Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.
Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.
Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.
As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.
I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite – or too devout – to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life.
Thus the creationist’s favourite question “What is the use of half an eye?” Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That’s very true.
I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.
The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.
It’s about time we start criticizing faith.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
You can make some inferences about a man’s character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.
Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.
The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.
We’re going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won’t take common sense for an answer.
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.