#sm

There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#religion

I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate… ↗

— David Attenborough

#birds #christian #christianity #creation #god

Once you have surrendered yourself, you make yourself receptive. In receiving from God, you are perfected and completed. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#christianity #god #jesus-christ #perfected-man #religion

You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#religion #skepticism #religion

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#prophets #religion #religion

In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him. ↗

— Jethro Tull

#atheist #religion #religion

The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#desire #religion #religion

Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#islamic-holy-books #islamic-republic #politics #religion #religious-text

A belief is not true because it is useful ↗

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

#agnosticism #agnostics #atheism #atheist #atheists

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