Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don’t know the Ten Commandments.
We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don’t have to bother saying so.
Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.
I’m sure Obama is an atheist, I’m sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.
Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
It is a virtue to admit ignorance when you don’t know, but not to wallow in ignorance as an end in itself. People say if we don’t believe god is watching over us, we abandon morality. Are they right?
What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing – that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?
Myths are fun, as long as you don’t confuse them with the truth.
Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins.
The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.
Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ’s followers seem to disagree.
I don’t feel depressed. I feel elated.
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that.
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
The universe doesn’t owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn’t owe us a nice warm feeling inside.
Evolution never looks to the future.
What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.
I think we certainly benefit from social institutions which encourage us towards moral behavior. It’s very important to have law. It’s very important to have a moral education.
If I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution. Why deliberately set it up in the one way which makes it look as though you don’t exist?
I don’t understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did.