Best natural & positive-atheism Quotes

“What can be accomplished by a few principles is not effected by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle, which is nature, and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle, which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God's existence.”

World Needs Humans Reason Seems Natural Existence Principles Atheism Positive Atheism Accomplished Natural Things Supposing Human Reason

Author:Thomas Aquinas

“There can be no doubt ... of our dependence upon forces beyond our control. Primitive man was so impotent in the face of these forces that g , especially in an unfavorable natural environment, fear became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fear created gods.”

Men Faces Force Natural Attitude Doubt Environment Atheism Positive Atheism No Doubt Primitive Dominant Dependence Natural Environment Old Saying Primitive Man

Author:John Dewey

“Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete.”

Father Natural Saws Atheism Equal Enlightenment Institutions Positive Atheism Clarity Fixed Revelations Founding Sympathetic Obsolete Meddlesome

Author:Edwin Gaustad

“When certain unmarried men, who had lost their capacity to sin, sat indoors, breathing bad air, and passed resolutions about what was right and what wrong, making rules for the guidance of the people, instead of trusting to the natural, happy instincts of the individual, they ushered in the Dark Ages. These are the gentlemen who blocked human evolution absolutely for a thousand years.”

“Jesus, in fact, was typical of a certain kind of fanatical young idealist: at one moment holding forth, with tears in his eyes, about the need for universal love; at the next, furiously denouncing the morons, crooks and bigots who did not see eye to eye with him. It is very natural and very human behaviour. But it is not superhuman.”

“Where Church and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.”

Should Mind States Order Natural Church Atheism Police Regard Positive Atheism Church And State

Book:Delphi Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Illustrated)

“Long time men lay oppress'd with slavish fear Religion's tyranny did domineer ... At length a mighty one of Greece began To assert the natural liberty of man, By senseless terrors and vain fancies let To slavery. Straight the conquered phantoms fled.”

Men Long Natural Liberty Atheism Long Time Slavery Lays Terror Positive Atheism Tyranny Vain Fancy Length Greece Phantoms

Author:Lucretius

“So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized.”

Natural Religious Atheism Mankind Positive Atheism Intolerance Religious Freedom Religious Intolerance

Book:On Liberty

Source: On Liberty

“There is a broad distinction between religion and theology. The one is a natural, human experience common to all well-organized minds. The other is a system of speculations about the unseen and the unknowable, which the human mind has no power to grasp or explain, and these speculations vary with every sect, age, and type of civilization. No one knows any more of what lies beyond our sphere of action than thou and I, and we know nothing.”

“Manly natural religion - it is not joining the Church; it is not to believe in a creed, Hebrew, Protestant, Catholic, Trinitarian, Unitarian, Nothingarian. It is not to keep Sunday idle; to attend meetings; to be wet with water; to read the Bible; to offer prayers in words; to take bread and wine in the meeting house; love a scape-goat Jesus, or any other theological clap-trap.”

“As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.”

“Science is a limited way of knowing, looking at just the natural world and natural causes. There are a lot of ways human beings understand the universe - through literature, theology, aesthetics, art or music.”

World Way Humans Art Universe Literature Causes Natural Human Beings Knowing Atheism Positive Atheism Theology Natural World Aesthetics

Author:Eugenie Scott

“An important tradition within westren philosophy believes in the primacy of natural science as a guide to truth. This is sometimes met with the charge that such an allegiance amounts to scientism - the view that the only things that really exist are those recognized by fundamental physical theory, and that the only forms of genuine knowledge are scientific ones.”

Believe Important Sometimes Philosophy Form Natural Views Atheism Theory Amount Mets Tradition Fundamentals Positive Atheism Guides Genuine Allegiance Scientism Natural Science Primacy

Book:Atheism and Theism

Source: Atheism and Theism

“If there be a mind that, not perceiving in the narratives we have compared the fingermarks of tradition, and hence the legendary character of these evangelical anecdotes, still leans to the historical interpretation, whether natural or supernatural; that mind must be alike ignorant of the true character both of legend and of history, of the natural and the supernatural.”

Ifs Mind Stills Character Natural Atheism Tradition Historical Positive Atheism Ignorant Narrative Interpretation Legends Evangelical Legendary Anecdotes True Character

Book:The life of Jesus critically examined

Source: The life of Jesus critically examined

“Yes, the natural sciences are telling us a great deal about human origins, the origins of our species the origins of our minds; we're on our way to explaining a large part of it. I'll accept an answer provided only by such means as obtaining and exploring, analyzing and arguing over the evidence - not because of a scribe's myopic view of the subject written 500 years before the birth of Christ!”

“Pat, did you notice yesterday the ACLU, and all the Christ-haters, People For the American Way, NOW, etc. were totally disregarded by the Democrats and the Republicans in both houses of Congress as they went out on the steps and called out on to God in prayer and sang "God Bless America" and said "let the ACLU be hanged"? In other words, when the nation is on its knees, the only normal and natural and spiritual thing to do is what we ought to be doing all the time - calling upon God.”

“I have hitherto followed the lines marked out by the Theist in his attempt to prove that there exists a mind behind natural phenomena, and that the universe as we have it is, at least generally, an evidence of a plan designed by this mind. I have also pointed out that the only datum for such a conclusion is the universe we know. We must take that as a starting point. We can get neither behind it nor beyond it. We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world.”

Knows World Mind Universe Natural Lines Behinds Existence Plans Atheism Prove Evidence Starting Positive Atheism Conclusion Data Starting Point Theist Natural Phenomena

Author:Chapman Cohen

“The new advocates of ID [Intelligent Design] ask that their ideas be judged by scientific, not religious, criteria. OK, let's see how well ID stacks up as a scientific alternative to Darwinism. To gauge how well ID is doing as a platform for scientific research, I logged into the best database of the biological literature. A search for keyword ''evolution'' yielded 24,000 hits in the last decade. A search for ''intelligent design'' yielded not a single piece of research. Evolution by natural selection remains the basis of every successful biological research program.”

“The argument from design is ultimately an appeal to miraculous causes, i.e., causes that do not, and cannot, occur in the natural course of events. This is why an explanation via design is not a legitimate alternative to scientific and other naturalistic modes of explanation. To refer to a miraculous cause is to refer to something that is inherently unknowable, and this sanctuary of ignorance explains nothing at all. However much it may soothe the imagination of the ignorant, it does nothing to satisfy the understanding of a rational person.”

Source: Why Atheism?

“This is a Christian country. Why, so is hell. Inasmuch as Strait is the way and narrow is the gate, and few - few - are they that enter in thereat has had the natural effect of making hell the only really prominent Christian community in any of the worlds; but we don't brag of this and certainly it is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.”

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3: The Complete and Authoritative Edition

“The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.”

Natural Religious Common Opinion Atheism Citizens Office Advantage Fellows Privilege Positive Atheism Unworthy Renounce Incapacity Depriving

Book:The writings of Thomas Jefferson

Source: The writings of Thomas Jefferson

“Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.”

Kind Suffering Natural Atheism Consequence Positive Atheism Inherent Indifferent Blindness Selection Natural Selection

Book:A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love

Source: A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love

“The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... I fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.”

Source: A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings

“If there were a reason for preferring the Christian religion to natural religion, it would be because the former offers us, on the nature of God and man, enlightenment that the latter lacks. Now, this is not at all the case; for Christianity, instead of clarifying, gives rise to an infinite multitude of obscurities and difficulties.”

Ifs Men Giving Reason Would Be Christian Natural Christianity Cases Atheism Offers Enlightenment Difficulty Infinite Positive Atheism Former Latter Multitudes Obscurity Clarifying

Author:Denis Diderot

“The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.”

Mind Humans Ideas Social Natural Growing Atheism Events Degrees Positive Atheism Proportion Human Mind Natural Phenomena Social Events

Book:Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader

Source: Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader

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