“ To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.
“ Christians are not bothered in the least that they are risking Allah’s hell by not being Muslims. We all risk the hell of other religions. All I do is risk one more hell than what others do. Once I risk one hell they all look like nothing but empty threats.
John Loftus, Debunking Christianity
ReBlogged from friendlyatheist
“ There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.
Stephen Hawking
“ Atheists often get accused of intolerance and disrespect for saying things like, “I don’t agree with you,” “I think you’re mistaken,” “What evidence do you have to support that?”, “I think your reasoning is flawed, and here’s why.” Criticizing ideas is not the same as attacking people — and religious ideas are no exception.
Greta Christina
“ If you care whether the things you believe are true — including religious beliefs — you ought to be willing to subject your beliefs to rigorous testing, and to let go of them if a solid body of evidence contradicts them. And if you don’t care whether the things you believe are true, then don’t try to defend and/or spread those beliefs to others.
The National Organization for Marriage has an operating budget of nine million dollars, which they are spending to convince voters to deny me my right to marriage, with their main argument being that children need a mom and a dad.
As someone who’s tutored children in some rough areas of Los Angeles, let me just say this:
You know what children really need? CHILDREN NEED NINE MILLION DOLLARS.
Just think what we could accomplish if these idiots put their time, effort and bags of money into something important (like saving children, curing diseases) rather than bigotry and discrimination.
(via daveholmes)
ReBlogged from aatombomb
“ The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not know that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace.
Robert G. Ingersoll
ReBlogged from ageofreason
“ It is a profound irony to see religious people praising themselves for their humility while essentially making claims about cosmology, and physics, and astronomy, and geology, and biology, and paleontology, and just dozens of specific sciences that no scientist could make. Every religious person who takes the Genesis account of creation seriously… is essentially saying to somebody like Stephen Hawking, ‘Stephen, you’re a smart guy, and I see you’ve got a lot of equations over there, but you don’t know enough about cosmology, because God did this in six days and He rested on the seventh.’
Sam Harris
ReBlogged from cocknbull
“ Bible scholars agree that the first gospels were written decades after the life of Jesus. Decades. And, of course, we don’t have the original manuscript. We have copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts, which have thousands — literally thousands — of discrepancies between them, many of which show signs of later interpolation, which is to say that people added passages that then became part of the canon. There are whole books, like the Book of Revelation, which for hundreds of years were not included, because they were deemed false gospel… Generations of Christians lived and died being guided by gospel that is now deemed both incomplete and mistaken.
Sam Harris
ReBlogged from cocknbull
“ England’s state religion is an accident sustained by apathy: lacking any logical existence at the heart of the nation, it survives because it is already there. No one would campaign to create an official Church of England, if we had not inherited one; other parts of the country do without it.
“ The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy — or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution — one of the wealthiest on earth — that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified, wherever Church teaching holds sway — leading boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to Church-run orphanages only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.
ReBlogged from cocknbull
“ Millennials, the generation of young adults born after 1980, are significantly more likely than older adults to say they are unaffiliated with any particular religion. Roughly a quarter of all Millennials (26%) are unaffiliated, compared with 20% of current Gen Xers, 13% of Baby Boomers and very few older Americans.
“ I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
John Cage
