February 2011
57 posts
Yay! The illusion of upward mobility!
prophetnoise:
A unionized public employee, a Tea Partier, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table sits a plate of a dozen cookies. The CEO reaches across, takes 11 cookies, looks at the tea partier, and says, “Look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.” —M. Luziett
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.28.11
“One last irony is that early Christians were sometimes accused of being atheists. Like Muslims and Jews, the early Christians refused to worship human images of God.”
-Jim Rigby, pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, which in 2006 let a professional atheist, Robert Jensen, become a member.
The Quotable Atheist
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.25.11
“Putting a different spin on Flag Day, a seven-year-old atheist Wednesday urged public-school students to refuse to recite the Pledge of Allegiance until the words ‘under God’ are excised…’When kids are forced to say, “under God,” it makes them think that atheists are bad people,’ Ricky Sherman said at a news conference. ‘Atheists are not bad...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.24.11
“There is something really pathetic in the statement that the universe was created for man… There are 300,000 million stars [in our galaxy] alone [whose total weight is] equal to about 270,000 million suns the size of our own. This is the raw material, the amazing cosmic ‘batter,’ from which our planetary system came… It is like mixing a batter of dough as big as the...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.23.11
“Christianity has succeeded in convincing many people that misery incurred through sacrifice is a mark of virtue… One that invests in this life, so to speak, and collects interest in the next. Fortunately for Christianity, the dead cannot return for a refund.”
-George H. Smith (1949- ), American libertarian thinker. Author of Atheism, The Case Against God (1979) and Atheism, Ayn...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.22.11
“For me, religion is serious business — a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.”
-Katha Pollitt (1949- ), American poet and columnist for the Nation. Outspoken feminist and atheist; named “Freethought Heroine” in 1995 by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Number 74 in 100 People Who Are Screwing Up...
“As Republicans succeeded in serving their corporate and ideological taskmasters...”
– House Votes to De-Fund Planned Parenthood 240-185 (via ladymisskate)
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.18.11
“The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.”
-Robert Anton Wilson (1932- ), American writer/philosopher/cult figure. Best known for The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), a humorous examination of American conspiracy paranoia mixing fact and...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.17.11
“[Clergy are] idle vermin who two or three times a day perform in the most slovenly manner a service which they think useless, but call their duty.”
-Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), English author and pioneer feminist. Decided, after an arduous youth, to become “the first of a new genus” — a female intellectual. Mother of Mary Shelley.
The Quotable Atheist
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.16.11
“My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: KEEP HIM OR HER AS FAR AWAY FROM A CHURCH AS YOU CAN.”
-Frank Zappa (1940-1993), American avant-garde comic proto punk jazz Dadaist Surrealist rock composer-guitarist-singer-record producer and detester of labels. Accordingly, objects named in his honor include an asteroid, a gene, a fish, a jellyfish, an...
Coolest Wife Ever
Dad: I sent your mom flowers at work today, she sent me 2 large pizzas. How cool.
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.15.11
“Science is reductionistic in that it tries to explain the unknown in terms of the known. Contrariwise, religious explanations frequently explain the unknown in terms of the even less known — the old fallacy of ‘ignotum per ignotius’ [‘unknown by means of the more unknown’].”
-Frank Zindler, American science writer. Spokesperson for American Atheists, editor of...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.14.11
“Modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not Christianity.”
-John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), English philosopher and economist. Began writing for newspapers in his teens. Among his first efforts was a defense of a religious doubter who had been jailed six years for “blasphemous libel.” Not a full-blooded atheist, but a good, non-God-fearing agnostic.
The...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.11.11
“When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God’s favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. Dave Hume, a believer, made this point in a very poignant way, when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.”
...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.10.11
“Religion drove planes into those buildings. It’s amazing how good religion is at mobilizing people to do awful, murderous things. There is a dark side to it, and anyone who loves religious experience, including me, better begin to own that there is a serious shadow side to this thing.”
-Brad Hirschfeld, Orthodox rabbi. Vice president of the National Jewish Center for Learning...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.9.11
“The theist sometimes rebukes the pleasure-seeker by saying: ‘We were not put here to enjoy ourselves; man has a sterner purpose than that.’ The atheist’s conception of man is, however, still sterner and nobler than that of the theist. … According to the atheist…there is no one to look after us but ourselves, and we shall certainly be defeated [by eventual...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.8.11
“It has always puzzled me that so many people have taken it for granted that God favors those who believe in him. Isn’t it possible that the actual God is a scientific God who has little patience with beliefs founded on faith rather than evidence?”
-Raymond Smullyan (1919- ), American mathematician/logician/philosopher. Started out as a stage magician. Author of popular books on...
After a bloated Super Bowl in Dallas, it's time to... →
wilwheaton:
For absurdity, how about those four Navy F-18s flying over the stadium - with its retractable roof closed? Everybody inside could only see the planes on the stadium’s video screens. It was strictly a two-second beauty shot. Know what it cost taxpayers? I’ll tell you: $450,000. (The Navy justifies the expense by saying it’s good for recruiting.)
Emphasis mine. It is disgusting and...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.7.11
“Christianity, above all, consoles; but there are naturally happy souls who do not need consolation. Consequently, Christianity begins by making such souls unhappy, for otherwise it would have no power over them.”
-André Gide (1869-1951), French author. Nobel Prize for Literature, 1947. The Catholic Church placed his works on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1952.
The Quotable...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.4.11
“Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.”
-Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German-Jewish poet. Converted to Protestantism in order to teach university, one of many professions then closed to Jews. His leadership in the Young Germany movement led to his books being banned in Germany. In 1933 they were burned. The above quote is engraved on the plaza in Berlin...
Quotable Atheist quote of the day 2.3.11
“The arguments for God’s existence have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints.”
-William James (1842-1910), American psychologist/philosopher. Brother of novelist Henry James. Author...
