atheists-from-the-united-states

"By a peculiar logical inversion the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, its imitators, accomplices, and victims, have come to believe in a Negro problem....While there is actually no Negro problem, there is definitely a Caucasian problem.Continual reference to a Negro problem assumes that some profound difficulty has been or is being created for the human race by the so-called Negroes. This is typical ruling class arrogance, and...has no basis in fact It has been centuries since any Negro nation has menaced the rest of humanity. The last of the Moors withdrew from Europe in 1492.The so-called Negroes...have passed few if any Jim Crow laws...set up few white ghettoes, earned on no discriminatory practices against whites, and have not devoted centuries of propaganda to prove the superiority of blacks over whites....While we may dismiss the concept of a Negro problem as a valuable dividend-paying fiction, it is clear that the Caucasian problem is painfully real and practically universal. Stated briefly, the problem confronting the colored peoples of the world is how to live in freedom, peace, and security without being invaded, subjugated, expropriated, exploited, persecuted, and humiliated by Caucasians justifying their actions by the myth of white racial superiority.The term Negro itself is as fictitious as the theory of white racial superiority on which Anglo-Saxon civilization is based, but it is nevertheless one of the most effective smear devices developed since the Crusades...Of course "white" and "Caucasian” are equally barren of scientific meaning....There are actually no white people except albinos who are a very pale pink in color..."

"Most comedians are questioning by nature. There are a solid handful of comedians who make fun of religion that are not atheist, just not fans of religion or specific religious institutions. There are also a higher percentage of atheists per capita in comedy due to the nature of what we do."

"I think in America it is safe to do whatever you want. Hopefully we can keep it that way, but we will see with this American Taliban attitude. I just don't really care. Controversy is great for comedy and if someone really wants to seek me out on stage and gun me down or get physical over an intellectual idea being told by one man on a comedy stage what can I do about it? It certainly wouldn't help their cause and it would immortalize me. (in response to the question "Personally, I find critiquing or debunking Christianity is pretty safe—but I’m scared to go after Islam. Do you feel that as well?")"

"First off, everything is fair game. Nothing is sacred, especially the "sacred". And since the theme is critical thinking and I try to do all my jokes about things we believe without evidence, or at least in the face of scientific data they are exactly the same. There is actually probably more "evidence" of bigfoot or ghosts than there is of God. At least we have one bad 50 year old 8mm film of bigfoot and some questionable foot prints. What evidence do we have of any gods? A statue that cries tears and a warm, fuzzy feeling inside? (in response to the question "Do you think it is fair to mock religion in the same way one mocks belief in Big Foot or ghosts – are these really the same sort of phenomena?")"

"Comedy is generally based in pain and suffering, often anger or a feeling of being on the outside looking in. Comedians tend to break down life and look at things we all see or do in a unique way. Comedians are rebellious by nature. It is our job to point out inconsistencies, wrong doings, etc. and make people think and laugh about them. The experiences are generally universal and the best comedy is honest and based in reality."

"I am not afraid of being called an Atheist, which is the most misunderstood word. Even dictionaries seem to be written at times by people who don't understand the word. A-Theism just means to not have accepted any assertions of any gods, or to not have a god. I equate it to asexual. Asexual organisms are not against sex or mad at sex, they just do not have male/female sex or sex organs. When it is used in humans metaphorically it has a similar meaning, someone not interested in or does not have sex. I do not have any gods. I have not fostered a belief in gods, or unicorns, or fairies, etc. The only reason it exists as a word is because the majority of people do have belief in gods, so it is used as a definition to understand a position on the issue of existence of gods, in contrast to the norm."

"I think there are both valid and invalid reasons for this. First, many atheists are angry. We are one of the last groups for which is socially and legally ok to discriminate against. There are still states where atheists can't hold office. Substitute "atheist" with any other group or minority and that becomes clear. (in response to the question "Many people think of atheists as being angry. Thoughts?")"

"[Charles Manson is] the perfect embodiment of Odinism as a way of life, a Hitlerian ideal! I find it difficult to breathe within the confines of more mainstream National Socialism which seems to be made up of people who lack any inner vision & are still thinking in terms as small as those who they oppose."

"Social Darwinism is simply the idea that the Darwinian concept of "survival of the fittest" applies to man. It's the idea that within a culture, superior individuals will rise to the top, and inferior individuals will sink to the bottom, as a part of natural selection. It isn't related to fascism, Nazism, or racism—it's just the way of the world."

"A Satanic world is a world reborn in purity, a world where the instinct and the intellect will be complementary to one another rather than being at odds with one another. It will be a world in which we follow laws of nature instead of just the rules that man has made up to regulate his conduct. It will be a world in which masters will be masters and slaves will be slaves, and never the twain shall meet."

"I feel that I'm a fascist, but 'Nazi' is a real specific term... I'm a fascist in the sense of the modern bastardized meaning of the word. I'm completely against democratic values and liberalism. I think that they have very little to do with life on Earth. I think they're an ideological abstraction."

"We mourn not its victims, we honor its victors... I would remind those here that murder is the predator's prerogative, and there is no birth without blood."

"The coasts are doomed, they're death traps. The cities are like malignant cancers, completely dysfunctional. They're llike previews of the Apocalypse. You know how deadly diseases have symptoms - ugly sores that sprout up that sort of signify a deeper problem. That's how I view cities. If America has the cultural equivalent of A.I.D.S., the major cities are analogous to Kaposis Sarcoma. If you want to see life in dysfunction, go to S.F. or L.A. or N.Y."

"When all is said and done, I have no great quarrel with being labelled a "fascist". While it is not the whole story, it implies (to me) a sort of Marquis De Sade worldview that sees life in terms of master and slave, strong and weak, predator and prey. I know such views are highly unfashionable, but to me they seem fairly consistent with what I've seen to be true."

"We don’t believe in a master race... We think there are strong people who do what they want to do, and there are other people who just follow along. Race is an issue, but I don’t think you can have a master race, because every race has a handful of people who are really intelligent, who are achievers, and a bunch of people who are what Lenin called "stuffing in the mattress"."

"I think AIDS is probably the best thing that's happened to Africa. I mean, just imagine; this is a place with so much population that the land can’t support it, and they can’t feed themselves, and they're starving to death—to me it seems that something like AIDS would be a godsend... think it would be great if that place were just turned into a big animal preserve—what about the animals? Fuck the human beings! Let them all slaughter each other with machetes, let them die of AIDS, let that entire continent turn back into a wild kingdom again."

"Every single one of us in this room, we'd be prepared to kill if need be, we would be prepared to die for what we believe in. But what scares the people out there a thousand times more is that we’re prepared to live for what we believe in."

"It's not painless – there's a lot of struggle with all the identity stuff you go through. But we were saying you can count on one hand people whose parents achieved at a very high level and whose children also achieved. So it definitely binds us and I think that's why we enjoy working together. Our heads aren't swelled about it."

"As you get older, all those dumb clichés, they’re all true. You only have a certain amount of time left, and you should only spend it doing the things that you want to do."

"Recently I attended a workshop on the study of complexity at which two MIT computer scientists, Tom Toffoli and Norman Margolus, demonstrated the operation of an and gate on a computer monitor. Also watching the show was Charles Bennett of IBM, an expert on the mathematical foundations of computation and complexity. I remarked to Bennett that what we were watching was an electronic computer simulating a cellular automaton simulating a computer. Bennett replied that these successive embeddings of computational logic reminded him of Russian dolls."

"Ω is in many senses a Cabalistic number. It can be known of, but not known, through human reason. To know it in detail, one would have to accept its un-computable digit sequence on faith, like words of a sacred text. It embodies an enormous amount of wisdom in a very small space, inasmuch as its first few thousand digits, which could be written on a small piece of paper, contain the answers to more mathematical questions than could be written down in the entire universe, including all interesting finitely-refutable conjectures. Its wisdom is useless precisely because it is universal: the only known way of extracting from Ω the solution to one halting problem, say the Fermat conjecture, is by embarking on a vast computation that would at the same time yield solutions to all other equally simply-stated halting problems, a computation far too large to be carried out in practice. Ironically, although Ω cannot be computed, it might accidentally be generated by a random process, e.g. a series of coin tosses, or an avalanche that left its digits spelled out in the pattern of boulders on a mountainside. The initial few digits of Ω are thus probably already recorded somewhere in the universe. Unfortunately, no mortal discoverer of this treasure could verify its authenticity or make practical use of it."

"Throughout history philosophers and mystics have sought a compact key to universal wisdom, a finite formula or text which, when known and understood, would provide the answer to every question. The Bible, the Koran, the mythical secret books of Hermes Trismegistus, and the medieval Jewish Cabala have been so regarded. Sources of universal wisdom are traditionally protected from casual use by being hard to find, hard to understand when found, and dangerous to use, tending to answer more and deeper questions than the user wishes to ask. Like God the esoteric book is simple yet undescribable, omniscient, and transforms all who know It. The use of classical texts to foretell mundane events is considered superstitious nowadays, yet, in another sense, science is in quest of its own Cabala, a concise set of natural laws which would explain all phenomena. In mathematics, where no set of axioms can hope to prove all true statements, the goal might be a concise axiomatization of all “interesting” true statements."

"The integrity of science is anchored in the willingness of scientists to test their ideas and results in direct confrontation with their scientific peers."

"Every step taken by science claims territory once occupied by the supernatural."

"I came to realize that many people choose scientific beliefs the same way they choose to be Methodists, or Democrats, or Chicago Cubs fans. They judge science by how well it agrees with the way they want the world to be."

"They are betting against the laws of thermodynamics. No one has ever won that wager."

"For a million years, our species was confronted with a world we could not hope to understand. Now, within a span of a single human lifetime, the book of nature has been opened wide. On its pages we are finding, if not a simple world, at least an orderly world in which everything from the birth of stars to falling in love is governed by the same natural laws."

"It is not so much knowledge of science that the public needs as a scientific worldview—an understanding that we live in an orderly universe, governed by physical laws that cannot be circumvented."

"Two hundred years ago, educated people imaged that the greatest contribution of science would be to free the world of superstition and humbug. It has not happened. Ancient beliefs in demons and magic still sweep across the modern landscape, but they are now dressed in the language and symbols of science: a best-selling health guru explains that his brand of healing is grounded in quantum theory; half the population believes Earth is being visited by space aliens who have mastered faster-than-light travel; and educated people wear magnets in their shoes to draw energy from the Earth. This is pseudoscience."

"What may begin as an honest error...has a way of evolving through almost imperceptible steps from self-delusion to fraud. The line between foolishness and fraud is thin. Because it is not always easy to tell when that line is crossed, I use the term voodoo science to cover them all: pathological science, junk science, pseudoscience and fraudulent science."

"Few scientists or inventors set out to commit fraud. In the beginning, most believe they have made a great discovery. But what happens when they finally realize that things are not behaving as they believed?"

"America's astronauts have been left stranded in low-Earth orbit, like passengers waiting beside an abandoned stretch of track for a train that will never come, bypassed by the advance of science."

"[T]he uniquely American myth of the self-educated genius fighting against a pompous, close-minded establishment."

"Those [natural] laws cannot be circumvented by any amount of piety or cleverness, but they can be understood. Uncovering them should be the highest goal of a civilized society. Not...because scientists have any claim to greater intellect or virtue, but because the scientific method transcends the flaws of individual scientists. Science is the only way we have of separating the truth from ideology, or fraud, or mere foolishness."

"We outnumber the rich and always will. This is still a democracy, more or less, and we have the ability to vote with our brains and not some kind of mixed up idealism that makes us go against our own interest. And we can organize, so that when the rich and privileged don’t keep their promises, we have a way to make them listen."

"Kane felt like a Goth at the sack of Rome, watching his stream of piss wash the delicate paints from a piece of Grecian marble."

"The Valium washed over him like a lullaby."

"I've got nothing against corporatocracy myself, but nationalism doesn't die out overnight. We've seen that here, and we don't want it starting again."

"The sun had creased his face like a note that had been folded and refolded and kept in a dirty pocket."

"I was offended by the New Atheist movement, which included the public intellectuals Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great, 2007), in addition to Dawkins and Dennett with their evolutionary credentials. In part I was offended by the poor scholarship of the books, which meant that Dawkins and Dennett were falsely trading on their academic reputations. The fact that the books were written for the general reader wasn’t an excuse. The New Atheists clearly began with animosity toward religion and constructed their arguments to support their predetermined conclusion. (P. 33)"

"Around this world and to this very day, among experts and novices alike, say the word “evolution” and most people hear the word “genes.” (P. 19)"

"...[A] new breed of philosopher was coming close to declaring that nothing in philosophy makes sense except in the light of evolution. (P. 26)"

"Building a scientific edifice is a bit like building a cathedral, stone by stone. Shaping each stone—each single study—is hard work but immensely satisfying, especially knowing that it will be durable. (P. 38)"

"Science is often associated with complicated instruments and questions so specialized that a PhD is required even to become interested. (P. 31)"

"When I was a small child I longed one day to become so famous that I did not have to hide how odd I was—how unlike other people. Few people really held my attention. It was birds and mammals, reptiles and insects that filled my dreams and eternally whetted my curiosity."

"The s mark where they have been and once one has learned to read sign, as woodsmen and professional ornithologists do, one can study food habits. Meat and fishing-eating birds pass conspicuous white urates, commonly called whitewash, and they regurgitate pellets. The splashes of whitewash under a perch suggest that a bird of prey may have used the perch. s, for example, also pass their urates in the form of whitewash, but if the perch is far from a body of water or from a heron rookery, the whitewash was probably passed by a hawk, an owl or a crow. The whitewash of hawks is rather splashy and falls in spatters and streaks. That of owls is far more solid, chalky in texture and tends to form little heaps. Owls tend to gulp their food in big mouthfuls, swallowing many bones—large and small—along with meat. The bones, only slightly digested, persist in the pellets of adults. One can learn a great deal about what owls have eaten by examining the contents of pellets carefully."

"In those days, we did a good deal of camping in abandoned houses. spent the first night up in this part of the world in a house. We had him sleep in the living room, because the roof didn’t leak there. And we slept in the kitchen, and we had pans put on the end of the bed. And we could hear the water beating in all night, falling into the pans by our feet."

"A long time ago, thousands of prairie chickens lived in Wisconsin. But as cities grew, the prairie chickens lost their nesting grounds. By 1850, the prairie chicken population began to decrease. In the 1950s, only about 2,500 prairie chickens still lived in Wisconsin. But 2 scientists helped to save them. Those scientists were Frances "Fran" and Frederick Hamerstrom."

"If you are aware of the actual nest location, it is best to approach it on a path which would lead past the nest. When you are adjacent to the nest, you should turn at right angles to your path of travel, walk directly to the nest and band the nestlings. Once you have banded the nestlings, retrace your steps to your original line of travel. On the return trip from the nest, sprinkle your trail with liberal quantities of crystals. When you reach your original trail, you should again turn at right angles and continue in your original direction of travel ... Thus any predator who picks up and follows your original trail would be discouraged from turning off and following your side trail to the nest. He would be more likely to continue following your trail in your original direction of travel."

"Fran loved wild birds. She always had an owl flying in her house. She was always rehabilitating eagles and hawks in her barn."