Then - Quotes
When you`re scared, [...] when life is hurting you, then you`re going to see what you`re really made of.
If a man calls himself priest but then demands your entire purse for entry into his cult, he is a false prophet.
My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
I`m probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don`t think anyone really knows. You`ll either find out or not when you get there, until then there`s no point thinking about it.
The religious reply to the moral sceptic`s question, `Why should I behave in such-and-such a way?` is simply `Because God requires it of you.` But this is merely a polite way of saying, `Because you`ll be punished if you don`t. [...] But a threat is never a logical justification for acting one way rather than another. If there exists a deity with the punitive vengefulness of the Judaeo-Christian variety, then it might be prudent to obey it, and thus avoid the flames of hell; but the threat of punishment is not a principled reason for obedience.
Believers unhesitatingly attribute every good thing in the world to God - and then respond to bad things by saying, "God works in mysterious ways." If God`s ways are so mysterious, and we can`t begin to understand his thinking behind tsunamis and drought and pediatric cancer, then what makes you think you understand his intentions when it comes to pretty sunsets or cute puppies or helping you find the peanut butter?
I`m angry that when people run for political office in the United States, it`s considered legitimate to grill them about their employment background, their positions on legislation, their positions on social issues, the taxes they`ve paid [...]... but it`s considered invasive and intolerant to ask if they believe in talking snakes, demonic possession, magic underwear, magic crackers that turn into the flesh of their god, an Earth that was created 6,000 years ago, or a god who put himself on Earth in human form and then sacrificed himself to himself to atone for sins that other people committed and to save humanity from the punishment he himself was planning to dole out. If someone is going to make decisions about science funding, emerging medical technology, our educational system, and so on... I think it matters if they believe any of that shit, and I bloody well want to know about it.
Believers say that the entire unimaginable hugeness of the Universe was made specifically for the human race - when atheists, by contrast, say that humanity is a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, an infinitesimal eyeblink in the vastness of time and space - and then, [...] believers accuse atheists of being arrogant.
Believers say they can know the truth - the greatest truth of all about the nature of the Universe, namely the source of all existence - simply by sitting quietly and listening to their hearts... and then accuse atheists of being arrogant. And this attitude isn`t just arrogant towards atheists. It`s arrogant towards people of other religions who have sat just as quietly, listened to their hearts with just as much sincerity, and come to completely opposite conclusions about God and the soul and the Universe.
Invoking a deity doesn`t solve the problem of complexity; it introduces a new problem. If all complex things really do require an intelligent creator, then why is that creator himself not bound to the same rule? Would that complex deity not require an even more complex creator, and so on, for infinity?
If things go the believer`s way, it`s a sign of God`s grace and intervention; if they don`t, then God moves in mysterious ways, and maybe he has a lesson to teach that we don`t understand, and it`s not up to us to question his will. No matter what happens, it can be twisted to prove that the belief is right. That is a sure sign of a bad argument.
There are actresses who build themselves, and then there are actresses who are built by others.
I won`t make a bucket list because I`m so afraid that I`ll die and then people will find my bucket list and be, like, "Oh, she didn`t get to do that."
If a `religion` is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.