What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.
To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?
I’m not afraid of being dead, that’s to say there’s nothing to be afraid of. I won’t know I’m dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I’m alive in any way at all, that’ll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.
Happiness is fleeting and life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us.
In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.
I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.
Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I personally want to “do” death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.
We know that our life is essentially tragic. I’m absolutely not for handing over that very important department of our psyche to those who say, “Why didn’t you say so before? God has a plan for you in mind.”
To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’
Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus.
Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.