Atheism Quotes - Page 71

If we are to stand the final heat of the battle, we must learn to stand our ground in the face of cavalry or baton charges and allow ourselves to be trampled under horses' hooves, or be bruised with baton charges.

The concepts of truth may differ. But all admit and respect truth. That truth I call God. For sometime I was saying, "God is Truth," but that did not satisfy me. So now I say, "Truth is God."

I am a poor mendicant. My earthly possessions consist of six spinning wheels, prison dishes, a can of goat's milk, six homespun loincloths and towels and my reputation, which cannot be worth much.

Watches may disagree, but let us not.

It is the reformer who is anxious for the reform, and not society, from which he should expect nothing better than opposition, abhorrence and even mortal persecution.

Even if nothing worse than wasted mental effort could be laid to the charge of theology, that alone ought to be sufficient to banish it from the earth, as one of the worst enemies of mankind.

Obsolete misleading theologies bear the same relation to the essence of true religion that scarlet fever, mumps, and measles do to education.

What is the use of assuring Fundamentalists that science is compatible with religion. They retort at once, Certainly not with our religion.

Bryan - a great friend of mine, by the way - had a Neanderthal type of head, Burbank says. As to Riley, he has not even the oratorical skill of Bryan. The whole movement is based on the poor whites of the south.

Nature is not personal. She is the compound of all these processes which move through the universe to effect the results we know as Life and of all the ordinances which govern that universe and that make Life continuous. She is no more the Hebrew's Jehovah than she is the Physicist's Force; she is as much Providence as she is Electricity; she is not the Great Pattern any more than she is the Blind Chance.

Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs.

Those things that are in the light we behold from darkness.

Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift I see the suns, I see the systems lift Their forms; and even the systems and the suns Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.

Forbear to spew out reason from your mind, but rather ponder everything with keen judgment; and if it seems true, own yourself vanquished, but, if it is false, gird up your loins to fight.

So much wrong could religion induce.

Assuredly whatsoever things are fabled to exist in deep Acheron, these all exist in this life. There is no wretched Tantalus, fearing the great rock that hangs over him in the air and frozen with vain terror. Rather, it is in this life that fear of the gods oppresses mortals without cause, and the rock they fear is any that chance may bring.

The nature of the universe has by no means been made through divine power, seeing how great are the faults that mar it.

There is so much wrong with the world. (tanta stat praedita culpa)

And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all.

The United States is not a Christian nation. It is a great nation with Christians, among others, in it. But our greatness is based on the fact that there is no official religion.

In good philosophy, the word cause ought to be reserved to the single Divine impulse that has formed the universe.

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.

Regardless of whether or not you belong to a majority religion, in the United States you may not impose your theology on civil law.

Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded. That all the Apostles would have done as they did.

A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?