Category Archives: Daily Thought

Thoughts of the Day

Posted on Saturday March 31st, 2012 by | Comments Off on Thoughts of the Day

“I brought the case because I wanted to encourage toleration among my children. I certainly did not want teachers who have control over my children for at least eight hours over the day to . . . program them into any religious philosophy.”

— Ishmael Jaffree, acceptance speech for “Freethinker of the Year 1985,” awarded by the Freedom From Religion Foundation

“The greatest difference between the Humanist ethic and that of Christianity and the traditional religions is that it is entirely based on happiness in this one and only life and not concerned with a realm of supernatural immortality and the glory of God. Humanism denies the philosophical and psychological dualism of soul and body and contends that a human being is a oneness of mind, personality, and physical organism. Christian insistence on the resurrection of the body and personal immortality has often cut the nerve of effective action here and now, and has led to the neglect of present human welfare and happiness.”

— Corliss Lamont, “The Affirmative Ethics of Humanism,” The Humanist, March/April 1980

“I’m a nonbeliever. I don’t believe in the existence of a God. I don’t believe in the Christian dogma. I find it horrifyingly silly.The intolerance that flows from organized religion is the most dangerous thing on the planet.”

— Jane Rule, Brave Souls: Writers and Artists Wrestle with God, Love, Death and the Things that Matter by Douglas Todd (1996), cited by Celebrity Atheists website.

http://ffrf.org/day/view/03/28/

“Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.”
— John Fowles, quoted in The New York Times Book Review (May 31, 1998)

http://ffrf.org/day/view/03/31/

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Thought of The Day

Posted on Monday March 26th, 2012 by | Comments Off on Thought of The Day

“My respect for the Abrahamic religions went up in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th. The last vestige of respect for the taboo disappeared as I watched the ‘Day of Prayer’ in Washington Cathedral, where people of mutually incompatible faiths united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place: religion. It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say ‘Enough!’ Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.”

— “Time to Stand Up,” written for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Sept. 2001. See Dawkins’s Emperor Has No Clothes Award.

http://ffrf.org/day/view/03/26/

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Thoughts of the Day

Posted on Sunday March 25th, 2012 by | Comments Off on Thoughts of the Day

“. . . the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion . . .”

— Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated and co-written by Joel Barlow, U.S. Counsel to Algiers, ratified in 1797

http://ffrf.org/day/view/03/24/#joel-barlow

“It’s an incredible con job, when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations, with all their reward systems, don’t try to make it posthumous.”

— Gloria Steinem, interview with Annie Laurie Gaylor, The Feminist Connection, November 1980 (Madison, Wisconsin)

“From my point of view, I would ban religion completely. The reality is that organized religion doesn’t seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it’s not really compassionate.”

— Sir Elton John quoted in Observer Music Monthly Magazine in an interview with Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears, Nov. 2006

“During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of the Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects. We note its beginning; its progress will overthrow every existing form of these institutions; its end will be a regenerated world.”

— Woman, Church and State by Matilda Joslyn Gage (1893)

God Isn’t Real

A world filled with wonder, a cold, fathomless sky
A man’s life so meager, he can but wonder why
He cries out to Heaven its truth to reveal
The answer: only silence, for God isn’t real.

Go ask the starving millions under Stalin’s cruel reign
Go ask the child with cancer who eases her pain
Then go to your churches, if that’s how you feel
But don’t ask me to follow, for God isn’t real.

He forms in his image a weak and foolish man
Speaks to him in symbols that few understand
For a life of devotion, the death blow he deals
We’d owe Him only hatred, but God isn’t real.

Go tell the executioner of the power he can’t defy
Go tell his shackled victim of the mercy on high. . .
Then go to your churches, go beg, pray, and kneel,
But don’t ask me to follow, for God isn’t real.

No, no matter how He should be, God isn’t real.
— Robbie Fulks, “God Isn’t Real”

http://ffrf.org/day/view/03/25/

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Thought of The Day

Posted on Friday March 23rd, 2012 by | Comments Off on Thought of The Day

“If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.”
— Erich Fromm, Man for Himself (1947)

http://ffrf.org/day/view/03/23/#erich-fromm

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Thoughts of The Day

Posted on Wednesday March 21st, 2012 by | Comments Off on Thoughts of The Day

“I’m offended by [evangelical leaders’] actions, but I’m not offended by their opinion. They believe in a sky god who’s going to suck them up into the sky with a vacuum cleaner. What’s there to get offended by? That’s funny! That’s hilarious! Have at it, Hoss, I’d love to see it!”
— Cenk Uygur, speech to FFRF’s 2010 National Convention accepting the Emperor Has No Clothes Award

 

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
— Blaise Pascal, French philosopher, Pensees (1623-1662)

http://ffrf.org/day/view/03/21/#blaise-pascal-quote

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