My favorite quotes. Original source here Celeberty atheistsFamous dead non-theistsThe Thomas Paine Library This is a collection of some of my favorite quotes, I will be adding to it as I find more of them. Quotes from: Page 1 Presidents and Statesmen Thomas Edison Mark Twain Albert Einstein Carl Sagan Steven Hawking Richard Dawkins Sigmund Freud Other Scientists Page 2 "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches. " [Benjamin Franklin] "When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. " [Ben Franklin, _Poor Richard's Almanac_, 1754 (Works, Volume XIII)] "My parents had early given me religious impressions, and brought me through my childhood piously in the dissenting [puritan] way. "I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. [Benjamin Franklin, in _Toward The Mystery_] [Thomas Paine] [Abraham Lincoln] [Susan B.
Why Atheism? Just about everyone is an atheist when it comes to other gods — the gods that other people believe in or that nobody believes in anymore. I’m an atheist about all gods because there's no reliable evidence for any god, or even for Jesus. There is also extensive evidence that Jesus and all gods are fictional characters — myths created mainly by people who had little understanding of how our universe operates. We all like myths and other stories, but we don't have to believe them. Let’s start with a quick experiment. You can grab three coins and actually do the experiment, or just do a thought experiment. Drop one coin and watch it fall. If you were to the release third coin, what do you think would happen? Our understanding of the world around us, and our abilities to predict what will happen are based on naturalism — the basis of science.
To be explicit, modern science relies on methodological naturalism. In “Cosmos” Neil deGrasse Tyson explained the basic rules of science. Dr. Embryology. The Improbability of God. The Improbability of God by Richard Dawkins from Free Inquiry, Volume 18, Number 3.
Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs oppress women in his name. Why do people believe in God? So ran Paley's argument, and it is an argument that nearly all thoughtful and sensitive people discover for themselves at some stage in their childhood. What do all objects that look as if they must have had a designer have in common? This is not a circular argument, by the way.
Of all the trillions of different ways of putting together the atoms of a telescope, only a minority would actually work in some useful way. We can safely conclude that living bodies are billions of times too complicated -- too statistically improbable -- to have come into being by sheer chance. The fossils tell us that life has been evolving on Earth for more than 3,000 million years. Return to Top. Council for Secular Humanism. Atheism VS Religion for dummies with Richard Dawkins! - StumbleUpon. The Spirited Atheist: Atheists know more about religion than the religious - On Faith at washingtonpost.com.
Why is anyone surprised at the findings of a new survey of American religious knowledge, released last week by the Pew Forum, which demonstrate that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than the religious do? The only religious groups comparable to atheists in general religious knowledge are Jews and Mormons. Atheists even know more about Christianity than American Christians. I find this totally predictable, because most atheists today (this may not be true a generation from now) were raised in some religious tradition and found it wanting. What do you do when you are unsatisfied with the religious answers you are getting? You start reading about religion. Atheists and agnostics, like Jews, are much more highly educated than the general American public, and the survey found a strong correlation between level of education and religious knowledge (among the religious as well as the nonreligious).
There is nothing new about these findings. An Atheist Manifesto. Update: (2/08/2006 1:35 p.m. EST) Read Sam Harris’ additional arguments about The Reality of Islam Editor’s Note: At a time when fundamentalist religion has an unparalleled influence in the highest government levels in the United States, and religion-based terror dominates the world stage, Sam Harris argues that progressive tolerance of faith-based unreason is as great a menace as religion itself. Harris, a philosophy graduate of Stanford who has studied eastern and western religions, won the 2005 PEN Award for nonfiction for The End of Faith, which powerfully examines and explodes the absurdities of organized religion. Truthdig asked Harris to write a charter document for his thesis that belief in God, and appeasement of religious extremists of all faiths by moderates, has been and continues to be the greatest threat to world peace and a sustained assault on reason.
An Atheist Manifesto Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. No. 45871_420527318365_563728365_4886354_8136143_n.jpg (720×576) I Am An Atheist: 16 Things Atheists Need Christians to Know.