Why - Quotes
If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works 90 percent of the time. On the other hand [...] if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are that it works at less than 10 percent, unless it is has also been covered by the grandmother and the classics, in which case why would you need a psychologist?
School is practice for future life, practice makes perfect and nobodys perfect, so why practice?
The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can`t achieve it.
The religious reply to the moral sceptic`s question, `Why should I behave in such-and-such a way?` is simply `Because God requires it of you.` But this is merely a polite way of saying, `Because you`ll be punished if you don`t. [...] But a threat is never a logical justification for acting one way rather than another. If there exists a deity with the punitive vengefulness of the Judaeo-Christian variety, then it might be prudent to obey it, and thus avoid the flames of hell; but the threat of punishment is not a principled reason for obedience.
If anyone bothered to examine what a Christian - or indeed any religious -morality demanded, he would be amazed by its diametric opposition to what is regarded as normal and desirable now, yet he would see - independently of whether it is the Christian or the contemporary morality which is `right` - the reason why the former is irrelevant to the latter.
If love [...] is the reason for being moral, what relevance does the existence or non-existence of a deity have? Why can we not be prompted to the ethical life by our own charitable feelings? The existence of a god adds nothing to our moral situation, other than an invisible policeman who sees what we do (even in privacy and under cover of night), and a threat of post-mortem terrors if we misbehave. Such additions are hardly an enrichment of the moral life, since the underpinning they offer consists of fear and threats of punishment: which is exactly what, among other things, the moral life seeks to free us from.
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?
Invoking a deity doesn`t solve the problem of complexity; it introduces a new problem. If all complex things really do require an intelligent creator, then why is that creator himself not bound to the same rule? Would that complex deity not require an even more complex creator, and so on, for infinity?
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.
Why does God need arguments, anyway? Why does God need people to make his arguments for him? Why can`t he just reveal his true self, clearly and unequivocally, and settle the question once and for all? If God existed, why wouldn`t it just be obvious?
If something happened where I couldn`t write music anymore, it would kill me. It`s not just a job. It`s not just a hobby. It`s why I get up in the morning.
Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?
To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.