Quotes from Famous Freethinkers

[Bob the Unbeliever]

"I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being"

~ Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

"If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people." ~ Dr. Gregory House, M.D.

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

“No, you can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your ‘religious freedom’. If you don’t like birth control, don’t use it. Religious freedom doesn’t mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”

~ President Barack Obama

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

“I am an atheist, out and out.

"It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic.

"I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist.

"I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.”

~ Isaac Asimov

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

~ Douglas Adams

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

"If lightning is the anger of the gods, the gods are concerned mostly with trees."

– Lao Tse.

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

”It is wrong for a secular government to promote prayer. We think the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. What if the president declared a National Day of Cursing God because He failed us on September 11? Americans would say, 'You've overstepped your authority.' That's how we feel when he promotes prayer.”

– Dan Barker

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

(notebook to self ... I got as far as page three of that other forum)

 

[Revoltingest]

 

[Thumper]

The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks. ~ Stephen Batchelor

 

[Thumper]

"If only I wasn't an atheists, I could get away with anything. You'd just ask for forgiveness and then you'd be forgiven. It sounds much better than having to live with guilt." ~ Keira Knightley

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

MINISTERS WONDER HOW I CAN BE WICKED ENOUGH TO ATTACK THE BIBLE.

Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)

"I will tell them:

"This book, the Bible, has persecuted, even unto death, the wisest and the best. This book stayed and stopped the onward movement of the human race. This book poisoned the fountains of learning and misdirected the energies of man.

"This book is the enemy of freedom, the support of slavery. This book sowed the seeds of hatred in families and nations, fed the flames of war, and impoverished the world.

"This book is the breastwork of kings and tyrants -- the enslaver of women and children. This book has corrupted parliaments and courts. This book has made colleges and universities the teachers of error and the haters of science.

"This book has filled Christendom with hateful, cruel, ignorant and warring sects. This book taught men to kill their fellows for religion's sake.

"This book funded the Inquisition, invented the instruments of torture, built the dungeons in which the good and loving languished, forged the chains that rusted in their flesh, erected the scaffolds whereon they died. This book piled fagots about the feet of the just. This book drove reason from the minds of millions and filled the asylums with the insane.

"This book has caused fathers and mothers to shed the blood of their babes. This book was the auction block on which the slave-mother stood when she was sold from her child. This book filled the sails of the slave-trader and made merchandise of human flesh.

"This book lighted the fires that burned "witches" and "wizards."

"This book filled the darkness with ghouls and ghosts, and the bodies of men and women with devils. This book polluted the souls of men with the infamous dogma of eternal pain. This book made credulity the greatest of virtues, and investigation the greatest of crimes.

"This book filled nations with hermits, monks and nuns -- with the pious and the useless. This book placed the ignorant and unclean saint above the philosopher and philanthropist.

"This book taught man to despise the joys of this life, that he might be happy in another -- to waste this world for the sake of the next.

"I attack this book because it is the enemy of human liberty -- the greatest obstruction across the highway of human progress.

"Let me ask the ministers one question: How can you be wicked enough to defend this book?"

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

“We are hard-wired to need answers. The problem is, when we don’t find a logical answer, we settle for a stupid one. Religion is what happens when we run out of rational.”~ Dr. Gregory House, M.D., 11/22/10

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

”You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say God is love, they will claim that you are taking things out of context!”

~ Dan Barker

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense and understanding. Whatever it sees must be put out of sight with nothing but the word of god remaining in view.- To be a christian, you must pluck out the eye of reason." - Martin Luther

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

"The church doesn't like for people to grow up, because you can't control grown-ups. That's why we talk about being born again. When you're 'born again' you're still a child. People don't need to be born again, they need to grow up." - John Shelby Spong

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

“Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.”- Chapman Cohen

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

"Seems to me that Christians worship the incredible shrinking god. I mean at one time it was supposedly capable of flinging thousands of billions of galaxies into existence with a mere thought. By the time of Noah, it was reduced to flooding an insignificant speck in the cosmos.

"By the time of Moses, its best trick was moving a tiny portion of a minor sea aside for a short while. By the time of Jesus, it has to send a delegate on its behalf who leaves behind only rumors that he was able to turn water into another beverage, or render himself extra buoyant.

"Now it counts as a miracle if a water stain grows mold that kind of looks like a bearded face which could be claimed to resemble this supposed delegate. How much more pathetic can this god get? How do Christians manage to sing praises of its glory and greatness without feeling like fools--or at best, like new parents gushing over their toddler's ability to make a pee."
– Kronk

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

"Every Christian who tries to escape the path of a speeding bullet with fear in his eye is an example of a 'foxhole conversion' to atheism and proves they don't really believe in a heavenly paradise in the hereafter. There are a hell of a lot more of those conversions than there are of atheists to Christians." - Darrell Plank

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

"Heaven, as conventionally described, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside." - George Bernard Shaw