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Quote by Michael Martin

“The aim of this book is not to make atheism a popular belief or even to overcome its invisibility. My object is not utopian. It is merely to provide good reasons for being an atheist. … My object is to show that atheism is a rational position and that belief in God is not. I am quite aware that atheistic beliefs are not always based on reason. My claim is that they should be.”

Quote by Michael Martin

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“Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. Or set me on an airplane traveling west, crossing the date line again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss still lies ahead, and you are here instead of sorrow.”

Death Loss Sorrow

Author:Nessa Rapoport

“It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.”

Reason Principles Reasoning Application

Book:The Gathering Storm

Source: The Gathering Storm

“I may not believe that 'all things happen for a reason.' But I do believe that reason may come from all things that happen.”

Reason Belief Sense

Author:Shellen Lubin

“What a deep [trust] in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!”

Reason Science Work Trust Mechanism Rationality Newton Kepler Isaac Newton Johannes Kepler

Author:Albert Einstein

“The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature and Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.”

Reason Understanding Evidence Meaning Rationality Scientific Method

Author:Anthony Collins

“That not adhering to those notions Reason dictates (concerning the nature of God), has been the occasion of all superstition, and those innumerable mischiefs that mankind (on account of religion) have done to themselves or to one another.”

Reason Religion Nature Mischief Deism

Book:Christianity as Old as the Creation

Source: Christianity as Old as the Creation

“Those who invalidate reason, ought seriously to consider, 'whether they argue against reason, with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle, that they are laboring to dethrone;' but if they argue without reason, (which, in order to be consistent with themselves, they must do,) they are out of the reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.”

Reason Argument

Book:Reason the Only Oracle of Man: Or a Compendious System of Natural Religion

Source: Reason the Only Oracle of Man: Or a Compendious System of Natural Religion

“It was about that time [415 BCE] that the poet Diagoras of Melos was proscribed for atheism, he having declared that the non-punishment of a certain act of iniquity proved that there were no gods. It has been surmised, with some reason, that the iniquity in question was the slaughter of the Melians by the Athenians in 416 BCE, and the Athenian resentment in that case was personal and political rather than religious. For some time after 415 the Athenian courts made strenuous efforts to punish every discoverable case of impiety; and parodies of the Eleusinian mysteries were alleged against Alcibiades and others. Diagoras, who was further charged with divulging the Eleusinian and other mysteries, and with making firewood of an image of Herakles, telling the god thus to perform his thirteenth labour by cooking turnips, became thenceforth one of the proverbial atheists of the ancient world, and a reward of a silver talent was offered for killing him, and of two talents for his capture alive; despite which he seems to have escaped.”

Reason Atheism Poet Gods Death Penalty Superstition Freethought Athenians Hercules Herakles Alcibiades Eleusinian Diagoras Diagoras Of Melos Impiety

Book:A Short History Of Freethought: Ancient And Modern

Source: A Short History Of Freethought: Ancient And Modern

“I project myself to love and devote my time and attention to someone without a reason, so at least I can give someone the feelings of being the most special person in someone’s life.”

Love Reason Feelings Time Attention Projection Devote

Book:LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS

Source: LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS

“Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand—it burns where it is not allowed to shine. Human when originally divulged, it becomes divine when finally established. At first, the breath of a rage—at last it is the edict of a god. Endowed with such vital energy, astronomical truth has cut its way through the thick darkness of superstitious times, and, cheered by its conquests, Geology will find the same open path when it has triumphed over the less formidable obstacles of a civilized age.”

Source: More Worlds Than One: The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian