#theism

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments. ↗

— Thomas Pynchon

#death #life #death

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess. ↗

— Marcel Duchamp

#chess #god #language #life #religion

I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#atheist #god #religion #imagination

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#daughters #death #fatherhood #fathers #god

The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#imagination

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#antitheism #atheism #new-atheism #skepticism #inspirational

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds. ↗

— Neal Stephenson

#christianity #church #intelligence #intelligence

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheism #belief #fantasy #god #humility

As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers. ↗

— Robert G. Ingersoll

#intelligence

Atheism Is Rare ?! so is intelligence ↗

— Sherif Gaber

#atheist #intelligence #rare #yamirasu #intelligence