Brilliant Blasphemy (Part 2)

Just finished reading Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah and have unsurprisingly been on a bit of a christian hating binge of late. Good, insightful book on the disintegration of the GOP into a fear lathering, backward, uneducated, theocratic swamp gas of blithering, evangelical idiots.

Let's cleanse ourselves with a few quotations from much brighter individuals. Culled from J. Huberman's The Quotable Atheist.

"I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."

                                                       - Richard Feynman

"There are a set of religions, or rather moral writings, which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true."

                                                       - Henry Fielding

"The Atheist Bible, it could be said, has but one word: 'Think'."

                                                       - Emmett F. Fields

"My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing worlds, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called Science."

                                                       - Gustave Flaubert

"It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible."

                                                       - G. W. Foote

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."

                                                       - Benjamin Franklin

"Religion is the universal obsessional neurosis of mankind; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father... it is a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."

                    - Sigmund Freud

"Once a doctrine , however irrational, has gained power in a society, millions of people will believe it rather than feel ostracised and isolated."

                                                       - Erich Fromm

"I don't see any god up here."

                                                       - Yuri Gagarin

"I would be well pleased if after the close of this life we should be blessed with another, but I would beg not to have there for companions any who believed it here."

                                                       - Joahnn Wolfgang von Goethe

"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."

                                                       - Edmond de Goncourt

"If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admiration, what types of human behavior can be presented to them as reprehensible?"

                                                       - Ruth Hurmence Green

"I believe that the scientist is trying to express absolute truth and the artist absolute beauty, so that I find in science and art, and in an attempt to lead a good life, all the religion that I want."

                        - J. B. S. Haldane

"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

"If God dwells inside us like some people say, I sure hope He likes enchiladas, because that's what He's getting."

                                                       - Jack Handey

"Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever."

                                                       - Sam Harris

"God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow."

                                                       - G. W. F. Hegel

If your right eye offends you, pluck it out. If your right arm offends you, cut it off. And if your reason offends you, become a Catholic."

                                                       - Heinrich Heine

"The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious... One only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes; fools and hypocrites."

                                                       - Thomas Jefferson

"The atheist, agnostic, or secularist... should not be cowed by exaggerated sensitivity to people's religious beliefs... Those who advocate a piece of folly like the theory of an 'intelligent creator' should be held accountable for their folly; they have no right to be offended for being called fools until they establish that they are not in fact fools."

                                                       - S. T. Joshi

"An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question."

                                                       - John "Uncle John" McCarthy

"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

"I would like, and this would be the last and most ardent of my wishes, I would like the last king to be strangled with the guts of the last priest."***

                                                       - Jean Meslier

*** A similar quote has also been attributed to Denis Diderot.