Quotes about Religion
Uninformed strong opinions - and I particularly include religious ones, which for some reason get special treatment - are of course mere clusters of prejudices and no more appropriate than mine, yours or anyone else`s are on topics we don`t understand.
Religion has never once in all of human history turned out to be the right answer to any question - why would you think it`s the right answer to anything we don`t currently understand?
Teaching children about Hell is child abuse. Nothing but the unverifiable promise of permanent bliss or torture in the afterlife would make loving, decent, non-abusive parents inflict it on their children.
Our beliefs affect our behavior towards others. And that makes our beliefs, not just a personal question, but an ethical one.
This idea that belief without evidence is a virtue... it doesn`t just inspire people to trust their religious leaders blindly. It inspires people to trust anybody blindly. Including people who are trying to rob them blind.
You don`t have any more reason to think you have the true faith than any other believer does. Sure, you can quote chapter and verse - and so can people with a different interpretation of the faith. That`s the nature of chapter and verse; it can be used to support just about any interpretation you can come up with.
I`m angry that when people run for political office in the United States, it`s considered legitimate to grill them about their employment background, their positions on legislation, their positions on social issues, the taxes they`ve paid [...]... but it`s considered invasive and intolerant to ask if they believe in talking snakes, demonic possession, magic underwear, magic crackers that turn into the flesh of their god, an Earth that was created 6,000 years ago, or a god who put himself on Earth in human form and then sacrificed himself to himself to atone for sins that other people committed and to save humanity from the punishment he himself was planning to dole out. If someone is going to make decisions about science funding, emerging medical technology, our educational system, and so on... I think it matters if they believe any of that shit, and I bloody well want to know about it.
People are told that they are inherently bad or sinful and that the only way to become good is by giving over control of their lives to faith. As there is no evidence that any of that is true, religion, in effect, is creating an imaginary problem simply so that it can sell an imaginary solution.
While you pray for your niece to get a much-needed heart transplant, someone else is praying for his organ-donor son`s life to be spared. Whether you`re praying to win a war or a football game, you`re also praying for the people on the opposing side to lose. To assume that God is not only personally invested in the minutiae of your life but that your problems are ultimately more important than other problems he may be asked to solve is both selfish and absurd considering the incredible amount of individual problems and concerns of every human on this planet.
Meaning can be found outside of religion, and seeking one`s own meaning in life can be far more fulfilling than following the rules of an outside religious authority.
If you genuinely loved God, wouldn`t you want to understand him as best you can? When faced with different ideas about God, wouldn`t you want to ask some questions, and look at the supporting evidence for the different views, and try to figure out which one is probably true? Doesn`t it seem insulting to God to treat that question as if it didn`t matter? There are profound differences between religions. They are not trivial. And the different religions cannot all be right. (Although, as atheists like to point out, they can all be wrong.)
When you look at the history of what we know about the world, you see a noticeable pattern. Natural explanations of things have been replacing supernatural explanations of them. Like a steamroller. Why the Sun rises and sets. Where thunder and lightning come from. Why people get sick. Why people look like their parents. How the complexity of life came into being. I could go on and on. All these things were once explained by religion. But as we understood the world better, and learned to observe it more carefully, the explanations based on religion were replaced by ones based on physical cause and effect. Consistently. Thoroughly. Like a steamroller.
If a `religion` is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.
I believe, too, that neither physical science nor psychology can ever `explain` human consciousness. [...] To me, then, human consciousness lies outside science, and it is here that I seek the relationship between God and man.