Originally posted by rwingettOriginally posted by rwingett
Paine was not an atheist, although he was very critical of religion. From 'The Age of Reason':
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church th ...[text shortened]... uman inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Paine was not an atheist, although he was very critical of religion. From 'The Age of Reason':
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
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Thomas Paine's Final Words: "He died almost alone. The moment he died Christians commenced manufacturing horrors for his deathbed. They had his chamber fill with devils rattling chains, and these ancient lies are annually certified to by the respectable Christians of the present day. The truth is, he died as he had lived. Some ministers were impolite enough to visit him against his will. Several of them he ordered from his room. A couple of Catholic priests, in all the meekness of hypocrisy, called that they might enjoy the agonies of a dying friend of man. Thomas Paine, rising in his bed, the few embers of expiring life blown into flame by the breath of indignation, had the goodness to curse them both. His physician, who seems to have been a meddling fool, just as the cold hand of death was touching the patriot?s heart, whispered in the dull ear of the dying man: "Do you believe, or do you wish to believe, that Jesus Christ is the son of God?" And the reply was: "I have no wish to believe on that subject." These were the last remembered words of Thomas Paine."
http://www.thomaspainesociety.org/ingersoll.html
Stupid atheist quotes.
"Religion has caused wars throughout history. Why just look at all the governments that have gone to war over the centuries because they over heard people praying the wrong way"
"Religion is for the stupid and weak. Although it is true that the vast majority of people on earth believe in God, just know that I'm one of the really smart idiots who never is in need."
"Religious people are so closed minded. If only they would open their minds they might see that I'm right and the entire Bible is wrong."
"We believe that after death comes there is nothing, because when you ask the dead what happens after they have died, they say nothing. If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then heaven is compulsory for all, excepting maybe Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan."
"We believe that mankind is basically good. It is only his behavior that lets him down. This is the fault of society. Society is the fault of conditions. Conditions are the fault of society".
"We believe that there is no absolute truth, excepting the truth that there is no absolute truth."
"I believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him or her. Then when they do, reality will adapt accordingly."
"Jesus raised from the dead? This is just absurd. Nothing that is dead can ever come to life."
"Extra dippy ice cream is logical proof that God does not exist. After all, if an omnipotent and omniscient God exists, then such a God would have the ability to stop ice cream from becoming extra dippy."
"Don't you think it cruel that God let all those innocent babies in the Great flood down? You people have no logical consistency, next thing you know you fundamentalists will be outlawing abortions like the Nazis you are."
Originally posted by SwissGambit"The 20 Best Christopher Hitchens Quotes" (1 of 2)
Needs Mark Twain quotes. And Bill Maher. And Christopher Hitchens. Etc. Etc.
I'd get them but then we might lose your unique insight on each one. So, *chop chop*.
"Christopher Hitchens has a lot of quote-worthy material, but here are 20 of my personal favorites:
"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more." -The Portable Atheist
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"By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And—most of all—what kind of designer or creator only chooses to “reveal” himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?" -The Portable Atheist
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"The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species." -God Is Not Great
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"What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes." -God Is Not Great
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"Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world…. Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment." -God Is Not Great
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"Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion." -God Is Not Great
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"The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals." -God Is Not Great
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"If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species." -God Is Not Great
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"Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing [in the ten commandments] about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly “in context” to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended?" -God Is Not Great
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"Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard—or try to turn back—the measurable advances that we have made.
Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and obstruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two.
Meanwhile, confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in proteins and acids which constitute our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.” -God Is Not Great
"The 20 Best Christopher Hitchens Quotes" (2 of 2)
"Christopher Hitchens has a lot of quote-worthy material, but here are 20 of my personal favorites:
"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it." -God Is Not Great
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"Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake." -God Is Not Great
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"Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did." -God Is Not Great
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"Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake." -God Is Not Great
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"If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world." -God Is Not Great
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"I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves." -Hitch-22
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"Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated."
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"Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer."
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"Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way."
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"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."
December 16, 2011 By Daniel Florien
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2011/12/the-20-best-christopher-hitchens-quotes/
"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Born Christopher Eric Hitchens 13 April 1949 Portsmouth, England, UK. Died 15 December 2011 (aged 62) Houston, Texas, US. Occupation: Journalist, author. Nationality: British, American . Alma mater The Leys School Balliol College, Oxford. Subjects: Politics, religion, history, biography, literature. Notable award(s): Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction (1991); National Magazine Award for Columns (2007, 2011); Richard Dawkins Award (2011); LennonOno Grant For Peace (2012); PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay (2012). Spouse(s): Eleni Meleagrou (m. 1981–1989; divorced); Carol Blue (m. 1991–2011; his death); Relative(s) Peter Hitchens (brother)"
"Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British-American author, polemicist, debater, and journalist. Hitchens contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was the author of twelve books and five collections of essays, and concentrated on a range of subjects, including politics, literature and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure. Known for his contrarian stance on a number of issues, he excoriated such public figures as Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Lady Diana, and Pope Benedict XVI. He was the older brother of author Peter Hitchens.
Long describing himself as a socialist, Hitchens began his break from the established political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton, and the "anti-war" movement's opposition to intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina—though Christopher did not leave his position writing for The Nation until, post-9/11, he felt the magazine had arrived at a position "that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden. "The September 11 attacks "exhilarated" him, bringing into focus "a battle between everything I love and everything I hate," and strengthening his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy which challenged "fascism with an Islamic face". His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left. Indeed, in a 2010 BBC interview, he stated that he maintained sympathies for Marxism.
A noted critic of religion and an antitheist, he said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct", but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion." According to Hitchens, the concept of a god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilisation. His anti-religion polemic, New York Times Bestseller, God is not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything, sold over 500,000 copies.
Hitchens died on 15 December 2011, from complications arising from oesophageal cancer, a disease that he acknowledged was more than likely due to his lifelong predilection for heavy smoking and drinking."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens’ Last Words August 19, 2012 By Hemant Mehta
"They weren’t “I’ve found Jesus!”
In anticipation of his final book Mortality, to be released on September 4th, his widow Carol Blue penned an afterword which was released online this weekend: I can’t seem to access the full piece at The Daily Telegraph, but you can catch glimpses of it at Google Books. Here’s Carol Blue":
"His last words of the unfinished fragmentary jottings at the end of this little book may seem to trail off, but in fact they were written on his computer in bursts of energy and enthusiasm as he sat in the hospital using his food tray for a desk.
When he was admitted to the hospital for the last time, we thought it would be for a brief stay. He thought — we all thought — he’d have the chance to write the longer book that was forming in his mind. His intellectual curiosity was sparked by genomics and the cutting-edge proton radiation treatments he underwent, and he was encouraged by the prospect that his case could contribute to future medical breakthroughs. He told an editor friend waiting for an article, “Sorry for the delay, I’ll be back home soon.” He told me he couldn’t wait to catch up on all the movies he had missed and to see the King Tut exhibition in Houston, our temporary residence.
The end was unexpected."
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2012/08/19/christopher-hitchens-last-words/
Jesus often gets a free pass from skeptics and scoffers. Not so from Mark Twain, the most eloquent scoffer of all time.
Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain, a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats, humiliations, and despairs -- the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
In time, the Deity perceived that death was a mistake; a mistake, in that it was insufficient; insufficient, for the reason that while it was an admirable agent for the inflicting of misery upon the survivor, it allowed the dead person himself to escape from all further persecution in the blessed refuge of the grave. This was not satisfactory. A way must be conceived to pursue the dead beyond the tomb.
The Deity pondered this matter during four thousand years unsuccessfully, but as soon as he came down to earth and became a Christian his mind cleared and he knew what to do. He invented hell, and proclaimed it.
Now here is a curious thing. It is believed by everybody that while he was in heaven he was stern, hard, resentful, jealous, and cruel; but that when he came down to earth and assumed the name Jesus Christ, he became the opposite of what he was before: that is to say, he became sweet, and gentle, merciful, forgiving, and all harshness disappeared from his nature and a deep and yearning love for his poor human children took its place. Whereas it was as Jesus Christ that he devised hell and proclaimed it!
Which is to say, that as the meek and gentle Savior he was a thousand billion times crueler than ever he was in the Old Testament -- oh, incomparably more atrocious than ever he was when he was at the very worst in those old days!
-Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
Originally posted by SwissGambitOriginally posted by SwissGambit (Page 1)
Jesus often gets a free pass from skeptics and scoffers. Not so from Mark Twain, the most eloquent scoffer of all time.
Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain, a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exulta ...[text shortened]... e was at the very worst in those old days!
-Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
Needs Mark Twain quotes. And Bill Maher. And Christopher Hitchens. Etc. Etc.
I'd get them but then we might lose your unique insight on each one. So, *chop chop*.
The three atheists you recommended are now represented. Next famous individuals whose quotes the conversation needs?
Originally posted by Grampy BobbyDavid Hume.
Originally posted by SwissGambit (Page 1)
[b]Needs Mark Twain quotes. And Bill Maher. And Christopher Hitchens. Etc. Etc.
I'd get them but then we might lose your unique insight on each one. So, *chop chop*.
The three atheists you recommended are now represented. Next famous individuals whose quotes the conversation needs?[/b]