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All reports are that you`re a fun gi.
Bertrand Russell: In conclusion, there is a marvelous anecdote from the occasion of Russell's ninetieth birthday that best serves to summarize his attitude toward God and religion. A London lady sat next to him at this party, and over the soup she suggested to him that he was not only the world's most famous atheist but, by this time, very probably the world's oldest atheist. "What will you do, Bertie, if it turns out you're wrong?" she asked. "I mean, what if -- uh -- when the time comes, you should meet Him? What will you say?" Russell was delighted with the question. His bright, birdlike eyes grew even brighter as he contemplated this possible future dialogue, and then he pointed a finger upward and cried, "Why, I should say, 'God, you gave us insufficient evidence.'" Al Seckel, in Preface to Bertrand Russell on God and Religion
Clarence Darrow: I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose.
Clarence Darrow: I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means.
Scopes trial, Dayton, Tennessee, July 13, 1925
Dennis McKinsey: If God kills, lies, cheats, discriminates, and otherwise behaves in a manner that puts the Mafia to shame, that's okay, he's God. He can do whatever he wants. Anyone who adheres to this philosophy has had his sense of morality, decency, justice and humaneness warped beyond recognition by the very book that is supposedly preaching the opposite.
newsletter Biblical Errancy
Don Hirschberg: Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
Emma Goldman: The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
Francis Bacon: Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
G.K. Chesterton: I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.
George Santayana: My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
Gore Vidal: I'm a born-again atheist.
Henny Youngman: I once wanted to become an atheist but I gave up . . . they have no holidays.
Jane Wagner: One thing I have no worry about is whether God exists. But it has occurred to me that God has Alzheimer's and has forgotten we exist.
The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe, performed by Lily Tomlin, 1986
Noam Chomsky: How do I define God? I don't.... People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don't. That's why you haven't found my "thoughts on this [for you] criticaI question." I have none, because I see no need for them (apart from the -- often extremely interesting and revealing -- inquiry into human culture an history).
Pearl S. Buck: When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.
Pearl S. Buck: Believing in gods always causes confusion.
Protagoras: As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist.
Quentin Crisp: When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
Robert Ingersoll: Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.
Roman Tombstone: Do not pass by my epitaph, traveler.
But having stopped, listen and learn, then go your way.
There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon,
No caretaker Aiakos, no dog Cerberus.
All we who are dead below
Have become bones and ashes, but nothing else.
I have spoken to you honestly, go on, traveler,
Lest even while dead I seem loquacious to you.
Sir Julian Huxley: Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable ... and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.
The New Divinity
Susan B. Anthony: I tell them I have worked 40 years to make the W.S. platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon.
on the Women's Suffrage platform
Thomas Jefferson: Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
Wendy Kaminer: I don't spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don't consider that a relevant question. It's unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can't worry about.
I didn't know where to put this story, but I think it might fit well attached to this comment. I'm sure our wonderful God would not have endorsed this behaviour, but the God of the Middle East obviously does. Sickening.If there is a god he is responsible for religion which has killed millions of believers and non believers so I think he is telling us to believe in evolution and get on with life and forget religion. For us there is only this planet Earth and maybe in the future the universe.
Teen pays ultimate price for love
Comment by Paul Kent
May 24, 2007 07:00am
A YOUNG love, two ancient religions ... a woman dying in a pool of her own blood after a very public stoning. This is the modern Iraq, for which we sent our troops to fight.
This is the freedom that exists ... and the reminder of how much more work there is still to be done.
For some, such as Du'a Khalil Aswad, this was the price of the so-called new freedom.
Of course, whether Du'a believed in the new freedom promised by the coalition forces will never be known.
All that we do know is that Du'a, young and in love, tested its limits only to see her new world come up terrifyingly, tragically, short. Her crime was to fall in love with a Sunni boy when her family practised the Yezidi religion, which does not allow marriage outside her faith.
The difference between her murder and the many other "honour" killings that also take place was that Du'a's death was captured by camera phone and sent around the world via the internet.
Never has the old world and new world come together more savagely.
A simple Google search will find the vision on any number of websites but it must come with a warning.
This is no Hollywood production. A woman dies before your eyes.
The blurred vision shows a crazed mob, jostling and crowing and jockeying for position, the cameraman struggling past the thousand-odd men who waited for Du'a to be dragged from the house of a tribal leader in a headlock so they could begin the killing.
More than anything the men are excited, which is as sickening to write as it is to accept.
In the mad scramble the cameraman finally gets close to Du'a, by which time she is already on the ground, her body sagging and struggling to stay strong.
Stones rain down on her. Her screams can be heard.
One stone, the size of a good Bessa brick, is catapulted with full force into her body.
As she tries to protect herself Du'a's hair is matted and strewn across her face. Again she screams.
To complete the shame somebody has ripped off her skirt, another man kicks her in the crotch.
For 30 minutes this goes on, until finally a stone knocks her unconscious and a deep, dark blood stream begins to run across the earth.
Du'a is dead.
This young woman, just 17 years old and whose crime was to fall in love, is now lost from this world forever.
If this is upsetting, then apologies. But this is the reality of our world, far from political spin, far from the lies of this "peaceful religion" we are force fed whenever racial tensions rise up.
It is abhorrent at every level. It must be stopped.
Du'a and her boyfriend, whose identity is still not known, had a plan to run away together.
Clearly aware that theirs was a forbidden love, it is uncertain whether their plan to elope was a result of having asked permission to marry and been denied or whether they planned it anyway, knowing how the answer would fall.
Regardless, they fled to Bashika but were betrayed by Du'a's family, whose "honour" had been besmirched.
They needed to cleanse the family and could do so only with Du'a's death.
Her parents did not want her to be stoned but, according to Diana Nammi, a leading Kurdish rights campaigner who fled to England, it is not certain whether they agreed to another form of death.
What is certain is that rather than a one-off, or a fading remnant of an old world that is thankfully disappearing, "honour" killings are on the rise in Iraq.
Nobody knows exact figures because exact figures are at best uncertain, at most shady, when it comes to happenings in Iraq.
But campaigners such as Ms Nammi say there is an "epidemic". The evidence is in the growing number of autopsy reports in Baghdad signed off with a simple verdict: "Killed to wash away her disgrace."
After Du'a's murder two men were arrested by Iraqi police but, according to Ms Nammi, were later quietly released.
Then last Saturday, 42 days after Du'a's murder, Iraqi authorities arrested four men in relation to the killing.
On the surface, at least, the arrests have been applauded.
"They (the crowd) brutally killed a young Yezidi girl in pursuit of out-of-date tribal rites," Tahsin Saeed Ali, the Yezidi religious leader known as the emir of the Yezidis in Iraq, said.
Is this a hope? Is this a sign of change, that maybe the coalition is making some headway, or merely a false dawn?
It is difficult to get too excited. The death came to light only after the image was released on the internet, after all, when the rest of the world had begun to vent its outrage. It forced the authorities to act.
Elsewhere the rise in "honour" killings suggests a descent into localised law, indicating it is getting worse rather than better. Maybe it has to before things are finally righted, which gives no comfort.
I think that was actually supposed to infer that we have all sinned, not that we are allowed to stone girls to death for falling in love. I'm sure you knew that.Jesus's response.
John 8.7
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
Unfortunately, I don't understand the Trinity, but I do understand that the Catholic God is definately not Yahweh. Yahweh is a totally different beast. Yahweh did evolved into God over centuries, but I think they are both simply historical ideas of God projected by humans. They are only as real as your perception will allow, IMO.Actually Yahweh and Jesus are one and the same.The trinity.
Jesus came to fulfil the law and since his arrival we live under grace not law.
If you refer to the passage above when confronted he doesn't contradict the law he adds grace to it.
What's your evidence apart from faith, idea?I believe that the non-believers will still decline the existence of God no matter how much evidence there is.
Unfortunately, I don't understand the Trinity, but I do understand that the Catholic God is definately not Yahweh. Yahweh is a totally different beast..
What's your evidence apart from faith, idea?
When you academically study the history of the idea of God, it is very clear that that God Christians worship today has no resemblance to the God of the Old Testament. The idea of God evolved in time to become what it is today. They are now totally unrecognisable. The God of Abraham is even different to the God of Moses. Abraham's God was a nice chap who even dropped by for tea, while Moses' God laid waste to anything He laid His eyes on. It's not physically, or even spiritually, the same being/beast/spirit when looked at objectively in historical terms.Jehovah (Yahweh)
The proper name of God in the Old Testament
http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=12479
There seems to be in radical fundamentalist Islam at the moment, but I think there's plenty of love out there as well. Some Islamic sects are well into a peacful, loving world, particularly the Sufi order. There is certainly plenty of love in the Christian idea of God, but I think fear is also a notable tool used to encourage punters to go by the Book too.I would suggest that hate has more to do with religion than love:
Apart from the answers to some of our prayers and plenty of co-incidence (if that's what you'd like to call them), the perfect design of nature.....
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