Some Poignant Quotes

Just a few quotes I have come across over the years of exploring freethinking/atheism material on the web. Some of them help to wrap up effective points into small packages.

"If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
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~ Thomas Szasz

"Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
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~ Ron Patterson

"I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.
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~ Adolf Hitler (just to debunk the myth of Hitler being an atheist)

"To use the term blind faith, is to use an adjective needlessly.
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~ Julian Ruck

"When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself."

~ Jack Gurney – “The Ruling Class”

“...if the definition of God is unfalsifiable, the question of the existence of God is meaningless.”
~ freethoughtpedia.com

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."


~ Gene Roddenberry

On the Supernatural

During the entire history of mankind, there has never been any independently verifiable evidence of the supernatural. Indeed, many proponents of the supernatural realm hardly have any idea what implications such a realm would have in the observable world, let alone any ideas of how to prove its existence. In previous posts, I have insisted that a rational person should have evidence of something before it is believed. This is hardly a novel thought, and I think anyone would agree with it. But due to the supposed non-physical nature of the supernatural, religious people feel they are exempt from having any burden of proof. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone has a reason for believing something, and we can honestly say that with the supernatural, evidence is not it.

As the first basic precept of religion, proving the existence of a supernatural realm should be at the top of the believer’s list of things to do. It should come before any other arguments, because if the supernatural does not exist, nothing in their religion is true. Given the very definition of immaterial, acceptable evidence for may never surface. This leaves argument as the only tool one can use to justify belief, but the arguments I have heard make flawed assumptions.

• Some mysterious or unknown feature of our universe (before the big bang, beauty in nature, physical laws, complexity of life). Things that are unknown are unknown. The ignorance of a cause for something does not make it magic. Things like the stars, the weather, and disease used to be thought to have supernatural causes.
  
• The existence of morality and of abstract ideas and concepts in our brains as being separate from our physical reality. Every one of those thoughts, ideas and concepts we have we have — including morality (view video in previous post) — is a result of known physical processes in a physical brain.
• The authority of the Bible. What if the only evidence for evolution was a book, and not all that observation, experiment, and not the independent lines of verification from geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, genetics, molecular biology, developmental biology, embryology, population genetics, genome sequencing, and many other sciences?
  

Skeptics of the supernatural have often been called “closed-minded," and accused of bias towards a particular world-view. This is an disingenuous thing to say. Anyone can agree that it is not close-minded to require evidence for beliefs. If you can’t provide the evidence for something, you shouldn’t malign those who don't believe it. How can you blame them for not believing you? If your position takes faith to begin with, you cannot expect others to follow suit. But more to the point, if your position takes faith to believe it, maybe you shouldn’t have so much confidence in your position.

- Evan

Might Makes Right: one Hell of a problem

Let us examine the concept of eternity. It is a concept, and is something that our minds literally cannot grasp. There is a video I have linked on the side of this page ("Hell: an excessive punishment") that has a good analogy for how long eternity is. Imagine a huge planet, made completely of bronze. Every hundred years a bird flies by, brushing its wing against the side of the planet. When the planet is completely worn down to nothing, that will have been the first day of eternity. It is too long a time for us humans to even understand. By God’s own book, no Christian should wish death or pain upon a non-believer, but God chooses to burn and torture people for eternity. Because he is all-powerful and this is his universe, he has the power to pull people out of Hell, or make it disappear completely. But no, he consciously chooses to torture people. Christians are more moral than their own God.

What kind of omniscient, perfectly good being would burn and torture a living thing for any expanse of time? You and I certainly wouldn’t. But God is excused because he is so holy that he is above our morality. This creates a problem: is God good because he has good qualities, or is he good because he’s God? The existence of Hell, accompanied by the millions of people God killed in the Bible, leaves us to assume that God is good because he’s God - he is so far above us that whatever he does goes. This is a dictionary definition of might-makes-right, or a dictator. God obviously does not have the good qualities that his followers insist upon, but rather has such a high position that we are victims to whatever he wants. Does this sound like a supreme, perfect, and good being?

Such a supreme being wants and needs nothing. So what is he doing? Why do we concern him? Why did he come down to this tiny planet on the outskirts of one random galaxy in one corner of the universe and make little miniscule, material creations that have to prove themselves to him? Why is he so offended by these insignificant creatures if they don’t worship him? Why does he want people in Heaven? To have company? These questions are simply unanswerable by Christianity; they don’t know God’s true motives or his actual plan for us. All they know is that they must unquestioningly worship and praise him. They must realize that to someone who is outside of religion, it all seems very strange.

- Evan

You don't know there's not a God

This response almost always occurs after someone says there’s no evidence of God. The fact is that no one is ever called upon to prove a negative, because it’s logically impossible. That’s right, it’s impossible to prove there’s no God. But don’t get excited yet. It’s logically impossible to prove the non-existence of any number of things. Think of anything we can’t directly observe. It’s logically impossible to prove that that thing doesn’t exist. This leaves the argument “you don’t know there’s not a God” on very shaky ground, since the same statement can be made for many different things, even things that contradict one another.

Let’s examine a claim that we can neither prove nor disprove: I am an alien in human form. If I told you this, you would not actually believe it no matter how hard I insisted it was true. My word would never be enough. You would require some sort of positive evidence for such an extraordinary claim. Needless to say, you wouldn’t be agnostic about it. You wouldn’t say “I neither believe nor disbelieve that you are an alien from another planet.” You would simply dismiss my claim as unverifiable, thinking I was pulling your leg, unless I came forth with very strong evidence (like building a homemade death ray).

“You don’t know there’s not a God.” This appeal to ignorance is very common, suggesting that the atheist should at least be agnostic about God. Surely if they were consistent, they would become agnostic themselves? But we don’t have to be agnostic. One of the best indicators that something isn’t there is a lack of evidence for its existence. Religion has never made any discoveries or predictions about the world, so it must have nothing to contribute as to its true nature.

- Evan