#at

John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's. ↗

— David Craig

#atheists #biologists #friedrich-engels #god #humanists

People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave. ↗

— Assata Shakur

#oppression #resistance #oppression

The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God. ↗

— Annie Wood Besant

#atheism #god #atheist

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176) ↗

— Stephen Batchelor

#belief #disbelief #metaphysics #reality #theism

I am a lonely man,' Sensei said. 'And so I am glad that you come to see me. But I am also a melancholy man, and so I asked you why you should wish to visit me so often. ↗

— Sōseki Natsume

#japanese #japanese-literature #loneliness #japan

He felt so lost, he said later, that the familiar studio felt like a haunted valley deep in the mountains, with the smell of rotting leaves, the spray of a waterfall, the sour fumes of fruit stashed away by a monkey; even the dim glow of the master's oil lamp on its tripod looked to him like misty moonlight in the hills. ↗

— Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

#japanese #japanese-literature #japan

When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone. ↗

— Ryū Murakami

#japanese #japanese-literature #japan

He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children's building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train. ↗

— Ryū Murakami

#japanese #japanese-literature #train #yamanote #japan

Out of the ugliness of the ironworks lepers will eat, children will be born, their parents will grow old. ↗

— Helen McCarthy

#film #hayao-miyazaki #japan #japan

Kon’s films present a fractured, multifaceted world in which everyone has their own different reality. ↗

— Andrew Osmond

#film #japan #japan