#theism

I'll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive. And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you. ↗

— Madalyn Murray O'Hair

#men

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

— Isaac Asimov

#bible #organized-religion #religion #religion

When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism. ↗

— Dag Hammarskjöld

#nature #pantheism #nature

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#philosophy #humans

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist. ↗

— Albert Camus

#god #religion #believe

How do you know when you're God?" "When I pray to him I find I am talking to myself. ↗

— Peter Barnes

#atheist #god #noremorse #comedy

Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery. ↗

— Bede Griffiths

#atheism #idols #religion #religion

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich. ↗

— Napoleon Bonaparte

#organized-religion #religion #religion

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics". To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile. Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life. ↗

— Paul Davies

#chance #coincidence #fine-tuning #fred-hoyle #id

What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. ↗

— Sam Harris

#atheism #belief #ethics #humanism #religion