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Permalink Reply by anti_supernaturalist on August 22, 2011 at 3:18pm

Write whatever you like; the quotable will come

So many brilliant quotes. Sparks that illuminate, maybe set ablaze a mind ready for them.

So good to read, but I pointedly avoid them when writing:
1. No use making my prose, by comparison, more everyday than it is.
2. The quotable (as aphorism) cannot be manufactured -- it comes on its own.

Who can equal Nietzsche (in good translation)? A great artist with humor. Surprised?

A little girl asked her mother,

-- “Is it true that God is everywhere?”
-- “Yes, he is.”
-- “Well, I think that is indecent.”

-- Nietzsche The gay science 2nd ed 1887 preface

the anti_supernaturalist

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Permalink Reply by Cesar on August 8, 2012 at 12:16pm

I finished reading the anti christ recently and got a few nuggets:

"Sacrifice for sin, and in its most obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What appealing paganism!"

"There is a perfect likeness between christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only toward destruction.One need only turn to history for a proof of this: there it appears with appalling distinctness"

"What is bad? But i have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge. --The anarchist and the christian have the same ancestry..."

"...mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons..."

"The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as skepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath him-- and behind him...A mind that aspires to great things, that wills the meant thereto, is necessarily skeptical."

"Truth is not something that one has and another has not: at best, only peasants, or peasant-apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any such way."

"Not every one may be a Christian: one is not "converted" to christianity-- one must first be sick enough for it..."

"Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health-- the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to make people ill."

""Faith" as an imperative, vetoes science--in praxi, lying at any price..."

I loved that man. I would provide more but would require the translation of a translation.

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Permalink Reply by Billie-Jo Schuyler on October 25, 2011 at 2:06am

Some of my favorite quotes, that I will and have used when conversing with a theist:

God made me an atheist, who are you to question his decision?

If god has a problem with the way I live, let him tell me.

 

I found them both somewhere online or in a book, not too sure

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Permalink Reply by Marvel on August 8, 2012 at 2:29am

This is my favorite

12.Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful - Edward Gibbon

This is so ture

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Permalink Reply by Cesar on August 8, 2012 at 9:18am

I thought that quote was from Seneca.

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Permalink Reply by Rob the Ridiculous on August 8, 2012 at 11:00am

I'm pretty sure that this quote is indeed from Seneca.

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Permalink Reply by Marvel on August 8, 2012 at 6:44pm

Edward Gibbon mentioned it in his book on the Roman Empire .. may be that explains it.

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Permalink Reply by Hope on August 8, 2012 at 9:33am

I liked them all,,, especially;

1. Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov

6. The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. — George Bernard Shaw

FUNNY AND TRUE :D

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Permalink Reply by Unseen on August 8, 2012 at 1:05pm

Of course, Woody's is the best.

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Permalink Reply by matt.clerke on August 9, 2012 at 1:48am

Sadly, number 15 is false in the case of those funeral insurance places. At least they do actually (I hope) pay out the value of the policy upon your death (unlike religion).

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Permalink Reply by Arcus on August 10, 2012 at 2:11pm

Many quotes, but none from baron d'Holbach, "founder" of atheism?

"Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them."

"Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty."

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