Text 1245, 154 rader
Skriven 2008-02-17 03:48:21 av Steve Kemp (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: Good quotes
===================
Albert Einstein

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have
expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religion than
it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our
science can reveal it."

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation,
whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a
reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives
the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear
or ridiculous egotism."

"I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics
to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward,
then we are a sorry lot indeed."

-Albert Einstein, German-born American physicist
Isaac Asimov

"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an
atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually
unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that
one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I
don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly
suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."

"Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after
being drunk all night"

-Isaac Asimov, Russian-born - American author
Ernest Hemingway

"All thinking men are atheists."

On page 144 of Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals, it states that despite being
raised in a strict Congregationalist household, Ernest "did not only not
believe in God but regarded organized religion as a menace to human happiness",
"seems to have been devoid of the religious spirit", and "ceased to practise
religion at the earliest possible moment."
Other's have pointed out that Hemingway used the non-existence of God as a
theme in his books.

- Ernest Hemingway, American author (1899-1961).
Arthur C. Clarke

"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create
him."

"Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a
necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people
in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?"

Arthur C. Clarke, author
Benjamin Franklin

"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself
from Christian assemblies."

"Lighthouses are more helpful then churches."

-Benjamin Franklin, American Founding Father, author, and inventor
Dave Matthews

"I'm glad some people have that faith. I don't have that faith. If there is a
God, a caring God, then we have to figure he's done an extraordinary job of
making a very cruel world."

-Dave Matthews, South African rock musician
Bertrand Russell

"Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of
defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no
wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on
religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a
source of untold misery to the human race."

"Fear is the parent of cruelty, therefore it is no wonder if religion and
cruelty have gone hand-in-hand."

"I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I
am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the
thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it
must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are
not everlasting."

"I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind
of religious belief will die out."

- Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, educator, mathematician, and social
critic (1872-1970).
Clarence Darrow

"I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment, to be called an
agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure. "

"I believe that relgion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't
believe in either. I don't believe in God as I don't believe in Mother Goose."

- Clarence Seward Darrow, American lawyer (1857-1938). (Scopes Monkey Trail-
Creationism in schools)
Freidrich Nietzsche

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true."

"So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of
life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be any answer
to the question: What is truth?"

"The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all
freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time
subjection, a self-derision, and self-mutilation."

"All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual
immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligations to speak
the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its God to be truthful and
understandable in his communications."

"The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was
nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God."

"There is no devil and no hell. Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy
body: fear therefore nothing any more."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, German philologist and philosopher (1844-1900).
Sigmund Freud

"Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of
being an out-and-out unbeliever. "

"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis."

"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to
anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the
great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life."

Freud certainly regarded belief in God as an illusion that mature men and women
should lay aside. The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious
which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than
an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile
yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for
life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and
worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion
belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the
transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which
were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it
should be left behind. [A History of God]

-Sigmund Freud, Austrian physician and pioneer psychoanalyst (1856-1939).

--- Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (Windows/20071031)
 * Origin: The Eastern Star - Fidonet Via Your Newsreader (1:123/789.0)