From: "Peter McWilliams" To: Subject: Meditations for your Holy Days Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 00:25:23 -0800 "God said "let there be light" and they watered down the beer. ..........Author Unknown "Democracy is the belief that twenty thousand lemmings can't all be wrong." ..........Author Unknown "I'm an atheist. Swear to god." ..........Author Unknown "Organized religion is like organized crime; it preys on peoples' weaknesses, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate." ..........Author Unknown "I am treated as evil by those who feel persecuted because they are not allowed to force me to believe as they do." ..........author unknown "A society without religion is like a crazed psychopath without a .45." ..........Author Unknown "Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned." ..........Author Unknown "Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life." ..........Author Unknown "'God is as real as I am', the old man said. I was relieved since I knew Santa wouldn't lie to me..." ..........Author Unknown "Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish." ..........Author Unknown "The world holds two classes of men: intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence." ..........Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri "Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends." ..........Woody Allen Faith; noun. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." ..........Ambrose Bierce "Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy." ..........Ambrose Bierce Mythology: The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later. ..........Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" Scriptures; noun. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based. ..........Ambrose Bierce "When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite." ..........William Blake "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." ..........Derek Bok - Harvard President "Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion." ..........Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D. For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. ..........Charles Bukowski "It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him." ..........Arthur C. Clarke "Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense." ..........Chapman Cohen "I do not believe in god because I do not believe in Mother Goose." ..........Clarence Darrow "I think; therefore I am." ..........Rene Descartes "Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing." ..........John Dewey "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." ..........Philip K. Dick "I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world." ..........Charles Dickens "I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God." ..........Thomas Edison "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." ..........Albert Einstein "The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so, cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are both able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can, but will not, than they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist?" ..........Epicures, 300 B.C. "We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn't been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake." ..........Catherine Fahringer "If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing" ..........Anatole France "Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?" ..........Jules Feiffer "Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition." ..........Freedom From Religion Foundation "In the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is only too palpable." ..........Sigmund Freud "We dance around in a ring and suppose, while the secret sits in the middle and knows." ..........Robert Frost "Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, dirty thing on the face of the earth and you should save it for someone you love." ..........Butch Hancock "The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H. Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history." ..........Robert A. Heinlein "Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe." ..........Thomas Henry Huxley "Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme." ..........Bernard Katz "I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end... where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice." ..........Pres. John F. Kennedy "Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking." ..........John Maynard Keynes "Faith is often the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate." ..........F.M. Knowles "Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness." ..........Fran Lebowitz "The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." ..........Ferdinand Magellan "I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance." ..........Christopher Marlowe "It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women." ..........Marquis de Sade "Religion is the opiate of the masses." ..........Karl Marx "The trouble with communism is the communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is Christians." ..........H.L. Mencken "Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill." ..........H.L. Mencken "A'nahl Nathrak, Uthphas Biethud, Dolkiel Deinvey" ..........Merlin "I should like to see, and this will be the last and most ardent of my desires, I should like to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest." ..........J. Messelier of Paris, dated 1733: "I have my own God, and I think my God finds me incredibly fucking funny. That's why I chose him as my God ... " ..........Dennis Miller "I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education." ..........Wilson Mizner "One would like to believe that people who think of themselves as devout Christians would also behave in a manner that is in according with Christian ethics. But pastorally and existentially, I know that this is not the case, and never has been." ..........John Neuhaus, in San Jose Mercury News Faith: not wanting to know what is true. ..........Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche "I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." ..........Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche "In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." ..........Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche "The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness - he must come one day." ..........Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche "Religion has caused more misery to all men in every state of human history than any other single idea." ..........Madelyn Murray O'Hair "No God ever gave any man anything, nor ever answered any prayer at any time -- nor ever will." ..........Madelyn Murray O'Hair "The only force more devastating than a nuclear holocaust is a group of Christians fresh out of church." ..........Matt Polek "Better to be unborn than untaught, for ignorance is the root of all misfortune." ..........Plato "Thanks for the job, Mickey." ..........Pluto "I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods you will understand why I dismiss yours." ..........Stephen F. Roberts "We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing, all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes