Vanguard News Network
VNN Media
VNN Digital Library
VNN Reader Mail
VNN Broadcasts

Old March 1st, 2011 #41
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Sir Francis Bacon. English empirical philosopher (1561-1626):

In every age, natural philosophy had a troublesome adversary and hard to deal with; namely, superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion.

It addeth deformity to an ape to be so like a man, so the similitude of superstition to religion makes it the more deformed.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

The more contrary to reason the divine mystery, so much the more must it be believed for the glory of God.

The trinitarian believes a virgin to be the mother of a son who is her maker.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #42
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Ben Jonson. English playwright (1572-1637):

What excellent fools religion makes of man.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #43
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Matthew Hamount. English heretic burned at the stake in 1579:

J.M. Robertson: [Hamount was] charged with heresy for having declared his belief: "That the New Testament and Gospel of Christ is but foolishness, a mere fable; that Christ is not God or the Saviour of the world, but a mere man, a shameful man, and an abominable idol; that He did not rise again from death or ascend unto Heaven; that the Holy Ghost is not God; and that baptism is not necessary, nor the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ."
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #44
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Lucilio Vanini. Italian philosopher (c. 1584-1619):

He [Christ] sweated with fear and weakness, and I, I die undaunted.

Note: This was spoken by Vanini just before he was burned at the stake. His executioner was reportedly so shocked and outraged by this remark that he obtained pincers and tore out Vanini's tongue before lighting his pyre.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #45
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Thomas Hobbes. English materialist philosopher (1588-1679):

Opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion to what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seeds of religion.

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick; which swallowed whole have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.

Atheism: the sin of imprudence.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #46
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Sir Thomas Browne. English author (1605-82):

The religion of one seems madness unto another.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #47
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Blaise Pascal. French mathematician and Jansenist philosopher (1623-1662):

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

To carry piety to the extent of superstition is to destroy it.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #48
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

John Locke. English philosopher (1632-1704):

Religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above beasts, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.

Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do.

How any man who should inquire and know for himself can content himself with a faith or belief taken upon trust, is to be astonishing.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #49
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Jean Meslier. French village priest--author of modern Europe's first atheist treatise, three copies of which were found in his possession after he died (1664-1729):

While we are told that God is infinitely good, is it not constantly repeated to us that He is very easily offended, that He bestows His favors upon a few, that He chastises with fury those to whom He has not been pleased to grant them?

If God Himself was not able to render human nature sinless, what right had He to punish men for not being sinless?

The pictures which are drawn of Divinity, are they not visibly borrowed from the implacable jealous, vindictive, blood-thirsty, capricious, inconsiderate humor of man, who has not yet cultivated his reason? Oh, men! You worship but a great savage, whom you consider as a model to follow, as an amiable master, as a perfect sovereign.

We find in all the religions of the earth a God of armies, a jealous God, an avenging God, an exterminating God, a God who enjoys carnage and whose worshippers make it a duty to serve him to his taste. Lambs, bulls, children, men, heretics, infidels, kings, whole nations, are sacrificed to him. All the Gods worshiped by men have a barbarous origin; they were visibly imagined by stupid nations, or were presented by ambitious and cunning legislators to simple and benighted people, who had neither the capacity nor the courage to examine properly the object which, by means of terrors, they were made to worship.

Faith consists in an unlimited credulity, which causes men to believe, without examination, all that which the interpreters of the Deity wish them to believe. . . . Implicit faith has been the source of the greatest outrages which have been committed upon earth.

There is no crime which men have not committed in the idea of pleasing the Deity or of appeasing his wrath.

Who are those who have seen God? They are either fanatics, or scoundrels, or ambitious men, whose word we can not rely on.

It is necessary to the priests that we tremble before their God, in order that we have recourse to them to obtain the means to be quieted.

"Sacrifice your reason; give up experience; distrust the testimony of your senses; submit without examination to all that is given to you as coming from Heaven." This is the usual language of all the priests of the world.

If religion was clear, it would have fewer attractions for the ignorant. They need obscurity, mysteries, fables, miracles, incredible things, which keep their brains perpetually at work.

The superstitious man wants to be afraid; his imagination demands it. It seems that he fears nothing more than having no object to fear.

Religion is, for the people, but a vain attendance upon ceremonies, to which they cling from habit, which amuses their eyes, which enlivens temporarily their sleepy minds, without influencing the conduct and without correcting their morals.

Morality and virtue are totally incompatible with the idea of a God, whose ministers and interpreters have painted him in all countries as the most fantastic, the most unjust, and the most cruel of tyrants, whose pretended wishes are to serve as rules and laws for the inhabitants of the earth.

To discover the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of Gods; they need but common sense. . . . Truth is simple, error is complicated . . . the voice of nature is intelligible, that of falsehood is ambiguous, enigmatical, and mysterious.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #50
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Anthony Shaftesbury. English philosopher (1671-1713):

If we are told that a man is religious, we still ask what are his morals. But if we hear he has honest morals, we seldom think of the other question.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #51
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Voltaire. French philosopher, poet, dramatist, and historian-- France's dominant eighteenth century proponent of deism as opposed to both atheism and orthodox religion (1694-1778):

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

Would you believe that while the flames were consuming these innocent victims [burned at the stake for heresy], the inquisitors and the other savages were chanting our prayers? These pitiless monsters were invoking the God of mercy . . . while committing the most atrocious crime.

Superstition, born of paganism, and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil.

Letter to Boswell: You seem solicitous about that pretty thing called soul. I do protest I know nothing of it, nor where it is, nor what it is, nor what it shall be.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

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

Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.

Most of the great men . . . live as if they were atheists.

The first divine was the first rogue who met the first fool.

Theology: A science profound, supernatural, and divine, which teaches us to reason on that which we don't understand and to get our ideas mixed up on that which we do.

Écraser l'enfame ["eradicate the infamy"]. Note: Voltaire's oft-repeated slogan referred to religious orthodoxy and more specifically to French Catholicism.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #52
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Henry Fielding. English novelist (1707-1754):

No man has ever sat down calmly unbiased to reason out his religion, and not ended by rejecting it.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #53
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

William Pitt. English Prime Minister (1708-1778):

We need a religion of humanity. The only true divinity is humanity.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #54
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Julien La Mettrie. French physician of the court of Frederick the Great--also notorious for his atheism (1709-1751):

To eliminate chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being since there could be something else that is neither chance nor God. I mean nature, whose study consequently cannot help but produce unbelievers, as witnessed by the ways of thinking of its most successful investigators.

To be a machine, to feel, think, know good from evil like blue from yellow, in a word, to be born with intelligence and a sure instinct for morality, and yet to be only an animal, are things no more contradictory than to be an ape or parrot and know how to find sexual pleasure.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #55
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

David Hume. Scottish skeptical philosopher (1711-1776):

Thought, design, intelligence, such as we discover in men and other animals, is no more than one of the springs and principles of the universe, as well as heat or cold, attraction or repulsion, and a hundred others which fall under daily observation. . . . [But] what peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model for the whole universe?

Is there any reasonable ground to conclude that the inhabitants of other planets possess thought, intelligence, reason, or anything similar to these faculties in men? . . . And if thought, as we may well suppose, be confined merely to this narrow corner [of the universe] and has even there so limited a sphere of action, with what propriety can we assign it for the original cause of all things?

What is the soul of man? A composition of various faculties, passions, sentiments, ideas--united, indeed, into one self or person, but still distinct from each other. . . . How is this compatible with that perfect immutability and simplicity which all true theists ascribe to the deity? . . . A mind whose acts and sentiments and ideas are not distinct and successive, one that is wholly simple and totally immutable, is a mind which has no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love, no hatred; or, in a word, is no mind at all.

The [universe] presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children. . . . The true conclusion is that the original Source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles, and has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy.

It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause.

Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent? Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent? Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Why, then, eternal punishment for the temporary offenses of so frail a creature as man?

Examine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world, and you will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men's dreams.

[Worship] depresses the Deity far below the condition of mankind, and represents him as a capricious demon who exercises his power without reason and without humanity.

Generally speaking, the errors of religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Boswell's report of his conversation with Hume on his death bed: "I asked him if he was not religious when he was young. He said he was. . . . He then said flatly that the Morality of every Religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said 'that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious.' I asked if it was possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever."
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #56
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Jean Jacques Rousseau. French philosopher and deist who rejected outright atheism (1712-1778):

The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force.

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #57
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Frederick the Great. Prussian king (1712-1786):

Superstition is the weakness of the human mind, which is inseparably tied up with it; it has always existed, and always will.

Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand. . . . We know the crimes that fanaticism in religion has caused.

The imbecile priests! The best destiny they can look for is that they and their vile artifices will forever remain buried in the darkness of oblivion.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #58
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Baron Paul-Henry d'Holbach. French philosopher (1723-1789):

We cannot doubt the power of nature; she produces all the animals we see by the aid of the combination of matter which is a continual action; the harmony that subsists between the parts of these same animals is a consequence of the necessary laws of their nature and of their combination; as soon as this accord ceases, the animal is necessarily destroyed. What becomes then of the wisdom, of the intelligence, or the goodness of that pretended cause to whom they ascribe the honour of this so much boasted harmony? . . . Where is the wisdom, the goodness, the foresight, and the immutability of a workman [God], who appears only to be occupied with deranging and breaking the springs of those machines, which are announced to us as the chefs d'oeuvres of his power and his ability. If this God cannot do otherwise, he is neither free nor omnipotent. If he changes his will, he is not immutable. If he permits those machines, which he has rendered sensible, to experience pain, he wants goodness. If he has not been able to render his work more solid, it is that he lacks the ability.

Shall it be in the revealed religions, that we shall draw up our idea of virtue? Alas! do they not all appear to be in accord in announcing a despotic, jealous, vindictive and selfish God, who knows no law, who follows his caprice in everything, who loves or who hates, who chooses or reproves, according to his whim; who acts irrationally, who delights in carnage, rapine and crime; who plays with his feeble subjects, who overloads them with puerile laws, who lays continual snares for them, who rigorously prohibits them from consulting their reason? What would become of morality, if men proposed to themselves such Gods as models.

A theology which assures us that God has been able to create men for the purpose of rendering them eternally miserable, shows us nothing but an evil and malicious genius, whose malice is inconceivable and infinitely surpasses the cruelty of the most depraved beings of our species.

It will ever be . . . that a [God] who gives liberty to sin, has resolved, in his eternal decrees, that sin should be committed; that a [God] who punishes those faults which he has permitted to be done, is sovereignly unjust and irrational; that an infinite [God] who contains qualities infinitely contradictory, is an impossible being, and is only a chimera.

. . . A God such as the theologians depict him, is totally impossible.

The Devil, the false God, the evil principle, has he not a more extensive empire than the true God, whose projects according to the theologians, he is unceasingly overturning? The true sovereign, is he not the sad witness and the accomplice of those outrages which are everywhere offered to his divine majesty?

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the gods, knowledge of nature is destined to destroy them.

An atheist is a man who destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

Diderot: "The first time that Mr. Hume found himself at the table of the Baron [d'Holbach], he was seated beside him. I don't know for what purpose the English philosopher took it into his head to remark to the Baron that he did not believe in atheists, that he had never seen any. The Baron said to him: 'Count how many we are here. We are eighteen.' The Baron added: 'It isn't too bad a showing to be able to point out to you fifteen at once: the three others haven't made up their minds.'"

Note: As a close friend of Diderot, D'Holbach heavily contributed to the Encyclopedié and held lavish bi-weekly soireés for freethinkers on his two estates. What few contemporaries realized was that he also authored well over a dozen anonymous atheistic texts, including his infamous System of Nature, which is quoted here.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #59
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

Gotthold Lessing. German critic and philosopher (1729-1781):

When told toward the end of his life of the annoyance that clerics caused Voltaire on his deathbed, Lessing replied, "When thou see me about to die, call the notary; I will declare before him that I die in none of the prevailing religions."
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #60
SmokyMtn
Banned
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: East Tennessee
Posts: 8,506
Default

John Adams. American president (1735-1826):

The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles.

As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?
 
Reply

Share


Thread
Display Modes


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 08:01 PM.
Page generated in 0.26864 seconds.