Naturalism Quotes

I try to keep these 2 principles in mind...

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.  -Joseph Addison

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.  -Mark Twain


The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.  -Bertrand Russell


"As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude ... that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honoured save justice and charity". – Baruch Spinoza




It is your own convictions which compels you; that is, choice compels choice.  -Epictetus


Belief is not a matter of choice, but of conviction.  -Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll nicknamed The Great Agnostic (unable to confirm attribution)


"Why don't you pray just in case there is a god?"  For the same reason you don't cover your doorways in garlic in case there are vampires.  -Ricky Gervais


Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.  -Voltaire


Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.  -Plato


One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.  -Paul Valéry (1871-1945) French poet and philosopher.






NEW


She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.  -Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (1964), speaking of his grandmother.

Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. -Jean-Paul Sartre, Lecture given in 1946

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. -Jean-Paul Sartre

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not. -Jupiter, Act 2, Jean-Paul Sartre

Jupiter: I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you?
Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free. -Jupiter, Act 3, Jean-Paul Sartre

One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life. -Inès, Act 1, sc. 5, Jean-Paul Sartre



Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose. -Jean-Paul Sartre

What man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.  -Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.  -Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, lecture (1946)






SKEPTISM


She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.  -Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (1964), speaking of his grandmother.

You cannot reason a man out of that which he was not reasoned into.  -Jonathan Swift (paraphrased)


If we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom.  -Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark


UCSB Professor McCray argues that one of the most notable trends in science this year wasn't a discovery at all. It has to do with how much the public accepts what scientists tell them. "Debates over climate change, evolution, whether vaccines cause autism, things like that all are part of a larger debate about the role and place of experts in American society," he says. Americans still accept that science is a way to learn truths, but people are less likely to trust scientists as objective experts, McCray says. "And I think it's certainly something that a decade from now, we might look back upon and find quite curious, and indeed, quite serious." That trend affects how we make use of the discoveries that flow from science so it also matters a lot.  http://www.npr.org/2013/01/01/168208273/the-year-of-the-higgs-and-other-tiny-advances-in-science


Pierre Abelard: "The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth."


Catholic Encyclopedia: "The faith demanded by the Christian Revelation stands on a different footing from the belief claimed by any other religion. Since it rests on divine authority, ... its refusal involves not merely intellectual error, but also some degree of moral perversity. It follows that doubt in regard to the Christian religion is equivalent to its total rejection."


"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."  -Thomas Aquinas.


"Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe."  -Saint Augustine.


"Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see."  -Martin Luther


"Where there is evidence, no one speaks of 'faith'. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence." -Bertrand Russell


The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.  -Walter Lippmann


"I have found a fullness in the doubts and questions of my life that I once thought could only be found in the answers. Mercifully, doubts and questions have come to be so fulfilling that I find myself suspicious of answers, not because they are necessarily false or irrelevant, but because even when relevant and true they are, and can only be partial. It is doubt and questioning that always lure me on to broader horizons and deeper insights through an openness to the infinite that leave me contentedly discontent." -Darrell J. Fasching

http://www.religioustolerance.org/reldoubt2.htm


The search for truth is more precious than its possession. -Albert Einstein


The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.  -Miguel de Unamuno


Inquiry is fatal to certainty.  -William J. Durant


The trick is living without an answer... I think.  -Perry Lyman/Keanu Reeves, Thumbsucker


Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  -Sir Martin Rees (astronomer)


The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism.  -Paul Ricoeur


A man is to be cheated into passion, but reasoned into truth.  -John Dryden


Common sense is the sum total of all prejudice deposited in the human mind prior to the age of 18.  -Albert Einstein


Prejudices are what fools use for reason.  -Voltaire



Throughout the night, it was clear that the point of these dialogues is not to change the other's mind. That would be a fruitless exercise, as history has taught us over and over. The point is to have an open mind about what the other is thinking, without resorting to some kind of primitive tribalism where the "other," the one with different opinions or values from you, is necessarily your inferior. It was also clear that a dialogue of any kind would be impossible between radicalized factions. I wouldn't sit down with a literalist or with my orthodox Jewish cousin to discuss science and faith. A literalist's arguments would be pointless to most scientists.  -Marcelo Gleiser






TRUTH


"If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another."  -Epicurus


"Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist." Epicurus



The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.  -Winston Churchill


An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.  -Mahatma Gandhi


Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.  -Winston Churchill


It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.  -Konrad Lorenz


Science increases our power in proportion as it lowers our pride. -Claude Bernard (1813-78) French physiologist.


... the scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge.  -Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961) U. S. physicist, Nobel Prize, 1946.


One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.  -Paul Valéry (1871-1945) French poet and philosopher.


Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!  -Galen, Claudius (c.130-c.200) Greek physician, writer. On The Natural Faculties


Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.  -Thomas Paine


The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.  -Samuel Butler


Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people's, if we are always criticizing trivial actions - which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through our ignorance of their motives.  -Saint Teresa


It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.  -James A. Baldwin


The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism.  -Paul Ricoeur


Science is the father of knowledge, but opinion breeds ignorance.  -Hippocrates


I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.  -Thomas Carlyle


Ignorance is always afraid of change.  -Jawaharlal Nehru


Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.  -George Eliot


I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.  -Christopher Marlowe


Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.  -Laurence J. Peter


We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.  -Christian Nestell Bovee


In the clashes between ignorance and intelligence, ignorance is generally the aggressor.
-Paul Harris


Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved.  -Thucydides


Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.  -Bennett Cerf


"An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed"  -Carl Sagan


"I do not fear death. I had been dead billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -Mark Twain


"Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return". -Genesis 3:19






MORALITY


"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."  -Dalai Lama


"Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love."  -Lao Tzu


"One kind word can warm three winter months."  -Japanese Proverb


"Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate."  -Albert Schweitzer


"Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence, or learning."  -Frederick W. Faber



Regarding suicide; When asked, 'If when we're dead we're oblivious and wouldn't miss being alive then what's the point in living if we're going to die anyways?'  But by this reasoning then if in death we don't care what's the lure in wanting to be immortal and live forever instead?  Immortality would have no advantage over a prematurely shortened life unless there's some perceived value in continuing to live, even if only for the lifespan of a mortal.  There's no 'point' or cosmic necessity in living, it's simply part of our biological and psychological nature. The oblivion in 'being' dead however isn't the problem, its the act of dying that should be feared.  Whether by self preservation and empathy or whatever else, the thought of killing, either of one's self or of others, is repugnant.  It wouldn't be a logical choice, it would be a tragic one.


Religions vary in their beliefs the world over but along with secular beliefs they all share one tenet, the Ethic of Reciprocity... The Golden Rule...


"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." -The Holy Bible, Luke 6:31


"The Golden Rule is arguably the most essential basis for the modern concept of human rights, in which each individual has a right to just treatment, and a reciprocal responsibility to ensure justice for others." -Wikipedia


"In faith and hope the world will disagree, but all mankind's concern is charity." -Alexander the Great






GOVERNMENT


"[T]he very first words of the Bill of Rights declare that: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The two clauses do not represent separate and distinct conceptions, but a unified one; together they serve the broad common purpose of religious liberty. As a means to that end, we believe it is at the very least arguable that the Establishment Clause creates in each citizen a "personal constitutional right" to a government that does not establish religion. The essence of the argument, as Justice Harlan recognized, is "that freedom from establishment is a right that inheres in every citizen, thus any citizen should be permitted to challenge any measure that conceivably involves establishment." As a cornerstone of our government, it may well be that the Establishment Clause should be enforceable at the demand of every individual who claims injury to an interest protected thereby. Justice Brennan, for one, has expressly rejected the suggestion that the Establishment Clause "is not one of the provisions of the Bill of Rights which in terms protects a `freedom' of the individual. . . . The fallacy in this contention," he wrote, "is that it underestimates the role of the Establishment Clause, as a coguarantor, with the Free Exercise Clause, of religious liberty." Americans United v. U.S. Dept. of HEW, 619 F.2d 252, 265-266 (3d Cir. 1980)


"A good many people find it comfortable for now, and sufficient, to extol, and propose to enforce, the values of what they call the Judeo-Christian tradition. Theirs is not a long view. Recall again the Islam is the fastest growing religion. It may or may not come to predominate. We can be nearly certain, however, that the current state of affairs will not endure. Today's Protestant minority in the United States may thank its ancestors who fashioned decent places for minorities when they were the majority. Today's power structure should be preserving that tradition. It is the essence of the Bill of Rights.

"The subject of power is not a simple matter of which majority sits on which minority at any given time. Looking around the world today and back through history, we see the horrors to which interreligious conflicts can lead—Muslims versus Hindus, Orthodox Eastern Serbs and Croatian Roman Catholics against Bosnian Muslims, Catholics versus Protestants in much Europe after the sixteenth century, not to omit our own lesser, but horrible, history of persecutions in colonial America and the martyrdom of Joseph Smith as well as a number of his Mormon followers. We see, too, the fragility of the lessons these oceans of blood should have taught. The powerless call out for tolerance. Achieving power, they may soon forget. The descendants of Rome's Christian martyrs remember too well the role of the tortures rather than the agonies of their own ancestors. […] As was said at the outset of this chapter, the vice in being too sure for our purposes is the deposition to impose your beliefs and your forms of religious conduct on others. That attitude is the enemy of religious freedom. It is the remembered and hated form of oppression against which the First Amendment was drawn."  -Marvin E. Frankel (New York, US Federal District Judge)


"Total separation of church and state was considered the best safeguard for the health of each. As [Andrew] Jackson explained, in refusing to name a fast day, he feared to 'disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country, in its complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government.'"  -Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (The Age of Jackson, Boston)


"To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against that liberty of conscience which is one of the foundations of American life."  -Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) 26th U.S. President


"It represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office." -John F. Kennedy


All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.  -Albert Einstein






PSUDO SCIENCE AND DENIAL AND WISHFUL THINKING


"Authentic scientific skepticism is an intellectual and scholarly pursuit that requires honesty, rationality, logic, and evidence. Real skeptics do not cling to absurd conspiracy theories for which there is no evidence, nor do they engage in obfuscation, misrepresentation, data fabrication, smear campaigns, or intimidation tactics. These are the methods of deniers... "

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-boslough/npr-finally-stops-referri_b_6165846.html


"To his great credit, Frank immediately admitted his mistake but stands unrepentant for sticking to his protocol of not sharing information with other researchers. He says that he lives by this protocol. The sheer hubris of having (and living by!) a protocol for not sharing information without apparently having any protocols for even insuring the authenticity of that information is amusing. But this is UFO 'research' and so, par for the course. For me this episode is sort of a snapshot example as to why so many consider UFOlogy a pseudoscience. And why it will always be that way."

http://www.notaghost.com/2011/05/the-protocols-of-frank-warren.html



"It's not about effecting the global temperature and climate change... There's public comments out there that question has been asked and answered saying no." Rep. Larry Bucshon

"You should look at the scientific literature instead of the public comments." John Holdren, White House Science Adviser

"Of all the climatologists who's careers depend on the climate changing to keep themselves publishing articles, yes, I could read that but I don't believe it." Rep. Larry Bucshon

U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 09/22/2014



"The standard scientific models give the explanation that what appears to be paranormal phenomena is usually a misinterpretation, misunderstanding, or anomalous variation of natural phenomena, rather than an actual paranormal phenomenon... Though there are still some parapsychologists active today, interest and activity has waned considerably since the 1970s. To date there have been no experimental results that have gained wide acceptance in the scientific community as valid evidence of the paranormal... There is evidence of absence for the power of faith healing (which the American Cancer Society also calls potentially dangerous if it replaces proper medical care).... Joe Nickell of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, wrote that there was no credible scientific evidence that any location was inhabited by spirits of the dead. Limitations of human perception and ordinary physical explanations can account for ghost sightings; for example, air pressure changes in a home causing doors to slam, or lights from a passing car reflected through a window at night. Pareidolia, an innate tendency to recognize patterns in random perceptions, is what some skeptics believe causes people to believe that they have 'seen ghosts'... By definition, the paranormal does not conform to conventional expectations of nature. Therefore, a phenomenon cannot be confirmed as paranormal using the scientific method because, if it could be, it would no longer fit the definition. (However, confirmation would result in the phenomenon being reclassified as part of science.) Despite this problem, studies on the paranormal are periodically conducted by researchers from various disciplines."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost


A classic case of ghost brain (the mindset that 'anything' that happens while you are fake ghost hunting can be attributed to ghosts), occured when two team members heard something in the room above them. They rushed up and threw open a door, only to have several birds fly out past them in flurry of wings admidst screams from the team members. Then, believe it or not, the scientific investigators went into the room and proclaimed that there was nothing there that could have made the sound. I thought I even heard the birds laughing at that one!

http://www.notaghost.com/2010/01/hitlers-ghost-january-6-2010ghost-hunters-internationalsyfyfor-the-past-month-syfy-has-advertised-the-return-of-ghi-and-the.html


...every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a miracle as soon as the religious view of it can be the dominant".  -Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian theologian


Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. –Carl Sagan


"Where belief in miracles exists, evidence will always be forthcoming to confirm its existence. In the case of moving statues and paintings, the belief produces the hallucination and the hallucination confirms the belief." -D.H. Rawcliffe


The claim that God has worked a miracle implies that God has singled out certain persons for some benefit which many others do not receive implies that God is unfair... If God intervenes to save your life in a car crash, then what was he doing in Auschwitz? (Thus an all-powerful, all-knowing and just God, as predicated in Christianity, would not perform miracles.)  -James Keller


Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. Studies have consistently shown that holding all else equal, subjects will predict positive outcomes to be more likely than negative outcomes (see unrealistic optimism). However, new research suggests that under certain circumstances, such as when threat increases, a reverse phenomenon occurs. In addition to being a cognitive bias and a poor way of making decisions, wishful thinking is commonly held to be a specific informal fallacy in an argument when it is assumed that because we wish something to be true or false, it is actually true or false. This fallacy has the form "I wish that P is true/false, therefore P is true/false." Wishful thinking, if this were true, would rely upon appeals to emotion, and would also be a red herring. Wishful thinking may cause blindness to unintended consequences. Concrete cognitive mechanisms underlying wishful thinking and wishful seeing are unknown. Since these concepts are still developing, research on the mechanisms contributing to this phenomenon is still in progress. However, some mechanisms have been proposed. Wishful thinking could be attributed to three mechanisms: attention bias, interpretation bias or response bias. Therefore, there are three different stages in cognitive processing in which wishful thinking could arise. First, at the lowest stage of cognitive processing, individuals selectively attend to cues. Individuals can attend to evidence that supports their desires and neglect contradictory evidence. Second, wishful thinking could be generated by selective interpretation of cues. In this case, an individual is not changing their attention to the cue but the attribution of importance to the cue. Finally, wishful thinking can arise at a higher stage of cognitive processing, such as when forming a response to the cue and inserting bias.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking





Magical thinking is the attribution of causal or synchronistic relationships between actions and events which seemingly cannot be justified by reason and observation. In religion, folk religion, and superstitious beliefs, the posited correlation is often between religious ritual, prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In clinical psychology, magical thinking can cause a patient to experience fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities. Magical thinking may lead people to believe that their thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it. It is a type of causal reasoning or causal fallacy that looks for meaningful relationships of grouped phenomena (coincidence) between acts and events.

"Quasi-magical thinking" describes "cases in which people act as if they erroneously believe that their action influences the outcome, even though they do not really hold that belief."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking



Law of truly large numbers; British mathematician J. E. Littlewood suggested that individuals should statistically expect one-in-a-million events ("miracles") to happen to them at the rate of about one per month. By Littlewood's definition, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle


Phenomenological approach: Ariel Glucklich tries to understand magic from a subjective perspective, attempting to comprehend magic on a phenomenological, experientially based level. Glucklich seeks to describe the attitude that magical practitioners feel which he calls "magical consciousness" or the "magical experience." He explains that it is based upon "the awareness of the interrelatedness of all things in the world by means of simple but refined sense perception."

Another phenomenological model is that of Gilbert Lewis, who argues that "habit is unthinking." He believes that those practicing magic do not think of an explanatory theory behind their actions any more than the average person tries to grasp the pharmaceutical workings of aspirin.[24] When the average person takes an aspirin, he does not know how the medicine chemically functions. He takes the pill with the premise that there is proof of efficacy. Similarly, many who avail themselves of magic do so without feeling the need to understand a causal theory behind it.

Substantive difference: One theory of substantive difference is that of the open versus closed society. Horton describes this as one of the key dissimilarities between traditional thought and Western science. He suggests that the scientific worldview is distinguished from a magical one by the scientific method and by skepticism, requiring the falsifiability of any scientific hypothesis. He notes that for native peoples "there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical texts." He notes that all further differences between traditional and Western thought can be understood as a result of this factor. Because there are no alternatives in societies based on magical thought, a theory does not need to be objectively judged to be valid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking




"Every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a miracle as soon as the religious view of it can be the dominant"  -Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Theologian (to theologians then a surprising and welcome coincidence following a prayer could then be a miracle)


Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  -Arthur C. Clarke


Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.  - Karl Schroeder


"The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance." -Richard Dawkins


"'Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted." -Ralph Waldo Emerson


“Fate would have no divinity if we were wise: it is we who make her a goddess and place her in heaven.” -Decimus Junius Juvenalis


“Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.” -Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings






SCIENCE


Rational Debate: We Can't Live (Together) Without It; Some of the time, there's no need for convergence of belief when it comes to coordinating public life. We can agree to disagree and pursue some common goals. But when different beliefs dictate different positions on what should be taught in schools, which scientific questions should be pursued or whether environmental catastrophes are imminent, some method for arbitration is required.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/04/28/307659432/rational-debate-we-can-t-live-together-without-it


"And so, you can’t just fund one branch of scientific inquiry, you have to fund them all... For example, the MRI came from principles of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine... So the cross pollination of disciplines is fundamental to truly revolutionary advances in our culture." -Neil deGrasse Tyson


"Consilience; In science and history, consilience (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) refers to the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" to strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence are very strong on their own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence: if not, the evidence is comparatively weak, and there will not likely be a strong scientific consensus."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience


"Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus


"The field of imagination is thus laid open to our use and lessons may be formed to illustrate and carry home to the heart every moral rule of life. Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity that ever were written." -Thomas Jefferson, on the benefits of reading fiction


Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, that the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider comfortable or plausible. We have learned something about the idiosyncratic nature of our common sense. Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. -A Universe Not Made for Us by Carl Sagan






SPIRITUALITY


"The meaning of life constitutes a philosophical question concerning the purpose and significance of life or existence in general... An alternative, humanistic (rather than religious) approach is the question 'What is the meaning of my life?'" -Wikipedia




Elna Baker, "The last big moment that I feel like was a spiritual experience that I had was probably three years ago, maybe four years ago, where I felt like it was getting so hard to believe for me. And I just was like, 'You know, I want a sign again like the one I had when I was young. And I just want you tell me that you're there, God.' And I knelt down and I prayed and I asked this. And then I looked up at the sky and I was like, 'The sky? That's the sign?' Like, anyone can see this. This isn't a sign. You just see a few stars. It's New York-- you see, like, maybe five stars. And just as I was saying, 'This isn't anything, this is just what's always there,' one of the stars shot across the sky. And it was biggest shooting star I'd ever seen. I still don't know what to think of that moment. It was shocking. But as soon as it happened, I did the thing I do now-- I started questioning. Was that meant for me? Or did I just happen to look up at the exact moment when a star shot across the sky? I had forgotten about that moment until I shared it with Ken, and it made me think, 'Well, that's an even bigger sign than what I experienced in the woods as a teenager, so really, I have had signs since then.' And that's when I realized I don't just want a sign, I want to be myself at 14 again-- the kind of person who believes in signs."




I argued that modern science, in exploring the diversity of worlds out there and the difficult steps for life to evolve from simple prokaryotic cells to full-thinking humans make it highly unlikely that there will be many intelligent aliens in our galaxy. This has important consequences, given that we become this rare oddity, molecular machines capable of self-awareness. In a metaphorical sense, science is restituting our cosmic importance as guardians of thought and of life, at least in this planet.  -Marcelo Gleiser


The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life--hence it is a valuable possession to him.  -Mark Twain, a Biography


I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.  -Mark Twain, Autobiographical dictation, 12 September 1907. Published in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3


In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.  -Mark Twain, Autobiographical dictation, 10 July 1908. Published in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3


We were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold.  -Mark Twain, 67th birthday dinner, 28 November 1902


Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes, and wishes he was certain.  -Mark Twain, Notebook, 1879


The altar cloth of one aeon is the doormat of the next.  -Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898


So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.  -Mark Twain, a Biography


We despise all reverences and all the objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.  -Mark Twain, Following the Equator


The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so. –Mark Twain




"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" –Carl Sagan




Rhetoric without logic, is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet more are taken with rhetoric than logic, because they are caught with fine expressions when they understand not reason.  -John Selden


All the arts of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.  -Locke, John


There is truth and beauty in rhetoric; but it oftener serves ill turns than good ones. -William Penn


Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others.  -Ray Comfort


Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.  -Noreena Hertz


The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.  -Octavio Paz


Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong. -Plato


The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life, or less; but instruction is to be given by showing them what they naturally are. A man is to be cheated into passion, but reasoned into truth.  -John Dryden


A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who … plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.  -Thomas Henry Huxley


Language isn't just the expression of minds but the molder of minds. How words are used influences our receptivity to an idea. -Randy Alcorn


Captain Hyperbole; Half the country is insane and thinks it's the other half that's crazy!


The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.  -Gustave Le Bon


Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television. -Rita Mae Brown


"The question [Do you believe in God?] has a peculiar structure. If I say no, do I mean I'm convinced God doesn't exist, or do I mean I'm not convinced he does exist? Those are two very different questions." -Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact


There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God...  -Michael Shermer (How We Believe)


I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence. -Frederick Douglass


“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” -Unknown, misattributed to Marcus Aurelius


Article IX, Sec. 2, of the Tennessee constitution ("No Atheist shall hold a civil office") states: "No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments shall hold any office in the civil department of this state." (Arkansas, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas have similar laws though not enforced.)







“Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley 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.” -Christopher Hitchens


And then there are fossiles. Whenever anybody tries to tell me that they believe it took place in seven days, I reach for a fossil and go "fossile!" And if they keep talking I throw it just over their head. -Lewis Black


"Suppose We've chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to chruch we're just making him madder and madder!" -Homer Simpson


“What a blessing to know there’s a devil, and that I’m but a pawn in his game / that my impulse to sin doesn’t come from within, and so I’m not exactly to blame.” — Frank Loesser


How can anyone consider Darwin on the HMS Beagle, Apollo 11, the over 1000 servicing satellites, the Large Hadron Collider, the International Space Station, or images from the Hubble Telescope and still question the necessity of exploration? Everything we already do isn't nearly enough. Mankind's exploration has been slowly pulling back the curtains of ignorance and revealing the very nature of the universe its self.  And yet people would rather debate its merits in spin-offs like freeze-dried foods.


After a lecture on astronomy the professor was approached by a distraught looking student. The student asked, "Is it true that the sun will turn into a red giant and destroy the world!?" The professor chuckled and said "Yes. But not to worry, it won't happen for billions of years." The student sighed with relief, "Oh good! I thought you said MILLIONS of years."


I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise. . . . Creeds pretend to explain the total universe in terms comprehensible to the human intellect, and that pretension seems to me bound to be invalid. -Rebecca West


To date, despite the efforts of millions of true believers to support this myth, there is no more evidence for the Judeo-Christian god than any of the gods on Mount Olympus.  -Joseph Daleiden


Our enemies’ opinion of us comes closer to the truth than our own.  -François La Rochefoucauld


We 'feel free' because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.  -Slavoj Zizek


Why are there arguments for God's existence? People don't argue over things they know exist. An argument for God is simply a hidden admission that he or she doesn't know. The very fact that there is an argument at all is evidence for agnosticism and doubt.  -Ignots Pistachio


As the son of a woman who was changed forever by her time in a concentration camp, I am wary of flags, wary of national pride, wary, frankly of god. Six days out of seven, I am an atheist. On the seventh day, I am an agnostic. I believe in holy writ in any language because I believe in poetry, and the power of myth and allegory to express idea that ordinary narrative cannot express. But organized religion makes my chest tighten. I freely grant it produces more figures like Mother Teresa and Saint Francis than it does Torquemadas and Hitlers and Osama bin Ladens, but I fear the scars left behind by the latter are beyond the healing balm of the former. Between Crusades, jihads and pogroms, the great religions have muddled their missions - and their messages - in ways that are impossible to explain away.  -Peter Freundlich, Washington Post, October 7, 2001


As the son of a woman who was changed forever by her time in a concentration camp, I am wary of flags, wary of national pride, wary, frankly of god. Six days out of seven, I am an atheist. On the seventh day, I am an agnostic. I believe in holy writ in any language because I believe in poetry, and the power of myth and allegory to express idea that ordinary narrative cannot express. But organized religion makes my chest tighten.  -Peter Freundlich, Washington Post, October 7, 2001


People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They're far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.  -Isaac Asimov


The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd except to be made by a species that's about a half chromosome away from being a chimpanzee.  -Christopher Hitchens (Hitchens debates Barry Brummett)


Imagine someone said the source of right and wrong is divine decree (killing is wrong because God said it is wrong), well then you have to ask, why did God say it was wrong? Did he have a good reason, or was it just a whim? He could have just as easily said that it's right to go out and kill and rape and torture, in which case it would be right because he said it was right. Now if you recoil at that suggestion: If you say, no it would still be wrong, even if God said it was right, or you say God wouldn't have commanded us to kill and rape because he had a reason not to give us that command, well we can appeal directly to the reason and skip the middle man.  -Stephen Pinker (Can Science Tell Us Right From Wrong?)


When a person is determined to believe something, the very absurdity of the doctrine confirms them in their faith.  -Junius


Some believers accuse skeptics of having nothing left but a dull, cold, scientific world. (as a skeptic) I am left with only art, music, literature, theatre, the magnificence of nature, mathematics, the human spirit, sex, the cosmos, friendship, history, science, imagination, dreams, oceans, mountains, love, and the wonder of birth. That'll do for me.  -Lynne Kelly


Now, I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.  -Barack Obama


I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less that I ought, giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I am capable of. I believe they know everything I do and think and they still love me and I've concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score... is me.  -Adam Savage


Outside we pause for prayers. Around midpoint in my tour I stopped praying, having noticed none of my squadron leaders joined in. I also noted that some of those who had prayed most fervently got killed. I saw that praying gave comfort, but no favor whether one lives or dies. I also knew my mom was praying for me—and she had surely earned more points with God than I. And weren't the Germans praying to the same God as our side?  -William Lyons (from P-51 Pilot: A Day in the Life)


The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.  -Neil deGrasse Tyson


As a scientist, I don't believe anything. Science shouldn't use the word belief. There are things more likely and less likely. Science can say nothing with absolute certainty.  -Lawrence Krauss (In a debate with a Muslim)


Your argument is not with atheists, it's with the other 29,999 sects who view your Christianity as a joke.  -apgracie


"The interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists."  -Voltaire (Regarding Pascal's wager for the belief in God)


"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering." -Dr Who


There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.  -George Washington (address to Congress, 8 January, 1790)


It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.  -Thomas Jefferson, (letter to Rev. James Madison, July 19, 1788)


You will do me the justice to remember that I have always supported the right of every man to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right makes a slave of himself to present opinion because he precludes himself the right of changing it. The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.  -Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)


I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.  -Robert Ingersoll (The Ghosts)


I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.  -Beatrice Hall [pseudonym: S.G. Tallentyre], 1907 (many times wrongfully attributed to Voltaire)


The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.  -Nietzsche (from Human, All-Too Human)


A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.  -Maxwell Planck


Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.  -Leo Tolstoy (On Life and Essays on Religion)


It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is-- if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.  -Richard Feynman (The Character of Physical Law)


I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here....  I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.  -Richard Feynman (interview with Christopher Sykes, in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out," BBC-TV, 1981, [recorded in the book, Genius, the life and science of Richard Feynman])


What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide on how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.  -Professor Stephen W. Hawking (Der Spiegel, 1989)


Science is expanding, and with it our vision of the universe. although this new and constantly changing view may not always give us comfort, it does have the virtue of truth according to our most effective resources for acquiring knowledge.  -Heinz R. Pagels


The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.  -Richard Dawkins (River out of Eden)


Don't believe anything. Regard things on a scale of probabilities. The things that seem most absurd, put under 'Low Probability', and the things that seem most plausible, you put under 'High Probability'. Never believe anything. Once you believe anything, you stop thinking about it.  -Robert A. Wilson (interview with "innerview")


We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.  -Mario Cuomo


For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.  -Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)


If you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defence of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side.  -Daniel C. Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea)


What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.  -Werner Heisnberg


Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.  -Galileo (Letter written to Don Virginio Cesarini)


The Gish Principle -- If a gap exists between two fossil species, and an intermediate fossil species is discovered, then two gaps are present now and evolution is disproved even more.  -Graham Kendall


Poets are always complaining that scientists take away from the beauty of the stars. Mere globs of gas atoms! Nothing is mere. I too can see the stars on a desert night and feel them. Stuck on this tiny carousel my little eye can catch million year old light. But what of the pattern, the meaning, the why? For far more awesome is the truth than any artists of the past could imagine. Where are the poets of the present to speak of it? Who are the poets who can speak of Jupiter as if he was a man - and when it is a huge spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must remain silent?  -Richard P. Feynman


We [scientists] don't reject the supernatural merely because we have an overweening philosophical commitment to materialism; we reject it because entertaining the supernatural has never helped us understand the natural world. Alchemy, faith healing, astrology, creationism—none of these perspectives has advanced our understanding of nature by one iota.  -Jerry Coyne (Don't Know Much Biology)


The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.  -Delos B. McKown, Ph.D., U.S. professor, philosopher, author, former clergyman


If you are one of those who think that free will is only really free will if it springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision into your motor cortex, then given what you mean by free will, my view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you think free will might be morally important without being supernatural, then my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably thought it was.  -Daniel C. Dennett (Freedom Evolves)


But most remarkable of all are those patients who have deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communion with God. Everything around them is imbued with cosmic significance. They may say, "I finally understand what it's all about. This is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. Suddenly it all makes sense." Or, "Finally have insight into the true nature of the cosmos." I find it ironic that this sense of enlightenment, this absolute conviction that Truth is revealed at last, should derive from limbic structures concerned with emotions rather than from the thinking, rational parts of the brain that take so much pride in their ability to discern truth and falsehood.  -V.S. Ramachandran (Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind)


There is, then, nothing mysterious about the fact of morality. There is no more need for supernaturalism here than there is room for it in any of the arts and sciences. Morality is a natural fact; it is not created by the formulation of "laws"; these only express its existence and our sense of value. The moral feeling creates the moral law; not the other way about. Morality has nothing to do with God; it has nothing to do with a future life. Its sphere of application and operation is in this world; its authority is derived from the common sense of mankind and is born of the necessities of corporate life. In this matter, as in others, man is thrown back upon himself and if the process of development is a slow one there is the comforting reflection that the growth of knowledge and of understanding has placed within our reach the power to make human life a far greater and better thing. If we will!!  -Chapman Cohen (Morality Without God)


So morality existed in fact long before it was defined or described in theory. Man did not first discover the laws of physiology in order to realize the need for eating or breathing, to digest food or to inhale oxygen. Nor did the rules, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, etc., first make stealing and killing wrong. A moral law makes explicit in theory what is implicit in fact. The fact creates the rule; it is not the rule that creates the fact.  -Chapman Cohen (Morality Without God)


We are back again with the old and simple issue of the natural versus the supernatural. This is one of the oldest divisions in human thought, and there is no logical compromise between them. Morality either has its foundations in the natural or in the supernatural. In asserting the first alternative I do not mean to imply that there is a morality in nature at large. There is not. Nature takes no more heed of our moral rules and judgements than it does of our tastes in art or literature. A man is not blessed with good health because he is an example of lofty morality, nor is he burdened with disease because he is a criminal in thought and act. Nature is neither moral or immoral. Such terms are applicable only when there is conscious action to a given end. Nature is amoral, that is, it is without morality. The common saying that nature "punishes" us or "rewards" us for this or that is merely a picturesque way of stating certain things; it has no literal relation to actual fact. In nature there are no rewards or punishments, there are only actions and consequences. We benefit if we act in one way; we suffer if we act in another. That is the natural fact; there is no ethical quality in natural happenings. Laws of morals are human creations; they are on all fours with "laws" of science -- that is, they are generalizations from experience.  -Chapman Cohen (Morality Without God)


I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.  -Bertrand Russell


I am a little baffled as to why it is called the "New Atheism." There is a very long tradition of free thinking, and the arguments made against religion tend to be the same but made over and over again. But I think what has happened is that there have been a number of good, articulate books--Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Sam Harris, and so on. What they have discovered to their own great surprise is that in the United States, and right across the South too, there are an enormous number of people who also think this way. I don't think they have suddenly been persuaded by this rash of books--the feelings were there anyway--but they didn't have a voice, they didn't have a focus. When Hitchens took his book across the Bible Belt and debated with Baptist ministers in churches, there were huge audiences, most of whom, it seems, from when they spoke to him afterwards, were somewhat irritated that the place in the United States that they lived in was called the Bible Belt. I think there was something there that people had not taken into account. Quite heartening really, given that America is meant to be a secular republic with a strong tradition of upholding all freedom of thought.  -Ian McEwan (in an interview with The New Republic)


What Christians love to call "New Atheism" is not new at all. It only seems new to them because atheism has been suppressed so long from their lives that they feel shocked to discover that lots of people disagree with them, people who do not own beliefs of gods and superstitions.  -Ignots Pistachio


Mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields … galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars ... The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent and hostile zoo ... the universe wants to kill us all.  -Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist


If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.  -Steve Allen


If you perform a rain dance and it rains doesn't mean that your dance caused the rain. The same goes with "answered" prayers. Confusing correlations with causations represents one of the most common human errors of logic.  -Ignots Pistachio


If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.  -T. H. Huxley (1825-1895) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding


"Philosophy has nothing to say about death. Only poetry. I wish I had memorized more poetry."  -Richard Rorty


"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."  -Ayaan Hirsi Ali,  The Portable Atheist


This emphasis on the present may feel incomplete to some. But concentrating on what we know -- our own experiences, senses and rational mind -- does not, in fact create a void; rather, it fills these precious moments that we have on earth with intensity, urgency and inherent meaning. An atheist perspective on the afterlife eliminates the option of patient endurance in hopes of rewards in the sweet by and by; rather, it insists that any hopes and desires must be realized in this life, or not at all.  -Paul Brandeis Raushenbush


I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.  -Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism


The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.  -Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact


There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.  -Carl Sagan, Cosmos television series


If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.  -Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 204 quoted in, 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, by James A. Haught


In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.  -Stephen Jay Gould


The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.  -Thomas H. Huxley (1825-95) English biologist.


...people today are so accustomed to pretentious nonsense that they see nothing amiss in reading without understanding, and many of them at length discover that they can without difficulty write in like manner themselves and win applause for it. And so it perpetuates itself.  -G. A. Wells, 1991


In the Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet,[1] Justice David Souter, writing for the majority, concluded that "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion."[2]


... If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous.
- W.K. Clifford, quoted in Science and Human Values, 1956.


Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
- Robert King Merton 1910-, Social Theory and Social Structure, 1962.


If knowledge is my God, doubt would be my religion.  —Kedar Joshi


"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."  -Stephen F. Roberts (Misattributed to Stephen Henry Roberts)

We are all atheists, some of us just believe in fewer gods than others. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.  -Stephen F. Roberts (Misattributed to Stephen Henry Roberts)


A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.  -Saul Bellow


Ms. Tippett: From André Comte-Sponville's The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. This is Speaking of Faith. After a short break, recalling the Cold War equation of atheism with evil in U.S. culture and why Greg Epstein sees nonreligious people to be a vital part of the interfaith movement.

Greg Epstein speculates that negative attitudes towards atheists that turn up in U.S. opinion polls are rooted in and still influenced by 20th-century Cold War equations of atheism with communism, the enemy of Christianity and a source of evil and danger in the world. This had its apex in the anti-communist frenzy of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, but its remnants can also be heard in this speech of President Ronald Reagan, his famous "Evil Empire" speech of 1983.

President Ronald Reagan: I, a number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War and communism and our own way of life were very much on people's minds and he was speaking to that subject. And suddenly, though, I heard him saying, "I love my little girls more than anything," and I said to myself, "Oh, no. Don't. You can't. Don't say that." But I had underestimated him. He went on, "I would rather see my little girls die now still believing in God than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God."




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"Here the skeptic finds chaos and the believer further evidence that the hand that made us is divine." -Robert Moses


"It is no good reason for a man's religion that he was born and brought up in it; for then a Turk would have as much reason to be a Turk as a Christian a Christian" -William Chillingworth

Passionate expressions and vehement assertions are no arguments, unless it be of the weakness of the cause that is defended by them, or of the man that defends it.
-William Chillingworth  


"Religion is as necessary to reason as reason is to religion. The one cannot exist without the other. A reasoning being would lose his reason in attempting to account for the great phenomena of nature, had he not a Supreme Being to refer to; and well has it been said, that if there had been no God, mankind would have been obliged to imagine one." -George Washingtion


"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." -Voltaire


"Here the skeptic finds chaos and the believer further evidence that the hand that made us is divine." -Robert Moses











I speak for myself: I do not wish any man to be converted from his sect. The distinctions which we have reformed from animosity to emulation may be even useful to the cause of religion. By some moderate contention they keep alive zeal. Whereas people who change, except under strong conviction (a thing now rather rare), the religion of their early prejudices, especially if the conversion is brought about by any political machine, are very apt to degenerate into indifference, laxity, and often downright atheism. -Edmund Burke


Religion, to have any force on men’s understandings,—indeed, to exist at all,—must be supposed paramount to law, and independent for its substance upon any human institution,—else it would be the absurdest thing in the world, an acknowledged cheat. Religion, therefore, is not believed because the laws have established it, but it is established because the leading part of the community have previously believed it to be true. -Edmund Burke


We know, and, what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort. In England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of superstition, with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety. We shall never be such fools as to call in an enemy to the substance of any system to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its construction. If our religious tenets should ever want a further elucidation, we shall not call on atheism to explain them. We shall not light up our temple from that unhallowed fire. It will be illuminated with other lights. -Edmund Burke


We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if, in the moment of riot, and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness, by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilization among us, and among many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take place of it. -Edmund Burke


There is but one thing without honour; smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or to be,—insincerity, unbelief. He who believes no thing, who believes only the shows of things, is not in relation with nature and fact at all. -Thomas Carlyle.


Conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into conduct. Nay, properly, conviction is not possible till then; inasmuch as all speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices: only by a felt indubitable certainty of experience does it find any centre to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a system. Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that “doubt of any sort cannot he removed except by action.” On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: “Do the duty which lies nearest thee,” which thou knowest to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer. -Thomas Carlyle.  



Infidelity gives nothing in return for what it takes away. What, then, is it worth? Everything to be valued has a compensating power. Not a blade of grass that withers, or the ugliest weed that is flung away to rot and die, but reproduces something. Nothing in nature is barren. Therefore, everything that is or seems opposed to nature cannot be true; it can only exist in the shape that a diseased mind imparts to one of its coinages,—a mass of base money that won’t pass current with any heart that loves truly, or any head that thinks correctly. And infidels are poor sad creatures; they carry about them a load of dejection and desolation, not the less heavy that it is invisible. It is the fearful blindness of the soul. -Dr. Thomas Chalmers.  


I question whether there ever was, or can be in the world, an uninterrupted and internal denial of the being of God, or that men (unless we can suppose conscience utterly dead) can arrive to such a degree of impiety; for before they can stifle such sentiments in them (whatsoever they may assert) they must be utter strangers to the common conceptions of reason, and despoil themselves of their own humanity. He that dares to deny a God with his lips, yet sets up something or other as a God in his heart. Is it not lamentable that this sacred truth, consented to by all nations, which is the band of civil societies, the source of all order in the world, should be denied with a bare face, and disputed against, in companies, and the glory of a wise Creator ascribed to an unintelligent nature, to blind chance? Are not such worse than heathens?
 -Stephen Charnock



The being of a God is the guard of the world; the sense of a God is the foundation of civil order; without this there is no tie upon the consciences of men. What force would there be in oaths for the decision of controversies, what right could there be in appeals made to one that had no being? A city of atheists would be a heap of confusion; there could be no ground of any commerce, when all the sacred bonds of it in the consciences of men were snapt asunder, which are torn to pieces and utterly destroyed by denying the existence of God. What magistrate could be secure in his standing? What private person could be secure in his right? Can that, then, be a truth that is destructive of all public good?  -Stephen Charnock


The existence of God is the foundation of all religion. The whole building totters if the foundation be out of course: if we have not deliberate and right notions of it, we shall perform no worship, no service, yield no affection to him. If there be not a God, it is impossible there can be one; eternity is essential to the notion of a God; so all religion would be vain, and unreasonable, to pay homage to that which is not in being, nor ever can be.  -Stephen Charnock



As when a man comes into a palace, built according to the exactest rule of art, and with an unexceptionable conveniency for the inhabitants, he would acknowledge both the being and skill of the builder; so whosoever shall observe the disposition of all the parts of the world, their connection, comeliness, the variety of seasons, the swarms of different creatures, and the mutual offices they render to one another, cannot conclude less, than it was contrived by an infinite skill, effected by infinite power, and governed by infinite wisdom. None can imagine a ship to be orderly conducted without a pilot; nor the parts of the world to perform their several functions without a wise guide; considering the members of the body cannot perform theirs, without the active presence of the soul. The atheist, then, is a fool to deny that which every creature in his constitution asserts, and thereby renders himself unable to give a satisfactory account of that constant uniformity in the motions of the creatures.
-Stephen Charnock


A secret atheism, or a partial atheism, is the spring of all the wicked practices in the world: the disorders of the life spring from the ill dispositions of the heart. For the first, every atheist is a grand fool. If he were not a fool, he would not imagine a thing so contrary to the stream of the universal reason of the world, contrary to the rational dictates of his own soul, and contrary to the testimony of every creature, and link, in the chain of creation: if he were not a fool, he would not strip himself of humanity, and degrade himself lower than the most despicable brute.
-Stephen Charnock



All creatures ignorant of their own natures, could not universally in the whole kind, and in every climate and country, without any difference in the whole world, tend to a certain end, if some overruling wisdom did not preside over the world and guide them: and if the creatures have a Conductor, they have a Creator; all things are “turned round about by his counsel, that they may do whatsoever he commands them, upon the face of the world in the earth.” So that in this respect the folly of atheism appears. Without the owning a God, no account can be given of those actions of creatures, that are an imitation of reason.
-Stephen Charnock


A man’s own good-breeding is the best security against other people’s ill manners.  -Lord Chesterfield


You should by no means seem to approve, encourage, or applaud those libertine notions which strike at religions equally, and which are the poor threadbare topics of half wits, and minute philosophers. Even those who are silly enough to laugh at their jokes are still wise enough to distrust and detect their characters: for, putting moral virtues at the highest, and religion at the lowest, religion must still be allowed to be a collateral security, at least to virtue; and every prudent man will sooner trust to two securities than to one…. Depend upon this truth, that every man is the worse looked upon, and the less trusted, for being thought to have no religion; in spite of all the pompous and specious epithets he may assume, of esprit fort, free-thinker, or moral philosopher; and a wise atheist (if such a thing there is) would for his own interest, and character in this world, pretend to some religion.
-Lord Chesterfield


It is no good reason for a man’s religion that he was born and brought up in it; for then a Turk would have as much reason to be a Turk as a Christian to be a Christian.  -William Chillingworth  


Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy, and the dividing of our grief.
-Cicero



Men resemble the gods in nothing so much as in doing good to their fellow-creatures.  -Cicero


Vicious habits are so great a stain to human nature, and so odious in themselves, that every person actuated by right reason would avoid them, though he were sure they would be always concealed both from God and man, and had no future punishment entailed upon them.  -Cicero  

But if I err in believing that the souls of men are immortal, I willingly err; nor while I live would I wish to have this delightful error extorted from me; and if after death I shall feel nothing, as some minute philosophers think, I am not afraid lest dead philosophers should laugh at me for the error.
Cicero: De Senect

It is a shameful thing to be weary of inquiry when what we search for is excellent.
Cicero.

Beyond all credulity is the credulousness of atheists, who believe that chance could make the world, when it cannot build a house.
Dr. Samuel Clarke.  

Faith is that conviction upon the mind of the truth of the promises and threatenings of God made known in the gospel; of the certain reality of the rewards and punishments of the life to come, which enables a man, in opposition to all the temptations of a corrupt world, to obey God, in expectation of an invisible reward hereafter.
Dr. Samuel Clarke.

Virtue and true goodness, righteousness and equity, are things truly noble and excellent, lovely and venerable in themselves.
Dr. Samuel Clarke.


There is no such thing as what men commonly call the course of nature, or the power of nature. The course of nature, truly and properly speaking, is nothing else but the will of God producing certain effects in a continued, regular, constant, and uniform manner,—which course or manner of acting, being in every movement perfectly arbitrary, is as easy to be altered any time as to be preserved.
Dr. Samuel Clarke.

Chance is but the pseudonyme of God for those particular cases which He does not choose to subscribe openly with his own sign-manual.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  
The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Thelwall thought it very unfair to influence a child’s mind by inculcating any opinions before it had come to years of discretion to choose for itself. I showed him my garden, and told him it was my botanical garden. “How so?” said he; “it is covered with weeds.” “Oh,” I replied, “that is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice. The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  
*Do not indoctrinate your children.  Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.  -Richard Dawkins

*(teach them to be their own gardener)


An atheist, if you take his word for it, is a very despicable mortal. Let us describe him by his tenet, and copy him a little from his own original. He is, then, no better than a heap of organized dust, a stalking machine, a speaking head without a soul in it. His thoughts are bound by the laws of motion, his actions are all prescribed. He has no more liberty than the current of a stream or the blast of a tempest; and where there is no choice there can be no merit.
Jeremy Collier.









Do not indoctrinate your children.  Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.  -Richard Dawkins

(teach them to be their own gardener)