Comments on: Atheists To Get High Court Hearing

Group's Challenge To President Bush's Faith-Based Initiative Heads To Supreme Court

[cantshutup]

%u201CNot only have the 'followers of Christ' made it their rule to hack to bits all those who do not accept their beliefs, they have also ferociously massacred each other, in the name of their common 'religion of love,' under banners proclaiming their faith in Him who had expressly commanded them to love one another.%u201D
-- Georges Clemenceau, In the Evening of My Thought (Au Soir de la pensee)

[cantshutup]

%u201CWhenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize.%u201D
-- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1792)

[cantshutup]

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind--that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious. . .

I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.

I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech . . .

I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.

I believe in the reality of progress.

But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
-- Mencken's Creed, cited by George Seldes in Great Thoughts

[cantshutup]

%u201CWhat a burden to think one is conceived in sin rather than in pleasure; that one is born into evil rather than into
joy. . . .

It is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of Europe, its midwives and healers, then crossed the oceans to Africa and the Americas and tortured and enslaved, raped, impoverished, and eradicated the peaceful, Christ-like people they found. And that the blueprint from which they worked, and still work, was the Bible.%u201D
-- Alice Walker, "The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven Is That You Have Been Driven Out of Your Mind," Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism).

[cantshutup]

%u201CLeave the matter of religion to the family altar, the Church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.%u201D
-- Ulysses S, Grant, address delivered in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1875

[cantshutup]

%u201CAtheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.

There are no sects in geometry.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.

Sect and error are synonymous.

Common sense is not so common.%u201D
-- Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764

[cantshutup]

"Ecrasez l'infame" (crush the infamy--the Christian religion)
--Voltaire

[cantshutup]

%u201CWhenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize.%u201D
-- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1792)

[cantshutup]

%u201CChristianity as antiquity. -- When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed -- whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions -- is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross -- how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?%u201D
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, 1878

[cantshutup]

%u201CI cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.%u201D
-- Albert Einstein