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.
Reason/Rationality • Science - The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them.
Religion/Faith - I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.
God • Religion/Faith - Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.
Religion/Faith
Einstein, Albert (1879-1955)
German-born American theoretical physicist whose special and general theories of relativity revolutionized modern thought on the nature of space and time.
- Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.
Nature • Science - A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Ethics • Freethought • Secular Humanism - I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
God • Nature - If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?
God • Philosophy • Reason/Rationality - The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Evolution • Reason/Rationality • Science - I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.
Ethics - It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Nature • Science - I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.
God • Nature • Science
Ellis, Albert (b. 1913)
American psychologist and originator of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT).
- For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.
Religion/Faith - In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - Some screwballs 100 years from now will manufacture atomic bombs in their bathtub and annihilate the human race because they demand that the world agree with their dogmas.
Religion/Faith
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
American essayist and poet.
- As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it.
Nature • Philosophy - Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.
Ethics • Nature • Religion/Faith • Science - Natural science sharpens the discrimination. There is no false logic in nature. All its properties are permanent: the acids and metals never lie; their yea is yea, their nay, nay. They are newly discovered but not new.
Nature • Science - The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
God - Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith • Skepticism
Epicurus (341-270 B.C.)
Greek philosopher.
- Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality - If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
God • Religion/Faith - Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
God • Reason/Rationality
Ferrer, Francisco (1859-1909)
Spanish crusader against illiteracy, monarchy, militarism, and religion: in a sense the last major European figure executed for heresy, his death was celebrated by Pope Pius X.
- When the masses become better informed about science, they will feel less need for help form supernatural Higher Powers. The need for religion will end when man becomes sensible enough to govern himself.
Freethought • Science - We will not, therefore, lose our time praying to an imaginary god for things which our own exertions alone can procure.
Freethought
Feuerbach, Ludwig von (1804-1872)
German philosopher.
- Faith is essentially intolerant ... essentially because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one's cause is also God's cause.
Religion/Faith - Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.
Ethics • Religion/Faith - My purpose ... is is to transform theologians into anthropologists, lovers of God into lovers of man, candidates for the next world into students of this world ... I negate the fantastic hypocracy of theology and religion only in order to affirm the true nature of man.
Freethought • Science - Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.
Nature • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith
Feynman, Richard P. (1918-88)
American Caltech physicist and Nobel Laureate.
- It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.
Philosophy • Skepticism - Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
God • Religion/Faith • Science - By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.
Ethics - God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
God • Philosophy • Science - No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
Liberty/Freedom - I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things; by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
Skepticism - We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
Science
Fouts, Roger (b. 1943)
American professor of psychology, best known for his work teaching sign language to chimpanzees, which he documented in his book Next of Kin.
- If you try to impose a rigid discipline while teaching a child or a chimp you are working against the boundless curiosity and need for relaxed play that make learning possible in the first place... learning cannot be controlled; it is out of control by design. Learning emerges spontaneously, it proceeds in an individualistic and unpredictable way, and it achieves its goal in its own good time. Once triggered, learning will not stop--unless it is hijacked by conditioning.
Liberty/Freedom • Nature • Religion/Faith - Creativity and learning are examples of innate behavior that can only be hindered, not helped, by rewards.
Nature • Philosophy
Franklin, Benjamin (1706-1790)
American public official, writer, scientist.
- The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.
Religion/Faith - Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Science
Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939)
Austrian physician and pioneer psychoanalyst.
- In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - The whole thing [Religion] 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.
Religion/Faith - The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.
God • Religion/Faith - The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Science - When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly
suprised at the weakness of his intellect.
Religion/Faith - Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviours by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively.
Ethics • Science • Secular Humanism - While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possesion of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be
altogether disregarded. If one attempts to assign religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
Religion/Faith - The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.
Reason/Rationality • Science - When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
Freethought • Religion/Faith - A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
Religion/Faith
Gage, Matilda Joslyn (1826-1898)
American author and women's suffrage activist.
- Do not allow the Church or State to govern your thought or dictate your judgment.
Liberty/Freedom - The careful student of history will discover that religion has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.
Religion/Faith
Galilei, Galileo (1564-1642)
Italian astronomer and physicist.
- I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them.
Freethought • God - In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Science - Nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages.
Religion/Faith • Science - The hypothesis is pretty; its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor demonstrable. Who does not see that this is purely arbitrary fiction that puts nothingness as existing and proposes nothing more than simple noncontradiction?
God • Religion/Faith - I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.
Science - To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith • Science - It vexes me when they [The Catholic Church] would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.
Religion/Faith • Science - It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith • Science
Gardner, Helen H.
American author, freethinker and advocate of women's equality.
- The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality - It is always a surprise to me that women will sit, year after year, and be told that, because of a story as silly and childish as it is unjust, she
is responsible for all the ills of life; that because, forsooth, some thousands of years ago a woman was so horribly wicked as to eat an apple she must and should occupy a humble and penitent position, and remain forever subject to the dictates of ecclesiastical pretenders. It is so silly, so childish, that for people of sense to accept it seems almost incredible.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - A religion that teaches a mother that she can be happy in heaven, with her children in hell -- in everlasting torment -- strikes at the very roots of family affection. It makes the human heart a stone. Love that means no more than that, is not love at all. No heart that has ever loved can see the object of its affection in pain and itself be happy. The thing is impossible. Any religion that can make that possible is more to be dreaded than war or famine or pestilence or death. It would eat out all that is great and beautiful and good in this life. It would make life a mockery and love a curse.
Freethought • Religion/Faith • Secular Humanism
Gautama, Siddhartha (B.C. 563-483)
AKA Gautama Buddha. Philosopher and spiritual teacher from ancient India and the historical founder of Buddhism.
- Believe nothing on the faith of traditions, even though they have been held in honor for many generations and in many places. Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it. Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past. Do not believe what you yourself have imagined, persuading yourself that a God inspires you. Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests. After examination, believe what you yourself have tested and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.
Freethought • God • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860-1935)
Prominent American non-fiction writer, short story writer, novelist, commercial artist, lecturer, and social reformer.
- The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.
Freethought • Religion/Faith • Science - One and all, religions have their original prophets, their sacred books, their traditions of ages gone. One and all require us to accept without question what other people long dead have said or written; to obey without question the commands of those behind us... No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, "This is our best thought, go on, think farther!" then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.
Religion/Faith - The soaring, imaginative minds of men, constructing lofty, shimmering piles of abstract thought, and taking as their postulate a revelation from God, gave us religions which could not possibly be maintained without belief and obedience... We find them most permanent and changeless among people who make the least effort to square their beliefs with the laws of life.
Religion/Faith - Let us inquire what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants?
God
Goldman, Emma (1869-1940)
Russian-American anarchist, writer, publisher.
- The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Philosophy - Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental ability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an organized institution that has always been a stumbling block to progress.
Religion/Faith - Atheism ... in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Religion/Faith
Gould, Stephen Jay (b. 1941)
American paleontologist.
- We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a higher answer -- but none exists.
Evolution • Nature - The fundamentalists, by knowing the answers before they start [examining evolution], and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science -- or of any honest intellectual inquiry.
Evolution • Nature • Religion/Faith • Science - Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so... Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency--the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.
Reason/Rationality • Skepticism
Green, Ruth Hurmence (1915-1981)
"Born-Again Atheist".
- Let us use our energy and our initiative to solve our problems without relying on prayers and wishful thinking. When we have faith in ourselves, we will find we do not have to have faith in gods.
Freethought
Haeckel, Ernst (1834-1919)
Eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist.
- Convinced that there is no eternal life awaiting him, he [man] will strive all the more to brighten his life on earth and rationally improve his condition in harmony with that of his fellows.
Freethought • Secular Humanism - Our science of evolution won its greatest triumph when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, its most powerful opponents, the Churches, became reconciled to it, and endeavored to bring their dogmas into line with it.
Evolution • Religion/Faith - The Monistic religion of Nature, which, accordingly, we must consider as the true "religion of the Future," will not, like all Church religions, stand opposed to the rational knowledge of nature, but in perfect harmony with it. And whereas Church religions are founded on deception and superstition, the religion of Nature will be based upon truth and knowledge.
Nature • Religion/Faith • Science
Haldane, J.B.S. (1892-1964)
British geneticist, evolutionary biologist and one of the founders of population genetics.
- Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which
I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of that of children. This means that the children have to learn about Adam and Noah
instead of about Evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about Christ's ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier's and Wright's. Worse than that, they are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith • Science
Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel (1889-1951)
American socialist reformer and publisher.
- The influences that have lifted the race to a higher moral level are education, freedom, leisure, the humanizing tendency of a better-supplied and more interesting life. In a word, science and liberalism - the two forces, fundamentally skeptical, that we have seen continuously at work in human progress - have accomplished the very things for which religion
claims the credit.
Liberty/Freedom • Science • Skepticism - The fear of gods and devils is never anything but a pitiable degradation of the human mind.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith - Theism tells men that they are the slaves of a God. Atheism assures men that they are the investigators and users of nature.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith - Religion, throughout the greater part of its history, has been a form of "holy" terrorism. It still aims its terrors at men, but modern realism and the spread of popular enlightenment has progressively robbed those terrors of their old-fashioned effectiveness. Wherever men take religion very seriously -- wherever there is devout belief -- there is also the inseparable feeling of fear.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - The fact that millions of people still believe in a hell of eternal punishment for sinners and unbelievers is a drastic reminder of the need for persistent, progressive education of the masses. We have as yet only begun to realize the possibilities of progress. But science, rationalism and humanism have pointed the way, they have taken the first great steps, and we must keep right ahead on the highway of modernism.
Reason/Rationality • Science • Secular Humanism - For centuries men have fought in the most unusual and devious ways to prove the existence of a God. But evidently a God, if there were a God, has been hiding out. He has never been discovered or proved. One would think a God, if any, should have revealed himself unmistakably. Isn't this non-appearance of a God (the non-appearance of a God in the shape of a single bit of evidence for
his existence) a pretty, strong, sufficient proof of non-existence?
God - With its fears and superstitions and prejudices, religion poisons the mind of any one who believes in it -- and even the best man, under the influence of religion, cannot reason wholesomely. Atheism, on the contrary, opens the mind to the clean winds of truth and establishes a fresh-air sanity.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith
Harris, Sam (b. 1967)
American author with active interests in philosophy, religion and neuroscience. His first book "The End of Faith" won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award.
- Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse.
Religion/Faith - Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago.
Religion/Faith - The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention — distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence — is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory.
Religion/Faith - Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity — a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - As a matter of doctrine, the Muslim conception of tolerance is one in which non-Muslims have been politically and economically subdued, converted, or put to sword.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - The penalty for apostasy [in Islam] is death. We would do well to linger over this fact for a moment, because it is the black pearl of intolerance that no liberal exegesis will ever fully digest.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - The history of Christianity is principally a story of mankind's misery and ignorance rather than of its requited love of God.
Religion/Faith - Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.
Religion/Faith - Most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths.
Religion/Faith - The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.
Religion/Faith - It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.
Religion/Faith • Science - 120 million of us [Americans] place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
Religion/Faith - Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society.
Ethics • Religion/Faith • Science - (On stem-cell research): The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.
Ethics • Religion/Faith • Science - To believe that God exists is to believe that I stand in some relation to his existence such that his existence is itself the reason for my belief.
God • Philosophy • Religion/Faith - Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
Religion/Faith - Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.
Religion/Faith - We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.
Religion/Faith - How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.
Religion/Faith - A close study of these "holy" books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages.
Ethics • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - Fundamentalist Christians support Israel because they believe that the final consolidation of Jewish power in the Holy Land — specifically, the rebuilding of Solomon's temple — will usher in both the Second Coming of Christ and the final destruction of the Jews.
Religion/Faith - The Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions — jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate.
God - The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago — and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since — is no one to consult on questions of ethics.
Ethics • God - The God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
Evolution • God • Nature - Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.
Religion/Faith - Faith is, really, the permission that religious people give one another to believe things strongly when reasons fail.
Religion/Faith - Given the astounding number of galaxies and potential worlds arrayed overhead, the complexities of life on earth and the advances in our ethical discourse over the last 2,000 years, the world's religions offer a view of reality that is now so utterly impoverished as to scarcely constitute a view of reality at all.
Religion/Faith - Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance.
Religion/Faith
Hawking, Stephen William (b. 1942)
British scientist, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge (a post once held by Isaac Newton).
- What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
God • Philosophy • Science - The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
Religion/Faith • Science - I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality - We shouldn't be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life.
Philosophy • Science
Hayes, Judith
American author, famous for her long-running Happy Heretic column.
- If judged only by the results that challenge the laws of probabilities, then the power of prayer is nil.
Nature • Religion/Faith - If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
Evolution - The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?
Religion/Faith - These highly exalted "linchpins," particularly in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, are nothing more than a carrot-and-stick approach to "morality." Do good or else! Goodness is not promoted for its own sake. It is promoted as a means of avoiding God's wrath and damnation. This is the antithesis of morality. You're doing something good solely because you're afraid of what might happen to you (frying in hell) if you don't. You're looking out for Number One --- pure selfishness --- the opposite of truly moral behavior. By contrast, those of us who don't believe there are any gods or devils snapping at our heels, do good simply because we feel compassion, and want to help. Surely this is truly moral behavior. We are seeking no spiritual rewards or brownie points for the hereafter. We just want to help.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Ethics • Religion/Faith - Life can be beautiful, profound, and awe-inspiring, even without an irate god threatening us with eternal torment -- or god's self-appointed spokespersons imposing their various notions of proper god-subservient behaviors on everyone else.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Religion/Faith
Heinlein, Robert A. (1907-1988)
Influential American science fiction author.
- One man's religion is another man's belly laugh.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith - Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.
Ethics - The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H. Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.
God • Religion/Faith - History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
Religion/Faith - A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong. The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter
judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak certainty of reason - but one cannot have both.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there.
Religion/Faith
Hitchens, Christopher (b. 1949)
British journalist, author, critic and self-proclaimed political satirist.
- What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
Reason/Rationality - Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!
God • Religion/Faith - Along with Islam and Christianity, [Judaism] does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensible condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith - 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.
Religion/Faith
Hoffer, Eric (1902-1983)
American philosopher.
- The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
Religion/Faith - The aim of a religious movement is to inflict a malady in society, then offer the religion as a cure.
Religion/Faith - The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.
Religion/Faith - Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.
Religion/Faith - The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse. It is doubtful whether
a movement which does not profess some preposterous and patently irrational dogma can be possessed of that zealous drive which "must
either win men or destroy the world." It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction between profession and practice - that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt - are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others.
Religion/Faith
Hubbard, Elbert (1856-1915)
American writer and publisher.
- Theology, by diverting the attention of men from this life to another, and by endeavoring to coerce all men into one religion, constantly preaching that this world is full of misery, but the next world would be beautiful -- or not, as the case may be -- has forced on men the thought of fear where otherwise there might have been the happy abandon of nature.
- Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific -- that is, truthful -- must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand.
Religion/Faith
Hugo, Victor (1802-1885)
French poet, dramatist, novelist.
- There is in every village a torch: the schoolmaster -- and an extinguisher: the parson.
Religion/Faith • Science
Hume, David (1711-1776)
Scottish philosopher and historian, one of the most important figures in the Scottish Enlightenment.
- But I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature.
Nature • Philosophy - All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be skeptical, or at least cautious; and not to admit of any hypothesis, whatsoever; much less, of any which is supported by no appearance of probability.
Skepticism - There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves
Reason/Rationality • Skepticism
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-1895)
British biologist, stront supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution, coined the term 'agnostism'.
- The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best -- that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Reason/Rationality • Science - Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
Nature • Reason/Rationality - I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.
Freethought • Religion/Faith - Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.
Liberty/Freedom - Cherish [Science], venerate her, follow her methods faithfully ... and the future of this people will be greater than the past.
Science - The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
Reason/Rationality • Science - No one who has lived in the world as long as you and I have, can entertain the pious delusion that it is engineered upon principles of benevolence... the cosmos remains always beautiful and profoundly interesting in every corner--and if I had as many lives as a cat I would leave no corner unexplored.
Reason/Rationality • Science - It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny