Tuesday 12 November 2013

How to talk to a Christian

"If you wake up tomorrow morning and think that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes will turn them into the body of Elvis Presley you're said to be out of your mind. If you think the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus you're just a Catholic."

Friday 8 November 2013

The Theological Trampoline


"I often liken reading high-quality theological writing to watching a skilled trampolinist. The latter begins at rest at the center of the trampoline. Then, before one's eyes, she goes through an increasingly complex set of manoeuvers, rising to the spectacular and leaving one filled with wonder that a fellow human can do such wonderful things. And then, at the end, she comes to rest on the trampoline, exactly where she started." 
~ Islernet

Tuesday 1 October 2013

Football and stamp-collecting.

"Although it is true that 'absence of belief' in supernatural agency is functionally equivalent to 'belief in the absence of supernatural agency', theists concentrate on the latter formulation in order to make atheism a positive as opposed to a privative thesis with regard to theistic-subject-matter-related matters; this is what makes theists think they are in  kind of belief football match, with opposing sets of beliefs vying for our allegiance. What is haappening is that the theists are rushing about the park kicking the ball, but the atheists are not playing. They are not even on the field; they are in the stands, arguing that this particular game should not be taking place at all.

The correct characterisation of the opposition between theism and atheism is therefore this: the theist has existential beliefs, metaphysical beliefs, of a certain distinctive kind; and the atheist does not share them, and therefore does not even begin to enter the domain of discourse in which these beliefs have their life and content. Rather to use a by now familiar simile, but it exactly captures the point - atheism is to theism as not-collecting stamps is to stamp collecting. Not collecting stamps is not a hobby. It says nothing about the non-stamp-collector's other hobbies or interests. It denotes only the open-ended and negative state of not-collecting-stamps. To think of non-stamp-collectors as theists think of atheists, stamp collectors would have to think that non-stamp-collectors  have stamp interests of (so to speak) a positively negative kind; that they share their own obsessions and interests about stamps but in reverse, for example in the form of hating stamps, deliberately doing stamp-related non-stamp-collecting things, and the like."  
from "The God Argument" by A C Grayling.

Saturday 14 September 2013

Through these Godless Eyes



 "You take your faith. I'll take my parachute. See you at the bottom of the cliff"

Friday 13 September 2013

Herman Philipse on the Incoherence of 'God'.

“How can one meaningfully say that God listens to our prayers, loves us, speaks to us, answers (or does not answer our supplications, etcetera, if God is also assumed to be an incorporeal being? For the stipulation that God is an incorporeal being  annuls the very conditions for meaningfully applying psychological expressions to another entity, to wit, that this entity is able in principle to display forms of bodily behaviour which resemble patterns of human behaviour. In other words, the very attempt to give a meaning and a possible referent to the word ‘God’ as used in theism must fail, because this attempt is incoherent. . .
. . . If this is so, one might object, how are we to explain the fact that the word ‘God’ and sentences such as ‘God loves me’, appear to be used meaningfully in monotheistic language? But explaining this is not difficult. The religious uses of the putative proper name ‘God’ are parasitic upon, and resemble to a large extent, the ordinary uses of proper names and psychological  expressions for human beings. What religious believers fail to notice is that by substituting ‘God’ for an ordinary proper name in sentences such as ‘John loves me’, or ‘Paul will condemn him’, they cancel the conditions for using meaningfully the words ‘loves’ and ‘condemns’.

Monotheistic believers often are vaguely aware that the meaning of words eludes them when they utter sentences containing the word ‘God’. But they misinterpret this fact as symptomatic of the spiritual depth of religious discourse. They think that the profoundly mysterious nature of monotheistic language points to a transcendent reality, which cannot be grasped by us, limited human beings. In this case, however, the impression of profoundness is caused by a mere misuse of language. As Wittgenstein aptly remarked, ‘the problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth.”


Herman Philipse is a professor of philosophy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. From 1986 until 2003, he taught at Leiden University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1983. 

Thursday 12 September 2013

The Incoherence of Believing in Something (but you aren't quite sure what).

Richard G Swinburne

In the opening lines of Swinburne's introduction to his book "The Coherence of Theism" he states that by a theist he understands a man who believes there "is something like a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, free, able to do anything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe."
This immediately begs the question of what, if anything, is "like a person without a body". This question-begging is only compounded by the additional qualifications that follow in the statement. 

A few lines down Swinburne also reveals his conclusion that "the question of coherence of belief that there is a god cannot be separated from the question of its truth".

So the void Swinburne opens up at the beginning of the introduction is later revealed to be bottomless at its end.

His book is 324 pages long. That's "Philosophy of Religion" for you. 

Wednesday 11 September 2013

Hitchens has it.

"How much vanity must be concealed - not too effectively at that - in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to "fit" with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then - after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty - to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas?" 
~ Christopher Hitchens, 
"God is not Great"

Craig caught carping



A 1.5 minute long neat exposé of WLC's debating modus operandi; spin, distortion of facts and aggressive volubility.

Monday 9 September 2013

Bill Maher on religion.


"Religious people aren’t afraid of other religious people.  Oh sure, sometimes they  kill and hate them.  But they don’t fear them.  They only fear the atheists, because we’re the only ones not clapping during Peter Pan. Because religion is kinda like a conga line.  If one person doesn’t join in, you see yourself through their eyes, and you realise you look like a schmuck."

Sunday 8 September 2013

The Arrogance of Atheism

Theism: the belief that 13.7 billion years ago some atemporal, immaterial. but omnipotent, omniscient & omnipresent entity created a Universe of a 100 billion galaxies, containing 70 sextillion stars and 10^24 planets just so that after a time interval of 13.695 billion years a particular life-form could evolve on one of the planets to sing the praises of said entity. . 

Atheism: The belief that this is probably not true. 

Sunday 14 July 2013

The Unicorn Delusion

Who has the burden of proof for an extraordinary claim? Those who make the claim or those who challenge the claim?

At first, it is quite reasonable to give benefit of the doubt to a man who makes a claim, such as "I have a unicorn in my garden". After all, we have not searched his garden and have no proof that he has no unicorn, and it seems reasonable to take the word of a man who has not been shown to lie. So reasonably, we take his word at face value and allow that he may indeed have a unicorn in his garden.

When we visit his home, we are interested to see the unicorn, but when asked the man says he has a big garden and the unicorn isn't around the house at the moment, but it is there nonetheless. We're disappointed, of course, but we have no reason to disbelieve him.

Later the man makes a moral judgement about our behaviour, such as "it is wrong to eat wheat on a Wednesday", and when asked why this is so, the man replies that his unicorn told him so. We are irritated by such judgement, and surprised that not only this man claims to have a unicorn, but that it can speak also. So we ask to see this unicorn and ask why it is wrong to eat wheat on a Wednesday. We search the garden with the man and find no unicorn, but have no proof that none exists. When challenged to produce the unicorn, the man now claims that the unicorn is invisible, and is in all parts of the garden at the same time.

Now the man's claim is looking extraordinary for a number of reasons:
1. We have never seen a unicorn, and they are popularly believed to be fictional;
2. We have never heard an animal speak, and most people accept that only humans speak;
3. The man changed his story to suit his needs as we enquired further about his talking unicorn;
4. We have never had experience of invisible animals, and invisibility has never been demonstrated; and
5. The concept of something being everywhere at once appears contradictory.

So we conclude that on the balance of probability, the man's claim is bogus and put the onus on him to prove the existence of his unicorn.

We tell the man not to be so silly and judgemental about our wheat eating habits, and go about our business, trying to avoid aggravating someone who appears not to have a firm grasp on reality.

Then we find that the man is a teacher is our children's school and is telling them that his unicorn is real, that they should not eat wheat on Wednesdays and other rules about how to live their lives which he cannot substantiate, other than by claiming his invisible unicorn told him so, and the children must believe him.

So now we are angry that our children are being indoctrinated and ask the school to stop him. When we find that the school governors are unicorn believers too, that none of them can prove the existence of unicorns either, but fully support the indoctrination of our children, we are outraged. We speak to local politicians and media, and mount a campaign to stop this silliness. But then the government, many members of whom turn out to believe in pixies or leprechauns, equally without foundation, object that we are trying to restrict people's right to believe what they choose to believe, and criticise us for being arrogant and intolerant.

We hold our heads in our hands, wondering how these people can be so deluded, and how we can have our children taught math, English and science, without all this mumbo-jumbo. We realise that it is we who are in the minority, and the world deluded.
~ Mark Beard

The Placebo Effect



For when someone starts talking about miraculous cures  . . . .

Wednesday 22 May 2013

Matthew Arnold


The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

from 'Dover Beach' Sept. 1851

"The word 'God' is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness — a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs."

"To pass from a Christianity relying on its miracles to a Christianity relying on its natural truth is a great change. It can only be brought about by those whose attachment to Christianity is such, that they cannot part with it, and yet cannot but deal with it sincerely."
from 'Literature & Dogma' 1873


Tuesday 21 May 2013

Petition for secular state education

This is a really important issue. We should just teach children to think for themselves and let them make their own minds about religion as they approach maturity.

http://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/make-all-state-schools-secular-say-no-to-faith-run-state-schools

Thursday 16 May 2013

Bibleheads

"Biblehead" is a very apt name for a particular type of religious nutter that atheist bloggers will be very familiar with. They use the bible as a substitute for rational thought, and have convinced themselves that a crushing response to sceptics is provided by quoting lengthy tracts, often with little relevance to the subject under discussion. They simultaneously seem have blinded themselves of the provenance of the bible; of its long, long history of oral transmisson, translation, editing, selection, so that, whatever the literary merits of the modern version they happen to be familiar with, it  bears little resemblance to whatever Moses thought God had said or to what Jesus himself said, if he existed, and that is by no means certain

The bible is simply a distillation mostly by 'chinese-whispers' of  the myths and superstitions of nomadic bronze-age goatherds who lived short, fear-ridden, violent lives, that bibleheads have indoctrinated themselves to believe has some relevance to the modern era. Any good that has come out of it has been filtered out by the developing humanity and rationality of the intervening generations.

So having a book handed to you with the explanation that it contains everything you need to know is very comforting, allowing you to believe that you are far more in control of your scary world than you would be otherwise. It's delusional, but for most people not being hit by lightning, or succumbing to infectious diseases, or being killed by natural disasters, there is no reason to believe otherwise. And those exceptions, well, they can be rationalized away too, simply by referring to this book.

With such a handy dandy guide to life, you really don't need to even think about or acknowledge your real ignorance.

Tuesday 7 May 2013

Religion

What greater impediment to our spiritual growth than the institutional church and its reverence for authority and stultifying dogmas? Religion transforms the flowering of humanity into a pathology. It demonizes our natural curiosity as wayward and heretical. It represses human sexuality into perversion and pornography. It censors our dreams and creative aspirations as blasphemy.

With its indoctrination of certitude, religion quashes open inquiry. With its static absolutes, religion neutralizes critical thinking.

Religion fills each generation with the poisonous doctrine that it is born evil, and it teaches that unless we redeem ourselves through unwavering compliance to the patriarch stand-ins for a fictional deity, we will be punished by torture for eternity.

Religion degrades and shackles the spirit in the name of saving it. It replaces community with dominion, science with superstition, philosophy with scripture, and art with rules. It redefines morality as conformity to authority. It would have us live ever prostrate before goblins it plants in the mind.
~ Jeff Mincey

Saturday 20 April 2013

Monday 15 April 2013

The Absent Duck

" Yes, yes, I can't "prove" that God doesn't exist or that we won't live forever. I can't prove anything, down to and including my name or the existence of Leamington Spa. Eventually you just have to admit that if it looks like the absence of a duck, walks like the absence of a duck, and quacks like the absence of a duck, the duck is probably absent."
~ Tom Chivers

Saturday 30 March 2013

Humanism

"The tradition of ethical thought stemming from classical antiquity is the foundation of humanism (and is a thousand years older than Christianity)—the study of these ideas suggests their living applicability to life, and I have been keen to alert people to this fact. Often people ask “what is the alternative to religion as a philosophy of life,” and the emphatic answer is: humanism.
Humanism is a philosophical starting point for reflection on how one should live, according to one’s own talents and interests and under the government of respecting others and not doing them harm, allowing them their own quest for an individual good life.The tradition of ethical thought stemming from classical antiquity is the foundation of humanism (and is a thousand years older than Christianity)—the study of these ideas suggests their living applicability to life, and I have been keen to alert people to this fact. Often people ask “what is the alternative to religion as a philosophy of life,” and the emphatic answer is: humanism.
Humanism is a philosophical starting point for reflection on how one should live, according to one’s own talents and interests and under the government of respecting others and not doing them harm, allowing them their own quest for an individual good life." 
~ A. C. Grayling. From an interview with Sam Harris

Monday 25 March 2013

Friday 22 March 2013

The Young Atheists' Handbook

Growing up in a strict Muslim community in south-east London, Alom Shaha learnt that religion was not to be questioned. Reciting the Qur'an without understanding what it meant was simply a part of life; so, too, was obeying the imam and enduring beatings when he failed to attend the local mosque. Shaha was more drawn to science and its power to illuminate. As a teen, he lived between two worlds: the home controlled by his authoritarian father, and a school alive with books and ideas. In a charming blend of memoir, philosophy, and science, Shaha explores the questions about faith and the afterlife that we all ponder. Through a series of loose lessons , he tells his own compelling story, drawing on the theories of some of history's greatest thinkers and interrogating the fallacies that have impeded humanity for centuries. Shaha recounts how his education and formative experiences led him to question how to live without being tied to what his parents, priests, or teachers told him to believe, and offers insights so that others may do the same. This is a book for anyone who thinks about what they should believe and how they should live. It s for those who may need the facts and the ideas, as well as the courage, to break free from inherited beliefs. In this powerful narrative, Shaha shows that it is possible to live a compassionate, fulfilling, and meaningful life without God.

The British Humanist Association would like to put a copy of The Young Atheist's Handbook (Reviews Here) in every secondary school library in England and Wales.
This means raising the funds to buy, package and post copies. and so make it available to students to read if they so choose.

Many young people are brought up in the faith of their family, without ever really having the chance to choose for themselves. School is where we go to learn how to ask questions. Making the book available through school libraries is a good first step in educating young people so that they can choose to exercise their freedom of choice. 

The costs over-all are heavily discounted thanks to Biteback Publishing, for each book to be packaged and sent to a secondary school library.

If you would like to help this BHA project there is an easy way of donating online through this JustGiving page. And please tell your friends and family about the campaign if you feel able. 

Thursday 21 March 2013

An Ignostic Argument

The Kalam Cosmological Argument attracts a lot of attention from faithists and sceptics alike because of its superficial simplicity. Here is the case for ignosticism presented in similar format:-

1. The statement that an immaterial, timeless 'something' exists is without discernible meaning.
2. God is a 'something' defined by theists as having the properties of immateriality and timelessness.
3. Conclusion; the statement "God exists" has no discernible meaning.

-oOo-
See also:-

Tuesday 19 March 2013

Militancy

It is possible to be a militant antitheist, as was Christopher Hitchens. It is no more possible to be a militant atheist than it is to be a militant non-stamp collector. ~ A C Grayling

Wednesday 13 March 2013

Early doubts

"Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life." ~ Protagoras 5 BCE.

Monday 11 March 2013

The Holy Parrot

If I choose to believe in an invisible parrot that perches on my shoulder and accompanies me everywhere whispering words of advice & comfort in my ear, I would be rightly regarded as delusional. If I claim this parrot exists outside time & space, created the Universe and is called "God" I'm apparently considered by the religiosa as completely normal.

Tuesday 5 March 2013

Isaac Asimov

"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature. It remains premature today"

Thursday 28 February 2013

Peter Millican on the KCA


Peter Millican is Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at Hertford College, University of Oxford. His primary interests include the philosophy of David Hume, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, epistemology, and moral philosophy.

(Interesting side-note
In 2008 and 2009 some Republican commentators advanced claims that US President Barack Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father was written or ghost-written by Bill Ayers. In a series of articles in American Thinker and WorldNetDaily, author Jack Cashill claimed that his own analysis of the book showed Ayers' writing style, and backed this up citing analyses by American researchers using Millican's Signature software. In late October 2008, shortly before the US Presidential election, US Congressman Chris Cannon and his brother-in-law attempted to hire Millican to prove Ayers' authorship using computer analysis. Millican refused after they would not assure him in advance that his results would be published regardless of the outcome.After some analysis Millican later criticized the claim, saying variously that he had "found no evidence for Cashill's ghostwriting hypothesis", that it was "unlikely"and that he felt "totally confident that it is false".)

WLC - Artful Dodger

Sunday 24 February 2013

Awkward questions for Theists - No.6

If in 100 billion years the Universe is cold, dark, lifeless what would this say about God? Is this his boredom limit? Was this the only cosmology model that would produce beings "in his image"? Or did he just get the fine-tuning slightly wrong? 

Supplementary question:- Is a God that can be bored, constrained in his creative abilities or error prone still a God?

Awkward questions for Theists - No.5

Saturday 23 February 2013

£250 prize for a Secular TftD

The ongoing irritation at the BBC's exclusion of secular voices from The Thought for the Day slot has spurred one the previous presidents of the National Secular Society, David Tribe, to sponsor a prize of £250 for the best secular Thought for the Day.

Further details:-
http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2013/02/win-gbp250--just-write-an-uplifting-secular-thought-for-the-day

'Silence in the House of God'



The film explores the charged issue of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, following a trail from the first known protest against clerical sexual abuse in the United States and all way to the Vatican.

Sunday 17 February 2013

Awkward questions for Theists - No.5

How are the rites of Mass or the Eucharist and various other religious practices distinguishable from those of witchcraft or voodoo?

Awkward question for Theists - No.1
Awkward question for Theists - No.2
Awkward question for Theists - No.3
Awkward question for Theists - No.4

Saturday 16 February 2013

Awkward questions for theists - No.4

Catholics, do your priests believe that by confessing their sins they will still get into heaven? Or are they really just as sceptical about the stuff they preach as those they condemn for atheism?

Awkward question for Theists - No.1
Awkward question for Theists - No.2
Awkward question for Theists - No.3

Thursday 14 February 2013

Just another Christian . . .

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.
 ~ Adolf Hitler, in his speech on 12 April 1922

Awkward questions for Theists - No.2

In its objective meaning, how is the expression "God created the Universe" distinguishable from "X created the Universe"?

Awkward questions for Theists - No.1

Wednesday 13 February 2013

Modern Christianity


A sceptic's guide to religious belief in the 21st Century

God is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being that created the Universe in a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago. We know this for certain because God specially created us so that we could say so. However God didn't need us to say so until about 13,695 billion years after the Big Bang; so he either carefully tuned the Big Bang initial conditions or, once having set things in motion, he dropped by every few billion years, firstly tweaking cosmological evolution to produce the Earth, and then biological evolution on Earth itself. God exists outside time and space yet manages to intervene in time & space. This is said to be "moving in mysterious ways". 

God, existing outside time & space, is of course invisible and undetectable yet we know at least something about him because it is said we were created "in his image". This doesn't mean we look like him, (don't be silly) so the fact that he is male needn't cause us females too much angst, especially as he is invisible.. Maybe it just means we think like him. Even so, perhaps as existence was boring,  he also made us so we would sometimes think naughty thoughts and do naughty things, and he knew all along that we would. He also wanted us to know that he, being God is much godlier, even infinitely godlier, than us and would therefore be forgiving us for all our naughties since he made us like that.

God signalled his forgiveness in a way that is rather difficult to understand. One first needs to know that God is composed of 3 parts (but definitely not a tribunal. that's a real no-no; this is strictly a Monotheistic religion we are talking about here). To make sure there is no confusion we call God a "Trinity" and the three parts are known as "God the Father"; "God the Daughter"; whoops, sorry "God the Son", and God the Holy Ghost. 

That having been established we can get back to God's scheme for forgiveness. By means we needn't go into here, (save that it involves the Holy Ghost and even some Christians have doubts about its veracity,) the God Trinity decides ( I assume it was a joint decision) that the Son bit should appear on Earth as a man called Jesus. On Earth in a backward, illiterate corner of the Middle East, his chief occupation would be wandering about telling everyone how wonderful God was, how they should behave, and throwing in the odd miracle to get attention. Being God he already knew of course that that would greatly annoy the existing religious hierarchy and ruling power and  would eventually get him horribly tortured and crucified to death. This however was all part of the Godly plan. By sacrificing himself to himself he apparently atoned for all the sins he knew the human race were going to commit from when he made them half a million years previously into the indefinite future. We are so lucky!

To absolutely clinch matters he got up from his tomb a few days later and walked about a bit before ascending finally into Heaven in a bright light. This greatly impressed his groupies who went on wandering about for years stirring up trouble until a later Roman Emperor for the sake of a quiet life decided to humour them. And the rest is real history. 

Tuesday 12 February 2013

Jim Jeffries . . .

. . . Australian, atheist, blasphemous, stand-up comic. Need I say more?

Thursday 7 February 2013

Awkward questions for Theists - No.1

Theists, what do you really know about your "God" other than that which has been passed down to you from the collective ancestral imagination and become nurtured by your own?

Any short pithy 'awkward questions' welcome. Please email to quedula@gmail.com

Wednesday 30 January 2013

Charles Bukowski


Henry Charles Bukowski, 1920 – 1994, was a German-born American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the ambience of his home city of Los Angeles and marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a "laureate of American lowlife". (Wiki)

Sunday 27 January 2013

The Sunday Bible slot . .

“This is what the Lord Almighty says... ‘Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’” ~ 1 Samuel 15:3

Sunday 20 January 2013

The Sunday slot . . .


"And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat." 

~ Leviticus 26:29 (King James Version)

Friday 18 January 2013

Still no news of God . .

 "One by one religious conceptions have been placed in the crucible of science, and thus far, nothing but dross has been found. A new world has been discovered by the microscope; everywhere has been found the infinite; in every direction man has investigated and explored and nowhere, in earth or stars, has been found the footstep of any being superior to or independent of nature. Nowhere has been discovered the slightest evidence of any interference from without.

These are the sublime truths that enabled man to throw off the yoke of superstition. These are the splendid facts that snatched the scepter of authority from the hands of priests."

A quote by Robert Ingersoll in 1872. . . Before Einstein, the electron microscope, the Hubble telescope and the Large Hadron Collider. . . .

Monday 14 January 2013

Quote of the Day

"When inventing a god, the most important thing is to claim it is invisible, inaudible and imperceptible in every way. Otherwise, people will become skeptical when it appears to no one, is silent and does nothing." ~ The Arrogant Atheist.

Simple Faith