#lists

John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's. ↗

— David Craig

#atheists #biologists #friedrich-engels #god #humanists

It is the philosophers, theologians, and evangelists who are said to be filled with pride and bigotry due to the strong convictions that they represent. On the contrary, teachings can be either taken or dismissed; whereas voting is the only thing the average person can do to force everyone to live how they would prefer. A simple vote is among the largest yet most acceptable forms of bigotry, and that is because people play the card only when they feel that in doing so it conveniences themselves. ↗

— Criss Jami

#bigotry #convenience #convictions #evangelists #hypocrisy

The keeping of lists was for November an exercise kin to repeating of a rosary. She considered it neither obsessive nor compulsive, but a ritual, an essential ordering of the world into tall, thin jars containing perfect nouns. Enough nouns connected one to the other create a verb, and verbs had created everything, had skittered across the face of the void like pebbles across a frozen pond. She had not created a verb herself, but the cherry-wood cabinet in the hall contained book after book, jar after jar, vessel upon vessel, all brown as branches, and she had faith. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#lists #words #writing #faith

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#press #men

I love the ritual of drawing up lists, and there's something wonderfully satisfying about ticking tasks off. ↗

— Shaida Kazie Ali

#satisfaction #tasks #love

Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets. ↗

— Gerald Priestland

#belong #classes #guilty #gutter #journalists

Every poll shows that most journalists are Democrats. ↗

— Sally Quinn

#every #journalists #most #poll #shows

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth. ↗

— Reinhold Niebuhr

#close #club #come #could #cynicism

In short, it is not that evolutionary naturalists have been less brazen than the scientific creationists in holding science hostage, but rather that they have been infinitely more effective in getting away with it. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#been #brazen #creationists #effective #evolutionary

To philosophical materialists God is no more than an idea in the human mind, and not a very important idea. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#human #human mind #idea #important #materialists