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On God

Started by Unbeliever, October 19, 2006, 02:34:06 pm

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Unbeliever

October 19, 2006, 02:34:06 pm Last Edit: March 09, 2016, 04:42:28 pm by Unbeliever
QuoteDB::God



Quote from: Unbeliever
A loving and forgiving God,
seems more than just a little odd,
when I think of all the punishments He'll mete,
and threaten even worse, replete
with hell on Earth before we die,
then eternity to fry and cry.

Quote from: Augustine of HippoGod always is, nor has He been and is not, nor is but has not been, but as He never will not be; so He never was not.


Quote from: Rev. Webster "Kit" HowellWhen we try to put God into the position of being a puppeteer who either pulls strings to make events happen or chooses to sit back, the suffering and evil in this world do become God's responsibility, and we can rightly accuse God of being a dysfunctional parent. But then, this is a child's view of God. Perhaps it's time we realized that we are not just children of the universe. We are also adults of the universe. Instead of complaining about the evil in the world, or sloughing it off to 'God's will' and 'judgment day,' why don't we grow up, access the divine within us (our thinking, our reason, our compassion, our love), and do something about it?


Quote from: John AdamsGod has infinite wisdom, goodness, and power; he created the universe; his duration is eternal, a parte ante and a parte post. His presence is as extensive as space. What is space? An infinite spherical vacuum. He created this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory; and with the deliberate design of making nine tenths of our species miserable for ever for his glory. This is the doctrine of Christian theologians, in general, ten to one. Now, my friend, can prophecies or miracles convince you or me that infinite benevolence, wisdom, and power, created, and preserves for a time, innumerable millions, to make them miserable for ever, for his own glory? Wretch! What is his glory? Is he ambitious? Does he want promotion? Is he vain, tickled with adulation, exulting and triumphing in his power and the sweetness of his vengeance? Pardon me, my Maker, for these awful questions. My answer to them is always ready. I believe no such things. My adoration of the author of the universe is too profound and too sincere. The love of God and his creation -- delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existence -- though but an atom, a molecule organ- ique in the universe -- are my religion.


Quote from: Peter O'TooleWhen did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.


Quote from: Richard Dawkins
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.


Quote from: James WatsonIn all honesty, if scientists don't play God, who will?


Quote from: Lazarus Long, a Heinlein characterThe most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all of history.


Quote from: Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'HolbachIf we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.


Quote from: Gary CohnWhen a society worships a god that kills babies, as the god of the Bible does, then religious terrorism should come as no surprise


Quote from: Carl SaganIf a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.


Quote from: ApostateLois, at infidelguy.comThe Virgin Mary in a pee stain, Jesus in a waffle, Allah's name on a fish...the gods really are weak and useless, aren't they? If I had the powers of a god, I'd be using them to feed children, cure diseases, and stop war, not carve my name on an egg shell.


Quote from: Thomas JeffersonThe Christian God can be easily pictured as virtually the same as the many ancient Gods of past civilizations. The Christian God is a three-headed monster; cruel, evil and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three-headed beastlike god, one only needs to look at the caliber of the people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.


Quote from: Edward AnhaltGod is an infantile fantasy, which was necessary when man did not understand what lightning was.


Quote from: Percy Blythe ShellyGod is a vengeful, pitiless and almighty fiend...A veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers.


Quote from: Herbert J. MullerThis doctrine of the material efficacy of prayer reduces the Creator to a cosmic bellhop of a not very bright or reliable kind.


Quote from: Harry Emerson FosdickGod is not a cosmic bell-boy for whom we can press a button to get things.


Quote from: Bertrand RussellControl of god is the essence of any religion. Through incantations, spells, prayers, penences (offering suffering in return for influence), payment and the surrender of power to the spiritual authorities who claim to control god,  we hope to gain a little of this control ourselves. And to the extent that we control others, we become little gods in another way.


Quote from: E. M. McDonald, [i]Design Argument Fallacies[/i]If such a God did exist, he could not be a beneficient God, such as the Christians posit. What effrontery is it that talks about the mercy and goodness of nature in which all animals devour animals, in which every mouth is a slaughter-house and every stomach a tomb!


Quote from: Robert G. IngersollThe 'Plan' of Nature I detest. Competition, and struggle, the survival of the strongest, of those with the sharpest claws and longest teeth. Life feeding on life with ravenous, merciless hunger-every leaf a bettlefield-war everywhere.


Quote from: Elizabeth Cady StantonHow anyone, in view of the protracted sufferings of the race, can invest the laws of the universe with a tender loving fatherly intelligence, watching, guiding and protecting humanity, is to me amazing. I see nothing but immutable inexorable law, grinding the ignorant to powder.


Quote from: Claude MontefioreHow anyone can believe in eternal punishment...or in any soul which God has made being' lost', and also believe in the love, nay, even in the justice, of God, is a mystery indeed.


Quote from: Mark TwainStrange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly ind hysterically insane like all dreams: a God who could make good children as well as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes ,yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether devine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!


Quote from: Mikhail BakuninThe idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.


Quote from: Mikhail BakuninGod, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.
"Some say God is living there [in space]. I was looking around very attentively, but I did not see anyone there. I did not detect either angels or gods....I don't believe in God. I believe in man - his strength, his possibilities, his reason."
Gherman Titov, Soviet cosmonaut, in The Seattle Daily Ti