Science doesn’t have all the answers, but it is good at spotting the important questions when they are camouflaged against a background of common sense.
Areas where there is a lack of data, or a lack of understanding, are automatically assumed to belong, by default, to God.
There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.
Religion is a distraction from true education.
Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: ‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
If you don’t understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.
Gaps, by default in the mind of the creationist, are filled by God.
Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like ‘living’ does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.
The nervous system has a rule that says, ‘Any trial action that is followed by reward should be repeated. Any trial action that is followed by nothing, or, worse, followed by punishment, for example pain, should not be repeated.
I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it. – ALBERT EINSTEIN.
As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: ‘But darling, why didn’t you come to us and tell us?’ Lalla’s reply is my text for today: ‘But I didn’t know I could.
In George Bernard Shaw’s words, ‘The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
There is in every village a torch – the teacher: and an extinguisher – the clergyman. – VICTOR HUGO.
The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’.
There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence.
The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.
Let’s get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.