Atheism Activists

"Human beings are social beings with or without religion."

"Recently Africa was polled as the most devout region in the world, and this includes deep devotion to the continent’s various harmful superstitions. Devoutness and underdevelopment, poverty, misery and superstition co-exist and co-relate. It should be said that the dominant religious faiths in the region are faiths alien to the continent. That means African Christians are more devout than Europeans whose missionaries brought Christianity to Africa. African Muslims are more devout than Muslims in the Middle East, whose jihadists and clerics introduced Islam to the region."

"Religious worldviews overshadow other worldviews. Religious movements override other movements. The most prominent movement in the region is religion. We are only beginning to see the emergence of non-religious movements, such as the humanist/atheist movements rear their heads."

"Skeptics need to organize and mobilize — online and offline — to further the cause of reason, science and critical thinking. They need to speak out in the media and to politicians about the harm resulting from undue credulity and challenge and confront the charlatans directly to put up or shut up. Skeptics can no longer afford to keep quiet or remain indifferent in the face of a looming dark age. They need to campaign for a reform of the educational system and encourage the teaching of critical thinking in schools."

"He's never really been part of the scene Give him Guns N' Roses, he'll take Queen He's more into Beatles than the Stones, He's more Stevie Wonder than Ramones"

"If you find me more offensive than the fucking possibility , then listen to me, motherfucker, this here is a fact: You are just as morally misguided as that Motherfucking power-hungry self-aggrandized bigot in the stupid fucking hat."

"By definition, (I begin), alternative medicine (I continue) has either not been proved to work, or has been proved not to work. You know what they call alternative medicine that has been proved to work? Medicine."

"A genius is just a mentally ill person with an audience."

"La Mettrie who had himself painted and engraved as a second Democritus laughs only the first time one looks at him. Repeated contemplation changes the philosopher into a fool, his laughter changes into a grin."

"La Mettrie was born with a fund of natural and inexhaustible gaiety; he had a quick mind, and such a fertile imagination that it made flowers grow in the arid field of medicine. Nature had made him an orator and a philosopher; but a yet more precious gift which he received from her was a pure soul and an obliging heart. All those who are not imposed upon by the pious insults of the theologians mourn in La Mettrie a good man and a wise physician."

"These features show truly the master Of jollities, laughter and wit; Too bold he was in his nature To take off the corners of it. He would have been but for one sage The victim alas! of the fools of his age."

"Lamettrie is a bold who sees in materialism only the justification of his profligacy."

"In conclusion, Lamettrie lays down the principles, " No senses, no ideas." " The fewer senses, the fewer ideas." " Little education, few ideas." " No sense-impressions, no ideas.""

"Lamettrie goes back to the father of the Church, Arnobius, from whose book, ' Adversus Gentes,' he borrows a hypothesis, which possibly became the original of the statue-man which plays its part in Diderot, Buffon, and particularly in Condillac. Let us suppose that in a feebly illuminated subterranean chamber, from which all sounds and sense-impressions are far removed, a new-born child is scantily nourished by a naked and ever-silent nurse... reared up without any knowledge... of the world or of human life until the age of... forty years. Then let this being leave his solitude. And now let him be asked what thoughts he has had in his solitude, and how he has been nourished and brought up. He will make no answer; he will not even know that the sound addressed to him has any meaning. Where now is that immortal particle of deity? Where is the soul that enters the body so well taught and enlightened? Like Condillac's statue, then, this creature, which has only the shape and the physical organisation of a man, must be supposed to have received feelings through the use of the senses that gradually arrange themselves, and education must do what else is necessary to give him the soul, the capacity for which is only dormant in his physical organisation. Although Cabanis, as pupil of Condillac, rightly rejected this unnatural hypothesis, we must nevertheless concede to it a certain justification as compared with the extremely weak foundation of the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas."

"[H]e... finally concludes: " The soul, then, depends essentially upon the organs of the body, with which it is formed, grows, decreases: 'Ergo participem leti quoque convenit esse.' ""

"Whether the soul occupies only a particular point or a circuit we do not know, but as all nerves do not meet in one point in the brain, the former supposition is improbable. All knowledge is in the soul only at the moment in which it is affected by it; all preservation of it is to be resolved into organic conditions. Thus the 'Natural History of the Soul,' starting from ordinary notions, gradually leads us on into Materialism, and it is concluded that... which feels must also be material. How this comes about Lamettrie too does not know; but why should we (according to Locke) limit the omnipotence of the Creator because of our ignorance? Memory, imagination, passions, and so on, are then explained in a thoroughly materialistic way."

"As a friend, he may have been obliging and self-sacrificing; as an enemy, he was, as in particular had to experience, malicious and low in the choice of his means."

"That the true connection could so long be misrepresented is, next to the influence of Hegel and his school, chiefly to be attributed to the resentment excited by Lamettrie's attack upon the Christian morality. People forgot, in consequence, his theoretical writings; and the calmest and most serious of them, including the 'Natural History of the Soul,' were most completely forgotten."

"In the year 1742 he... received there a position as surgeon to the Guard. In this capacity he made a campaign in Germany, and... was seized by a violent fever, and used this opportunity in order to institute observations upon himself as to the influence of quickened circulation upon thought. He came to the conclusion that thought is nothing but a consequence of the organisation of our mechanism. ...[H]e tried during his convalescence to explain the mental functions by the help of anatomy, and he had his conjectures printed under the title of a 'Natural History of the Soul.' The regimental chaplain sounded the alarm, and soon a universal cry of indignation was raised... His books were recognised as heretical, and he could no longer continue to be surgeon of the Guard. ...about the same time ...writing a satire on his rivals, the foremost Paris practitioners. ...He fled in the year 1746 to Leyden. Here he wrote ...a new satire upon the charlatanism and ignorance of doctors, and soon afterwards (1748) appeared also his 'Homme Machine.'"

"The very much shorter section on the rational soul discusses freedom, reflection, judgment, and so on, with the same strong leaning to Materialism there follows a chapter over which is written, "...religious faith alone can confirm our belief as to the existence of a rational soul." ...[T]he object... is to show how metaphysics and religion came to adopt the notion of a soul, and it concludes by saying that true philosophy freely confesses that the... soul is unknown to her. ...[M]ention is also made of Voltaire's phrase, 'I am body, and I think;' and Lamettrie refers with pleasure to the way in which Voltaire scoffs at the Scholastic proof for the proposition that no matter can think."

"In very different fashion does the book set to work that already in its very title declares that man is a machine. While the 'Natural History of the Soul' was cautious, cunningly arranged, and only gradually surprising us with its results, here, on the contrary,the final conclusion is expressed at the outset of the work. While the 'Natural History of the Soul' allied itself with the whole Aristotelian metaphysics only in order to prove by degrees that the soul is but an empty form, into which we may pour a materialistic content, here we no longer deal in all those fine distinctions."

"Lamettrie was not only the extremest of the French Materialists, but was the first also in point of time. ...for several decades men could with virtuous indignation condemn this sinner, while they were gradually absorbing his ideas."

"[H]e who has the most imagination should be regarded as having the most intelligence or genius, for all these words are synonymous..."

"Hettner forgets his own chronological data when he maintains that Lamettrie, instigated chiefly by Diderot's 'Pensées Philosophiques,' wrote in 1745 the 'Histoire Naturelle de l'Ame,' and in 1748 'L'Homme Machine;' and in Schlosser's ' History of the World' we may read that Lamettrie was a very ignorant man, who had the impudence to pass off the discoveries and observations of others as his own. Only that in nearly every case where we find a striking similarity of ideas between Lamettrie and any famous contemporary of his, the former had an indisputable priority!"

"[I]magination is the soul, since it plays all the roles of the soul."

"[T]he sciences that are expressed by numbers or by other small signs, are easily learned; and... this facility rather than its demonstrability is what has made the fortune of algebra."

"Man's preeminent advantage is his organism. ...Only through nature do we have any good qualities; to her we owe all that we are."

"With regard to the questions with which we are concerned, Lamettrie stands at the commencement of the whole series."

"Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art."

"[T]he, diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body."

"[A] brilliant man is his own best company, unless he can find other company of the same sort."

"In general, the form and the structure of the brains of quadrupeds are almost the same as those of the brain of man..."

"What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of language? An animal.."

"One needs only eyes to see the necessary influence of old age on reason."

"A mere nothing, a tiny fibre, something that could never be found by the most delicate anatomy, would have made of Erasmus and Fontenelle two idiots, and Fontenelle himself speaks of this very fact in one of his best dialogues."

"Among animals, some learn to speak and sing; they remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician. Others, for instance the ape, show more intelligence... would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so."

"A geometrician has learned to perform the most difficult demonstrations and calculations, as a monkey has learned to take his little hat off and on..."

"As a violin string or a harpsichord key vibrates and gives forth sound, so the cerebral fibres, struck by waves of sound, are stimulated to render or repeat the words that strike them."

"[E]verything is the work of imagination, and... all the faculties of the soul can be correctly reduced to pure imagination..."

"[W]hy should we divide the sensitive principle which thinks in man? ...For a thing that is divided can no longer without absurdity be regarded as indivisible."

"Whatever the virtue may be, from whatever source it may come, it is worthy of esteem... Mind, beauty, wealth, nobility, although the children of chance, all have their own value, as skill, learning and virtue have theirs."

"If one's organism is... the preeminent advantage, and the source of all others, education is the second. The best made brain would be a total loss without it..."

"The soul is... but an empty word, of which no one has any idea, and which an enlightened man should use only to signify the part in us that thinks..."

"Julien Offray de la Mettrie, or simply Lamettrie... is one of the most abused, but one of the least read, authors in the history of literature—an author known even superficially to but few of those who thought proper to abuse him when it suited them."

"The human body is a machine which winds its own springs."

"The soul follows the progress of the body, as it does the progress of education."

"The 'Natural History of the Soul' begins by showing that as yet no philosopher, from Aristotle down to Malebranche, had been able to account for the nature of the soul."

"Very ingeniously Lamettrie observes that at bottom I am immediately certain only of my own feeling. That other men also feel, I conclude with very much stronger conviction from the expression of their feelings in gestures and cries than from their articulate speech. That energetic language of the emotions is, however, the same in the animals as in men, and it carries with it much stronger proof than all the sophisms of Descartes. ...[T]he internal organisation of man and of the animals offers a perfect analogy. If it remains for the present incomprehensible how the capability of feeling can be an attribute of matter, it is with this, as with a thousand other puzzles, in which, according to an idea of Leibniz, instead of the thing itself we see only the veil that hides it. ...[S]ensation, like motion, must at all events potentially belong to all matter. So thought the ancients, whose philosophy is preferred by all capable minds to the inadequate attempts of the moderns. After this Lamettrie passes to the doctrine of substantial forms..."

"[T]he last chapter... bears the title, " Narratives which prove that all Ideas are derived from the Senses." ...Everywhere the consequence is drawn that only the education he receives through the senses makes man man, and gives him what we call the soul, while no development of the mind from within outwards ever takes place."

"[E]ither everything is illusion, nature as well as revelation, or experience alone can explain faith."