From Isaac Asimov's
Guide to the Bible
"As it happens, Josephus, who mentions John the Baptist,
does not mention Jesus. There is, to be sure, a paragraph in his history
of the Jews which is devoted to Jesus, but it interrupts the flow of the
discourse and seems suspiciously like an afterthought. Scholars
generally believe this to have been an insertion by some early Christian
editor who, scandalized
that Joesphus should talk of the period without mentioning the Messiah,
felt the insertion to be a pious act."
From The Canadian
Atheists Newsletter
"Imagine the people who believe such things and who are
not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds
through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is
these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the
most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders
of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who
would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally
resent it bitterly and warn the people of Canada..."
From The Tyrannosaurus
Prescription
"...anger is the common substitute for logic among those
who have no evidence for what they desperately want to believe."
"Naturally since the Sumerians didn't know what caused
the flood any more than we do, they blamed the gods. (That's the advantage
of religion. You're never short an explanation for anything.)"
From I. Asimov: A
Memoir
"...if I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God
who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their
lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an
honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God,
God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."
From Free Inquiry
"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to
say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it
was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it
assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one
was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of
emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have
the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he
doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."
"I am not responsible for what other people think.
I am responsible only for what I myself think, and I know what that is.
No idea I've ever come up with has ever struck me as a divine revelation.
Nothing I have ever observed leads me to think there is a God watching
over me."
"Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not
afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse)
going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be
nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am
thankful to atheism."
From 2000 Years of
Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt
"The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken
place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than
a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence
that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their
notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy
has."
"I certainly don't believe in the mythologies of our
society, in heaven and hell, in God and angels, in Satan and demons. I've
thought of myself as an ´atheist,´ but that simply described what I didn't
believe in, not what I did. Gradually, though, I became aware there was a
movement called ´humanism,´ which used that name because, to put it most
simply, humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive
advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe
that if the ills are to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do
the job. They disbelieve in the influence of the supernatural on either
the good or the bad of society."
From Nightfall
"So the universe is not quite as you thought it was.
You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't
rearrange the universe."
Some Random Quotes
"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for
atheism ever conceived."
"I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to
spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For
whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even
worse."
"The bible must be seen in a cultural context. It didn't
just happen. These stories are retreads. But, tell a Christian that
-- No, No! What makes it doubly sad is that they hardly know the book,
much less its origins."
"Creationists make it sound as though a ´theory´ is
something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."
"To rebel against a powerful political, economic,
religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people
do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the
"scientific" establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world,
and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as
a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think
that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell
them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not,
become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group
of astronomers denounces it."
"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future
is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and
ignorant superstition."
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always
been premature, and it remains premature today."
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