#atheism

If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say “God.” This turns out not to be easy. The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn’t a real god. They didn’t believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn’t believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#experience

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#daughters #death #fatherhood #fathers #god

The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#imagination

Atheism Is Rare ?! so is intelligence ↗

— Sherif Gaber

#atheist #intelligence #rare #yamirasu #intelligence

The greatest admission a human can make is that perhaps he does not have the intelligence, the vision, the grasp to fully understand the universe, and that perhaps no human ever will. To put it all down to some omnipotent deity is a cop-out. Factor in fairy tales of an afterlife and it becomes a comforting cop-out. ↗

— Neal Asher

#philosophical #intelligence

You may only get this one life – but lived free of submissive reverence – that is still a thing of rampant beauty. ↗

— Trevor Treharne

#atheist #god #logic #reason #religion

It is hard to see how a great man can be an atheist. Without the sustaining influence of faith in a divine power we could have little faith in ourselves. We need to feel that behind us is intelligence and love. Doubters do not achieve; skeptics do not contribute; cynics do not create. Faith is the great motive power, and no man realizes his full possibilities unless he has the deep conviction that life is eternally important, and that his work, well done, is a part of an unending plan. ↗

— Calvin Coolidge

#creativity #faith #god #faith

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#bible #organized-religion #religion #religion

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' "Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him. ↗

— Kingsley Amis

#god #misotheism #religion #religion

Not only is this not love; I think it is the most diabolical unfairness that was ever taught or devised. ↗

— Ruth Hurmence Green

#bible #christianity #religion #love