• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Quotes from Famous Freethinkers

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
"If an all-powerful god either caused the earthquake in Haiti or stood passively by as thousands perished, he would be a god more worthy of blame than praise. Some days the best thing you can say about God is that he doesn't exist." ~ Dr. Herb Silverman

"You either have a God who sends child rapists to rape children or you have a God who simply watches it and says, 'When you're done, I'm going to punish you' .. If I were in a situation where I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That's the difference between me and your God." - Tracie Harris

"According to "Samuel," David took a census of the people. This excited the wrath of Jehovah, and as a punishment he allowed David to choose seven years of famine, a flight of three months from pursuing enemies, or three days of pestilence. David, having confidence in God, chose the three days of pestilence; and thereupon, God, the compassionate, on account of the sin of David, killed seventy thousand innocent men. Under the same circumstances, what would a devil have done?" - Robert Green Ingersoll
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
“I should not believe in the Gospel if I had not the authority of the Church for so doing.” (St. Augustine, against the epistle entitled ”Of the Foundation” [ed. Vives, vol xxv, p. 435]: “Ego vero Evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae ecclesiae commoveret auetoritas ... Ego me ad eos teneam, quibus praecipientibus Evangelio credidi.”)

Augustine was quite a fellow:

"What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother? it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman... I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children." - Saint Augustine


"Since God has spoken to us it is no longer necessary for us to think." - St Augustine
 

Geoff-Allen

Resident megalomaniac
Not sure who said it ...

"The true test of a good religion is whether you can make a joke about it"

People do seem 2 take themselves rather seriously most-of-the-time.

:)
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
"If the basic constants of fundamental physical laws were even slightly different, lesbian sex could not exist. Ergo, God exists, and He is a bro who likes to watch women get it on." - Blake Stacey

... which segues right to Ellen:

"In the beginning there was nothing. God said,‘Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better." - Ellen DeGeneres
 

Geoff-Allen

Resident megalomaniac
"Everybody knows what celebration is. I have never come across a person who does not know what celebration is. Just rejoicing in your being, just rejoicing in this moment, this tremendous universe. You had not asked for it, you have simply been given a universe which is infinite and eternal. You have not asked and you have been given a consciousness which is eternal, which can become festive. If you allow it, it can make you the sanest, the most graceful, the most loving."

~ Osho

Sorry! He wasn't an atheist ... but I just love his advice! :)
 
Last edited:

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry." H.L. Mencken
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
Benjamin Franklin: “Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so.”-- Poor Richard's Almanac, 1743
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
Benjamin Franklin: “When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.” -- letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1780
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
"The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation." ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
"Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself." – Confucius (c. 551–479 BCE)

"Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss." – Lao Tzu

Ancient Egyptian concept of Maat (c. 2040–1650 BCE): "Do to the doer to cause that he do thus to you."

"Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing." – Thales (c. 624 BC – c. 546 BCE)

"Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." - Siddhartha Gautama,(c. 563-483 BCE)
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
It's hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it's damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person. ~ Bill Murray
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
The Pale Blue Dot

“We succeeded in taking this picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived; lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, every hopeful child, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light.”

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”

“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Carl Sagan

Nice.

Related comments:

"We are part of this universe. We are in this universe. But perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact - many people feel small, because they're small and the universe is big, but I feel big. Because my atoms came from those stars [that I see when I look up in the night sky]. There's a level of connectivity. That's really what you want in life; you want to feel connected. You want to feel relevant. You want to feel like you're a participant in the goings-on and events around you. That's precisely what we are, just by being alive." - Neil Degrasse Tyson

"When I delete God from the equation, I take God's place. I don't need God to care about and accept me in order to belong in the universe. I already belong in the universe - by myself, without any help from God - because I'm a completely natural, head-to-toe, inside-and-out part of it." - Peter Mosley

"When I looked at the galaxy that night, I knew the faintest twinkle of starlight was a real connection between my comprehending eye along a narrow beam of light to the surface of another sun. The photons my eyes detect (the light I see, the energy with which my nerves interact) came from that star. I thought I could never touch it, yet something from it crosses the void and touches me. I might never have known. My eyes saw only a tiny point of light, but my mind saw so much more … I stepped out of a supernova… And so did you." - Philhellenes

"We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, and we got to get ourselves back to the garden." - Joni Mitchell from the song "Woodstock"
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
But when individuated consciousness comes up against the idea of individual death, something’s got to give. That’s why people invent afterlives, and versions of the afterlife, which there is absolutely no evidence for whatsoever. ... I think God is the name of a question. God is not an existing thing. That’s what we’ve named an unknown. ~ James Taylor
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
An old one from George Carlin which might become germane again (Sung to the tune of Oh, Beautiful) --

"Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty, above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea."
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. - Socrates
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
"I did not lose my faith, I gave it up purposely. The motivation that drove me into the ministry is the same that drove me out. I have always wanted to know." - Dan Barker, ex-preacher (Losing faith in faith)

Robert G. Ingersoll -- As people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.
 

Thumper

Thank the gods I'm an atheist
"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned." ~ Richard Feynman
 
Top