Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the Christian majority’s” private liking.
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.
Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?
More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.
most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.
Ama-a, ama-a, ama-a. Se ela favorecer-te, ama-a. Se ela ferir-te, ama-a. Se ela te despedaçar o coração, que à medida que envelhecer e ficar mais forte, sangrará mais, ama-a, ama-a, ama-a!
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.
No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.
If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?
Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.
