Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
It was harder to work out that there was a question than to think of the answer.
I should also give some space to Amotz Zahavi’s idea that altruistic donation might be a ‘Potlatch’ style of dominance signal: see how superior to you I am, I can afford to make a donation to you!
There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were. Of.
The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.
Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true. Even if we make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God’s existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst – none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true. It.
Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.
What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.
If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers. Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools: that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise.
No sane creator, setting out from scratch to design a flat-fish, would have conceived on his drawing board the absurd distortion of the head needed to bring both eyes round to one side.
Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men – above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends. – ALBERT EINSTEIN.
One of my pet peeves is the habit of labelling young children with the religion of their parents: ‘Catholic child’, ‘Protestant child’, ‘Muslim child’. Such phrases can be heard used of children too young to talk, let alone hold religious opinions. It seems to me as absurd as talking about a ‘Socialist child’ or ‘Conservative child’, and nobody would ever use a phrase like that. I don’t think we should talk about ‘atheist children’ either.
The American comedian Cathy Ladman observes that ‘All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.
Indeed, to claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained.
Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.
One way to express the answer is that it might happen by ‘chance’. But ‘chance’ is just a word expressing ignorance. It means ‘determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means’.