Showing posts with label "Quote of the Day". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "Quote of the Day". Show all posts

Quote of the Day, By Yours Truly ;-)

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I think the Christian delusion is harmful if for no other reason than that it weaken one's critical thinking skills. If faith is the basis for what one thinks then anything can be believed. It also adversely impacts us in polls that bolster the delusion in others, in donations to faith-based causes that are harmful, in TV, radio, and book buying habits that grant spokespersons for the delusion a bigger voice than warranted, and in voting patterns that place deluded people in power who in turn cause harm to individual people, one's particular nation, and the world at large.

Quote of the Day, by Sir_Russ

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God isn't the 300 people who died in the plane crash. No, no, no. God is the one person who survived it. God is that unlikely event.

God isn't the death, mayhem, destruction and chaos of the tornado. No, no, no. God is the miracle puppy which lived through it.

God isn't the hundreds of US children who die every year due to medical neglect by their Christian Science parents. No, no, no. God is the one who may have suffered needlessly, but didn't die.

Christian faith is blindness to manifest horror in favor of comfort. Christian faith is picking over a cataclysm looking for anything to indulge their insatiable lust for feeling good. Link

Quote of the Day, By Victor Stenger on Science vs Religion

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Religion is a belief system based on bullshit. Link.
I received my copy of Stenger's newest book yesterday, God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion.On the back cover I have a blurb that reads:
A tour de force. Among the published atheists trying to bridge the gap between scientifically minded people and people of faith Stenger is the best. I consider this book to be his best yet. I think it'll probably be a classic.
His book should be available shortly. Get it! Don't miss it. You can read all I said about it right here.

Quote of the Day by Kayt Sukel

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Technology and science have now advanced to the point that disciplines like biology, genetics, epidemiology, evolutionary science, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and medicine have converged into the catchall field of neuroscience. More and more, neuroscientists are demonstrating that the brain is behavior—the two simply cannot be teased apart.
Sukel is author of Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex, and Relationships. This reminds me of Helen Fisher's TED talk on Why We Love and Cheat, as well as Jesse Bering on the Klüver-Bucy Syndrome and Nymphomania. I think the days of faith, sin, atonement, and divine judgment talk are all over.

Quote of the Day, by extian

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Almost everything in the Bible reads like a product of its time and culture. The ancient Israelites just borrowed their gods from the Canaanites (El, Asheroth, and Baal all used to be on the same team), then made El the primary (and later, only) god, merged him with another god, Yahweh, and developed an entire religious and ritualistic system around these plagiarizations. Centuries later, the gospel writers drew on these same OT fabrications while borrowing extensively from their time and culture, incorporating god-man resurrection stories (i.e. Romulus) to create the Jesus narrative. If you start your epistemology with the Bible, you've built your foundation on falsehoods. Ignorance is bliss. Willful ignorance is faith.

Quote of the Day, by AdamHazzard

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Had Constantine established some religion other than Christianity -- say, Mithraism -- we would no doubt be celebrating the Tauroctony every spring and the birth of Mithras at the winter solstice. And if Mithraic scholars were to unearth copies of Mark or Luke from the Judean desert, the scrolls would be treated as cultic mystery stories of purely historical interest. Religion is as contingent and mutable as any other human cultural invention.

Quote of the Day, by articulett

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It's not that science has ever been wrong... it's that religion has never been right. Science has an error correcting mechanism; faith does not. That's why there is one science-- and it's the same for everybody no matter what they believe.

Quote of the Day, With Examples

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If the same kind of reasoning produces support for two different conclusions then the reasoning is delusional. By your host here, John W. Loftus ;-)
--Example 1) Ontological arguments for God's existence equally support the Oriental conception of God, or a trickster god.
--Example 2) The same kind of arguments exonerating God from being evil also work in reverse to exonerate an evil God from being good.
--Example 3) Arguments deflecting the problem of divine hiddenness for the Christian God also work to deflect the problem of divine hiddenness for Zeus, Odin, Thor, Re, Hathor, Apollo, and Artemis.
--Example 4) Pascal's beneficial argument to support belief in the Christian God also works to support the evil Egyptian god Set (Seth), and the Greek gods Minos, Styx, Tartaros and Thanatos.
--Example 5) Arguments supporting the proper basically of belief in the Christian God also work to support the proper basically of belief in Allah. Somebody stop me!

Quote of the Day, by articulett on the OTF ;-)

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You can believe whatever goofy shit you want-- but if you want us to take your beliefs more seriously than you take the goofy shit that others believe in, you would need to give us the kind of evidence that you would require from them to take their beliefs seriously.

Quote of the Day, by Kel

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Self-authenticating private evidence is useless,
because it is indistinguishable from the illusion of it.

Quotes of the Day

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Here are a few salient quotes in context for further discussion:
The more often Christians have to resort to background beliefs—the more often they have to resort to their overall religious worldview to defend a particular tenet of faith—then the less likely their faith is true. Link
Christians must be convinced that their faith is nearly impossible before they will ever consider it to be improbable, which is an utterly unreasonable standard. Link.
When Christians criticize each other I think they're all right. Link.

Quote of the Day, From My Wife

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As we drove past a church having their service yesterday she made me laugh when she said:
Looks like they can't remember how to be good and need to be reminded every week. Some of us are smarter than that.
[First posted 9/6/10]

Quote of the Day, by Tony Campolo

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I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night. Link. Hat Tip: James McGrath

Quote of the Day, by Sam Harris

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Whatever else may be wrong with our world, it remains a fact that some of the most terrifying instances of human conflict and stupidity would be unthinkable without religion. And the other ideologies that inspire people to behave like monsters—Stalinism, fascism, etc.—are dangerous precisely because they so resemble religions. Sacrifice for the Dear Leader, however secular, is an act of cultic conformity and worship. Whenever human obsession is channeled in these ways, we can see the ancient framework upon which every religion was built. In our ignorance, fear, and craving for order, we created the gods. And ignorance, fear, and craving keep them with us. Link

Quote of the Day

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With over 30,000 different denominations and sects to choose from, Christianity bears no orthodoxy, no consistency and no authority whatsoever. It has hundreds of 'official' denominations who disagree, sometime violently on all foundational tenets of the religion. Given the general level of ignorance people have about the religion they adopt and their propensity for moulding it to be what they want it to be, one could argue that each Christian has their own denomination. We can state confidently, with evidence and reason that Christianity hasn't a clue what it believes or why. Until the Christianity’s can actually internally agree and harmonise what they believe and state why, they all remain a laughably absurd and unsubstantiated proposition to those who do not believe. Your argument is not with atheists, it's with the other 29,999 sects who view your Christianity as a joke. Link.

Quote of the Day, On The Ending of Christianity, by Jerry Rivard

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I am an atheist. I believe that gods do not exist. I also believe the world would be a better place if all or most people didn't believe that gods exist, and in particular if children weren't taught to believe in something I consider to be a myth. And I would like to see a (peaceful) end to Christianity, and of all religious belief, within my lifetime. I have no illusions that is going to happen, of course, but I do believe that if we don't blow ourselves up in the next few hundred years or so that religion in general will become about as uncommon as, say, paganism is today. I believe that will happen because I believe that theism is false, and I believe that the power of truth is such that it will always emerge from the darkness, as I believe it always has – eventually. I believe that our increasing scientific knowledge will convince more and more people of that truth over time. For the same reason, I believe that this will be an improvement for mankind.

Quote of the Day

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The probability that God inspired the Bible is inversely proportional to the probability that it developed in ways indistinguishable from a purely human process (i.e., the more probable it looks like a purely human process then the less probable it has God as an author), and there is overwhelming evidence that it looks indistinguishable from a purely human process. -- John W. Loftus

What Is Faith?

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Faith is pure wishful thinking, nothing more and nothing less. It offers a person a leap beyond what the probabilities actually lead us to think. For if something can be known to be the case we wouldn't need faith. Faith therefore is not a virtue when it comes to knowing the truth about anything. Skepticism is.

Quote of the Day, by Articulett

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I agree wholeheartedly with his assessment of the OTF:

Quote of the Day

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All religions have the same faith-based foundation. When faith is a foundation anything can be believed. --John W. Loftus