#oral

Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#religion #religion

In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise. ↗

— Sam Harris

#morality #religion #religion

What is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked? ↗

— Rowan Atkinson

#cults #human-rights #liberty #logic #morality

There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US! ↗

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

#morality #morals #philosophy #religion #nature

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#religion

He was like Superman, but with fangs and oddly impaired morals. ↗

— Patricia Briggs

#vampire #morals

[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. ↗

— Jonathan Haidt

#religion

Immorality is the word we use to describe people that are not sinning the same way we are. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#church #hypocrisy #hypocrites #immorality #judgement

I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible Court of Arbitration with which all religion is concerned. Unless he thinks he is vitally, eternally, cosmically in the right, he is wrong to fire off a pocket-pistol. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#god #morality #religion #war #religion

Modern society, the political body, the legal and judiciary system, the state of governance, capitalism and the very fabric of the society itself, including our religions and so-called morals and values, are institutions steeped in traditions of absolute and total violence. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#government #institution #morality #politics #religion