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Old March 1st, 2011 #81
SmokyMtn
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Thomas Carlyle. English visionary (1795-1881):

I have for many years strictly avoided going to church and having anything to do with Mumbo-Jumbo.

We know nothing: all is, and must be, utterly incomprehensible.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #82
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Heinrich Heine. German poet (1797-1856):

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #83
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Ralph Waldo Emerson. American poet and essayist (1803-82):

In churches, every healthy and thoughtful mind finds itself . . . checked, cribbed, confined. Other world? There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.

As man's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds as disease of the intellect.

If I go into the churches in these days, I usually find the preacher, in proportion to his intelligence to be cunning, so that the whole institution sounds hollow.

The believer tells me he has an evidence historical & internal which makes the presumption [of God's existence] so strong that it is almost a certainty that it rests on the highest of probabilities. Yes; but change that imperfect to perfect evidence & I too will be a Christian. But now it must be admitted I am not certain that any of these things are true. The nature of God may be different from what he is represented. I never beheld him. I do not know that he exists.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #84
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Ludwig Feuerbach. German theologian (1804-1872):

God has not created man, but man created God.

In brief, man in relation to God denies his own knowledge, his own thoughts, that he may place them in God. Man gives up his personality; but in return, God, the Almighty, infinite, unlimited being, is a person; [man] denies human dignity, the human ego; but in return God is to him a selfish, egotistical being, who in all things seeks only himself, his own honour, his own ends; [man] represents God as simply seeking the satisfaction of his own selfishness, while yet he frowns on that of every other being; his God is the very luxury of egoism.

Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from the reason but also from the life of mankind, and it is nothing more than a fixed lie.

Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

He who says no more of me than that I am an atheist, says and knows nothing of me. . . . I deny God. But that means for me that I deny the negation of man. In place of the illusory, fantastic, heavenly position of man which in actual life necessarily leads to the degradation of man, I substitute the tangible, actual and consequently also the political and social position of mankind.

Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, nature religion. . . . I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being . . . And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite mortal being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #85
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John Stuart Mill. English philosopher (1806-1873):

I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.

If a being who can create a race of men devoid of real freedom and inevitably foredoomed to be sinners, and then punish them for being what he has made them, he may be omnipotent and various other things, but he is not what the English language has always intended by the adjective holy.

Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?

God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.

Modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christianity.

It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.

It [Christianity] is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established.

The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be rooted out.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #86
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David Friedrich Strauss. German theologian (1808-1874):

If everything in the universe has been caused by something else, and so on, ad infinitum, what we finally reach is not the conception of a Cause for which the Cosmos is the effect, but of a Substance of which individual cosmical phenomena are but the accidents. We reach not a deity, but a self-centred Cosmos, unchangeable amid the eternal change of things.

The so-called spiritual functions develop, grow, and gain strength along with the body, especially with their distinctive organ, the brain, [and thereafter] decline in sympathy with it in old age . . . But a thing so closely and completely bound to a physical organism can as little exist after the latter's destruction as the centre of a circle after the dissolution of the circumference.

My conviction, therefore, is, if we would not evade difficulties or put forced constructions upon them, if we would have our yea yea, and our nay nay,--in short, if we would speak as honest, upright men, we must acknowledge we are no longer Christians.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #87
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Edgar Allen Poe. American author (1809-49):

The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.

No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter . . . than you and I; and all religion . . . is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.

The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #88
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Alfred Lord Tennyson. English poet (1809-1892):

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

The churches have killed their Christ.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #89
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Charles Darwin. English evolutionist (1809-1882):

Science and Christ have nothing to do with each other. I do not believe that any revelation has ever been made.

My theology is a simple muddle. I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind.

I think an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind. The whole subject (of god and morality) is beyond the scope of man's intellect.

In response to a question by Robert Lewin, "as to the bearing of his researches on the existence of an anima, or soul in man, he [Darwin] distinctly stated that, in his opinion, a vital or spiritual principle apart from inherent somatic (bodily) energy, had no more locus standing in the human than in the other races of the animal kingdom.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with a mouse.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #90
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Abraham Lincoln. American president (1809-65):

My earlier view of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #91
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John Draper. American scientist and free thought historian (1811-1882):

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

The tranquillity of society depends so much on the stability of its religious convictions, that no one can be justified in wantonly disturbing them. But faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them, impossible to conceal, must take place. It then becomes the duty of those whose lives have made them familiar with both modes of thought, to present modestly, but firmly their views; to compare the antagonistic pretensions calmly, impartially, philosophically. History shows that, if this be not done, social misfortunes, disastrous and enduring, will ensue.

As to Science, she has never sought to ally herself to civil power. She has never attempted to throw odium or inflict social ruin on any human being. She has never subjected any one to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas. She presents herself unstained by cruelties and crimes. But in the Vatican--we have only to recall the Inquisition--the hands that are now raised in appeals to the Most Merciful are crimsoned. They have been stained in blood!
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #92
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Robert Browning. English poet (1812-89):

Who knows most doubts most.

I am no Christian.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #93
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Henry Ward Beecher. American preacher and lecturer (1813- 87):

The God of the Bible is a moral monstrosity.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #94
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Mikhail Bakunin. Russian anarchist (1814-1876):

Religion is a collective insanity.

Theology is the science of the divine lie.

As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers.

The idea of god implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #95
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton. American feminist (1815-1902):

The Bible and Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.

Every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman. Man himself could not do this; but when he declares, "Thus saith the Lord," of course he can do it.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #96
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Henry David Thoreau. American naturalist (1817-62):

There may be gods, but they care not what men do. I say--one world at a time.

What is it you tolerate, you church today? Not truth but a lifelong hypocrisy.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #97
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George Holyoake. English reformer (1817-1906):

In view of the state of the world, it is time to put the deity on half pay.

Note: Holyoake spent six months in prison on charges of blasphemy for having made this remark in response to a question after a public lecture. His Oracle of Reason was a popular Atheist publication in England.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #98
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Walt Whitman. American poet (1819-92):

There is no God more divine than yourself.

Seeing, hearing, feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle; this head, more than churches, Bibles, and all the creeds.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God--I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not the least.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #99
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Herbert Spencer. English philosopher (1820-1903):

[Agnostics are] people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.

The cruelty of a Fijian god, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a God who condemns man to tortures which are eternal.

Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas, of those assumed cognitions which it could not substantiate.

The "Creed of Christendom" is alien to my nature, both emotional and intellectual.
 
Old March 1st, 2011 #100
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H.T. Buckle. English historian (1821-1862):

When, towards the end of the fifth century, the Roman empire was broken up, there followed, as is well known, a long period of ignorance and of crime, in which even the ablest minds were immersed in the grossest superstitions. During these, which are rightly called the Dark Ages, the clergy were supreme: they ruled the consciences of the most despotic sovereigns, and they were respected as men of vast learning, because they alone were able to read and write, because they were the sole depositaries of those idle conceits of which European science then consisted; and because they preserved the legends of the saints and the lives of the fathers, from which, as it was believed, the teachings of divine wisdom might easily be gathered.

But when the human reason began to rebel [in the 12th century] the position of the clergy was suddenly changed. They had been friendly to reasoning as long as the reasoning was on their side. While they were the only guardians of knowledge, they were eager to promote its interests. Now, however, it was falling from their hands; it was becoming possessed by laymen: it was growing dangerous: it must be reduced to its proper dimensions. Then it was that there first became general the inquisitions, the imprisonments, the torturings, the burnings, and all the other contrivances by which the church vainly attempted to stem the tide that had turned against her.

From that moment there has been an unceasing struggle between these two great parties,--the advocates of inquiry, and the advocates of belief; a struggle which, however it may be disguised, and under whatever forms it may appear, is at bottom always the same, and represents the opposite interests of reason and faith, of scepticism and credulity, of progress and reaction, of those who hope for the future, and of those who cling to the past.
 
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