“I believe that virtuous behavior is trivialized by carrot-and-stick schemes, such as promises of highly improbable rewards or punishments in an improbable afterlife.”
-Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), American novelist-satirist. Once called himself a “Christ-worshipping agnostic.” Succeeded Isaac Asimov in what Vonnegut called the “totally functionless capacity” of president of the American Humanist Association in 1992. The University of Chicago anthropology department inexplicably rejected his graduate thesis on the similarities between Cubist painting and nineteenth-century Native American uprisings, but later accepted his novel Cat’s Cradle and awarded him the degree. He said his study of anthropology “confirmed my atheism.” Once said everything one needs to know about good and evil was in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.