— Edward Snowden
(Source: The New York Times)
Josh's blog
Posts tagged religion
“ I feel that religion, adopted purely, is ultimately representative of blindly making someone else’s beliefs your own. ”
“ [To] insist that children be raised with a fear of hell… that would be a dealbreaker for me. The idea that to be with someone who insisted upon instilling in our child a fear of eternal torment in hell - I view that as child abuse. ”
— Sam Harris
(Source: youtube.com)
“ The history of religion shows that God has commanded people to do all manner of selfish and cruel acts: massacres Midianites and abduct their women, stone prostitutes, execute homosexuals, burn witches, slay heretics and infidels, throw Protestants out of windows, withhold medicine from dying children, shoot up abortion clinics, hunt down Salman Rushdie, blow themselves up in marketplaces, and crash airplanes into skyscrapers. Recall that even Hitler thought he was carrying out the will of God. The recurrence of evil acts committed in the name of God shows that they are not random perversions. An omnipotent authority that no one can see is a useful backer for malevolent leaders hoping to enlist holy warriors. ”
— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate
“ [Religion is] cosmically hopeless, as is all the related masochism that goes with it – you’ve got to spend your entire life making up for the vermin you are. What is that if not degrading? We don’t do that to people. We say you may as well know you’re a primate, but take heart, primates are capable of great things. ”
— Christopher Hitchens
(Source: Guardian)
“ We need to blaspheme wherever necessary, publicly and without apology, criticize anyone who takes offense—and ridicule those who pretend to take offense. ”
— Sam Harris
(Source: samharris.org)
“ I use it a lot, but the point bears repeating: I don’t hold religion accountable for all the bad things that religious people have done. I hold it accountable for all the bad things they have done because of their religious beliefs. No doubt, there are atheists and secularists who have caused immense amounts of human suffering, but I know of no cases in which they did this because they valued empirical evidence over faith or found specific religious doctrines irrational. ”
— Sam Harris
(Source: samharris.org)
“ If there’s going to be a resurrection, an ingathering, if in the end all the injustices will be canceled, all tears dried, all the other promises kept, then why do you care what happens in this brief veil of tears? Why do the churches want power in the here and now? Why do they want to legislate like things for abortion or sexuality or morality? Why bother? I mean, isn’t it just as much the case, as Dostoyevsky says about atheism, that without God all things are possible, that with God all things are thinkable too? ”
— Christopher Hitchens
(Source: hitchensdebates.blogspot.co.uk)
“ Your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America, OK, who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus, on Death Row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he’s going to spend an eternity in Heaven after death, ok. One thing should be crystal clear to you: This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability. ”
— Sam Harris
(Source: reasonablefaith.org)
“ My suspicion is if you really ask the religious where do they want power and what’s the world they care about—the next one or this one—it’ll be this one every time because they too know perfectly well that this is the only life we’ve got. ”
— Christopher Hitchens
(Source: youtube.com)
