Four Atheist Quotes That Hit Home.

Originally posted by randyvs

you mean like a CHERRY PICKER.

core of light?

[edit on 13-7-2009 by randyvs]

Yea I´m deff NO cherry/picker

Core of Light, is for me the ´beginning´ (Biblical term) or the ´big bang´ (scientific view).

BEFORE there was a difference between Dark and Light, there was ‘Sound’, Vibration, Frequency.

I honestly believe that in ‘the core’ ALL religions do come from the same Source. It’s the rituals and later on they ‘writings’ from people living in different area’s of the World and living in different Cultures, that finally made so many differences between Religions.

ALL was and ever will be, everything else is done by man (and females).

Originally posted by Dr.Venkman
Some people who label themselves as an atheist may find that they're beliefs are closer to an agnostic point of view Agnosticism , or even Ietsism

Up until a year ago i told people i was an atheist, however after doing a little reading it became clear to me that agnosticism summed me up much more accurately.

On that note, an agnostic quote:

"Is there a God? I do not know. Is man immortal? I do not know. One thing I do know, and that is, that neither hope, nor fear, belief, nor denial, can change the fact. It is as it is, and it will be as it must be." - Robert G. Ingersoll

Very nice quote!

It’s being an Atheist not quite the opposite from being an Agnost?

An Atheist doesn’t believe in God nor in any Mythical Power or Paranormal Phenomena.

An Agnost is more of a Philosopher who doesn’t say there is NO God neither that there IS a God. So an Agnost is someone ‘who doesn’t know’. Someone who is still on the fence.

I became a Multi-religious somebody from being an Agnost at first. Why? Because I had too many experiences showing me there was simply no way of denying there was ‘more’.

Darwin was an Agnost too, one of quotes:

“"Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."


reply to post by 5thElement

Originally posted by LoneGunMan
"Those that confuse religion with God are truly lost."
~LoneGunan

I think a lot of the quotes I read in the OP are referring to religion and not God. Definitively not spirituality.

God is not controlling nor does God believe in religion. God is. As we are.

I agree with you, except from the sentence “Definitely not spirituality’.

There are many many people who confuse spirituality with a believe in (a or more?) God(s).

Isn’t Spirituality the search for one’s Deeper Self? The search for connection to a Reality beyond the Physical World?

reply to post by randyvs


If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
~Sydney J. Harris

For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
~Author Unknown

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.
~Albert Einstein


I wonder if I am suggesting that randyvs is an angry person.

Originally posted by jay.mo

your supposed to pray to god in sincerity. if i were him i wouldnt just answer your prayers because of vanity. why would he just answer your prayers for things like clearing up your acne. when the only reason your doing it is for the acne and not the personal connection with god.

he was wrong on his quote every one deserves to believe in god but its your fault for not believing. atheists just dont know.

oh and to jaxon roberts quote. believing is harder than not believing and there for not for the weakminded but the people who are truely willing to do the harderthings like believing.

Why should he answer any prayers? Especially when he apparantly has a plan for everyone... surely if there's a plan then why would God ever intervene when that plan is being carried out?
And yea it would seem silly if he answered a prayer for someone who wanted to get rid of spots or something... but then again arent the vast majority of prayers selfish? And even the one's that arent... world peace, no more wars etc, they dont get answered either do they?

For the record, Im not an athiest. I couldnt put all my faith on there being a God, or there not being one.. at the end of the day athiests and religious people both believe things they havent actually seen for themselves, and what they've read in books. And both sides are flawed.
Although to be fair I do lean more towards atheism I think. Science doesnt claim to know everything... it doesnt claim to know exactly how we came about, or even how large the universe is... Whereas religion seems to pass the buck on, saying if we dont know the answer then God does, and we cant comprehend it so thats that.

It seems a little disturbing that God would create us, give us the intelligence to question the world around us in a logical manner, the need to explore & learn new things... but then ask us to repress those ablities/instincts.



[edit on 13-7-2009 by Bluebelle]

Very inspiring quotes. I loved them all!

Here's one that's a good one. "Jesus Christ is like Santa Claus for adults"

Well maybe that's more of a bumper sticker but I LOVE IT!

I'm loving the santa for adults.

One of my faves from Dawkins: "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

Originally posted by Bluebelle

Originally posted by jay.mo

your supposed to pray to god in sincerity. if i were him i wouldnt just answer your prayers because of vanity. why would he just answer your prayers for things like clearing up your acne. when the only reason your doing it is for the acne and not the personal connection with god.

he was wrong on his quote every one deserves to believe in god but its your fault for not believing. atheists just dont know.

oh and to jaxon roberts quote. believing is harder than not believing and there for not for the weakminded but the people who are truely willing to do the harderthings like believing.

Why should he answer any prayers? Especially when he apparantly has a plan for everyone... surely if there's a plan then why would God ever intervene when that plan is being carried out?
And yea it would seem silly if he answered a prayer for someone who wanted to get rid of spots or something... but then again arent the vast majority of prayers selfish? And even the one's that arent... world peace, no more wars etc, they dont get answered either do they?

For the record, Im not an athiest. I couldnt put all my faith on there being a God, or there not being one.. at the end of the day athiests and religious people both believe things they havent actually seen for themselves, and what they've read in books. And both sides are flawed.
Although to be fair I do lean more towards atheism I think. Science doesnt claim to know everything... it doesnt claim to know exactly how we came about, or even how large the universe is... Whereas religion seems to pass the buck on, saying if we dont know the answer then God does, and we cant comprehend it so thats that.

It seems a little disturbing that God would create us, give us the intelligence to question the world around us in a logical manner, the need to explore & learn new things... but then ask us to repress those ablities/instincts.




[edit on 13-7-2009 by Bluebelle]

lets start that it is all part of his plan because part of his plan is to intervene but if you dont try and here it its your problem but he made certain laws pertaining about the human race he gave us free will. but gave us consequences for not doing the right thing. thats why we have the bible and the qurran to remind us of those laws so we know what to do, and for the not putting all the eggs in one basket the indecisive burn in hell.
some of us do know what happens people that are good enough to god get to see special things that god allows them too. thats for people that truely believe in god.

[edit on 13-7-2009 by jay.mo]

Originally posted by barksplinter

"I don't think I'm superior. Just less violent. I don't know many wars that were founded on the ideals of atheism."


AS POSTED,
ATHEISM HAS KILLED 1/4 TO 1/3 BILLION PEOPLE IN THE LAST 100 YEARS; THE ONLY 100 YEARS ATHEISM HAS BEEN A PLAYER ON THE WORLD SCENE.
ATHEISM HAS KILLED MORE PEOPLE IN THE LAST 100 YEARS THAN ALL OF THE WARS IN ALL OF HISTORY. (Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao just for a start)

SEEMS TO ME THAT MAN HAS A BIG PROBLEM.
ATHEISM APPEARS TO BE LESS EFFECTIVE AT LIMITING MAN'S BIG PROBLEM.....
A PROPENSITY TOWARD EVIL AND DESTRUCTION.

You can't be serious... are you actually suggesting that WWI, WWII, and others mentioned above were fought in the name of atheism?! Just because their leaders didn't subscribe to religion, doesn't mean they killed for it. Their ambitions were political, unlike...
the Crusades (all 9 of them including the CHILDREN'S CRUSADE)
French Wars of Religion
Thirty Years War
Taiping Rebellion
Second Sudanese Civil War
Indo-Pakistani Partition of 1947
Indian Rebellion of 1857
Yellow Scarves Rebellion
Five Pecks of Rice Rebellion
White Lotus Rebellion
Sri Lankan Civil War
Jewish-Roman Wars
Arab-Israeli War
Sikh uprising (1982-91) ()
Saxon Wars
All Persian wars for Zoroastrianism of the Sassanid era


Here's a source supporting my stance, because you can't seem to provide one (you also can't seem to find your capslock button...) en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by jay.mo


Can you clarify what you mean by laws? Ten commandments, or just generally everything thats in the bible?

God sounds like he's got issues! Loves us all, will happily let murderers, rapists etc into heaven as long as they are sorry, is happy to give second chances out... but if someone is generally a good person, is indecisive due to whatever reason, then they burn in hell. What happens if you die and then are like 'crap, he does exist... sorry!'. Will God just have no sympathy and take the attitude of 'whatever!' while your just swimming around in the lake of fire trying to stop the demons from tearing you apart?

[edit on 13-7-2009 by Bluebelle]

[edit on 13-7-2009 by Bluebelle]

reply to post by Bluebelle


lol. By asking your question honestly, you have also (and possibly unintentionally) pointed out how incredibly ridiculous it sounds.

I went through Lutheran catechism, so I can confidently say that the giant, magical man with the flowing white beard who lives in the sky won't care that you're reanimated soul/body will burn in a sea of fire for all eternity while being chased around by monsters in the center of the earth, just because you didn't believe he exists.

I hope that clear up any confusion you may have.

reply to post by Avarus


Oh I know how ridiculous it sounds.. thats my whole point!

Ah well, Ive always preferred warmer weather anyway

Histophernes--

It is very difficult to know whether Thomas Jefferson would have been considered a 'Christian' in any meaningul sense if he were alive today.

He was certainly not a 'Pauline Christian', in that in his own cut and pasted 'Jefferson Bible' version, he deliberatley removed all the words of Saul of Tarsus from the text---since it dawned on him (and other thinkers like him in his own day) that Saul never actually physically met R. Yehoshua bar Yosef the Galilean Nazir ('Jesus') in the flesh, only in 'dreams and visions' like my cook--and moreover Saul hated the original disciples of 'Jesus' whom he called 'those so called Pillars of the Churches' when referring to Shimeon bar Yonah, ha Kephah ('Peter') and Yakkov bar Yosef, aka James (read Galatians Chapter 2).

So Jefferson exised all of Paul's writings (and the forged Petrine correspondence, and the Greek Epistle of James, the brother of 'Jesus' and the Book of Reveleation (aka Apocalypse of Yohanon the Levite, whoever he was, written in AD 69 during the 1st Jewish Revolt against Rome) from his 'bible' and just collected all the 'logia' (sayings/oracles) of R. Yehoshua from the 4 Greek canonical Gospels he could lay he hands on (at least Jefferson could read Koine Greek fluently--unlike 99.99% of all lay Christians today who don't bother to learn the gospel material very closely---we have a copy of one of Jefferson's Greek Lexicons, wherein he made several dozen grammatical corrections to the print in his own copy)

Jefferson also excised all the 'miracle stories' in the gospels (e.g. the virgin birth, which he did not believe in, or the walking on the water, which he did not believe in, or the resurrection, which he did not believe in--so he cut those contradictory endings to the canonical Greek gospels out altogether in his 'Jefferson Bible'. [He did all this cutting and pasting in 1804/1805 at nights while he was serving as President of the US, incidentally.)

Most persons who style themselves as 'Christian', today believe in virgin births and resurrections and loaf multiplying and water-walking and daemon excorsing (and talking snakes, come to think of it), but Jefferson was a quasi-masonically influenced rationalist Deist of the late 18th and early 19th century (1743-1826) who tended to eschew the miraculous and tended rather to concentrate on 'substantive' moral teaching of R. Yehoshua bar Yosef--that is, as much as he could given the limited information exchange at the time (for example, Jefferson did not have access to our currently patched up Dead Sea Scroll corpus, esp. the fragments found after 1946 in caves 1-11 with all the contradictory versions of the Old Testament lying side by side (e.g. Jeremish and Isaiah) to say nothing of all those EXTRA books not in our 'bibles' today e.g. the Scroll of the Words of Henoch and the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs that R. Yehoshua quoted from so often in the Greek canonical gospels) --

I think Jefferson would have relished the Internet had it existed in his day !

reply to post by badmedia


I'm really sorry, but was it the first quote? Because I still don't know what you're talking about.

(I'm not trying to be a pest or anything, I really am confused)

Whether you believe in a religion or are an atheism or agnostic it's pretty much the exact same thing for 99% of people. It is a belief system that comforts them but has no real relationship to the true salvation of their soul. The subject by in large is a pointless argument. Somebody that takes comfort believing they are right in saying there is no god is just as close if not closer to the Supreme Being than someone that takes comfort believing in god or the bible or the koran doing prays n times a day. It's all pretend and hypocrisy for most just minor variations.

I declare myself agnostic, although I used to be like you and was an atheist. As the quote goes on the first page:

"a wise man changes his mind frequently, a fool never."

Perhaps that will say something to those of you that absolutely deny a god is capable of existing.

[edit on 13-7-2009 by Deus Ex Machina 42]

[edit on 13-7-2009 by Deus Ex Machina 42]

reply to post by Alaskan Man


What about for the person like my self, who believes in God, Jesus, etc 100%, but feels that science is valid as well.

Also, Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers were not atheists. They believed in an inactive God who did not intervene in human affairs.

This is the foundation stone to western liberal views. The belief that God will not help children who need to learn for their own how to do things. The belief that Man has to re-earn his position in Eden through the sweat of his own brow. That nobody is coming down from the clouds to help you, because God sent Jesus to open the door for you to help yourself.


This is the belief to which I subscribe to, even though I wonder if God might do something.

Originally posted by Amagnon
I am an agnostic because atheism is a set of rigid beliefs, in the same way religion is a set of beliefs.

...atheism simply is a non-belief in a deity - thats it... theres no dogma, no rules, no set of rigid beliefs... a lot of people try to add to what atheism is, especially since the web came online, but nothing is safe from tweekers and thats just how it goes around here...

reply to post by Alaskan Man


"We don't have a word for not believing in Zeus, which is to say we are all atheists in respect to Zeus. And we don't have a word for not being an astrologer."

"I'll be very happy when we retire the term "atheist," and I think it is a word destined for disuse because if atheists win and we all just achieve a level of intellectual honesty where we are no longer going to pretend to be certain about things we are not certain about, then we'll just be open-minded, rational, scientifically inclined people who will talk about spiritual experiences honestly, talk about ethics honestly, talk about the shape of the universe honestly, and it won't be a word." -Sam Harris

source: Religion & Ethics. NewsWeekly

There's no reason science and God cant co-exist IMHO. Its impossible to dismiss either of the ideas completely. Especially with the things we're starting to learn about the universe i.e. dark matter, dark energy... and that weird dark flow stuff - which incidentally I think is actually terrifying, we could be heading towards some insanely huge black hole!
And add all that to the various theories that are arising about possible other dimensions, it just goes to show that we still have a lot to learn.

It might well be impossible to ever determine whether we were created or not, especially seeing as we dont even know what our universe is, or even how big it is... but think how far we've come in the last 1000 years or so, its absolutely mind boggling to think where we might be in another 1000 years!

Originally posted by riddle6
reply to post by badmedia

 

I'm really sorry, but was it the first quote? Because I still don't know what you're talking about.

(I'm not trying to be a pest or anything, I really am confused)

If you look at this thread and review it. You will notice that the arguments made against god aren't actually based on the topic of god at all. Rather, all the arguments against god are made verses the people who claim to do things in the name of god.

Like all the wars someone mentioned. Those are simply things people have done in the name of god. It's not a valid argument towards if god is real or not.

If someone went around doing bad things in your name, would it be fair to judge you based on that? It wouldn't be at all. But that is what people are doing in this thread(and you quote had it as well).

Just don't think it's right to decide issues about "God" based on the actions of those who claim to be about or of him. Anyone can make such a claim.

I often point out all the killings religion has done. All the time I point it out - to show how ridiculous organized religion and those who claim to be authorities in the name of god really are. However, that only says things about them, not about god.

So my reply was in reference to your quote doing this. Using what people do as a means of disproving god and such. Isn't a valid argument. If it was, then I can just go around doing bad things in your name, as a way of making you look bad/discredit you, and that wouldn't be right at all.

Religion does not equal God. God does not need religion.

reply to post by Sigismundus


Your post was gourmet. I devoured it. Thank you so much for educating us on such an amazing man.

I never understood what the Jefferson Bible was other than that every member of Congress or Senate, I forget which, receives one.

It it great to see someone who contains such a vast amount of knowledge on the subject share it. Thank you very much.

I too think Jefferson would find the Internet as it currently exists almost entirely free from censorship completely amazing.