Skeptics

"Despite the severity of their punishments, religions have still consistently failed in virtually all attempts to curtail criminal behavior, and have in fact actually empowered or promoted criminality in many ways. More reasonable laws are usually more effective."

"I mean it; the Bible-god of western monotheism is just like that horrible kid. Who would want to be trapped in a house with an indomitable telepathic despot and have to guard your thoughts –or be voluntarily mindless- and endure that existence forever and ever? Religion doesn’t want to talk about life either. They hate practically everything that goes on in life. They want to talk about death and pretend that THAT is life. And those of us who know life, live life, and love life, they accuse of being dead already. Every aspect of their world-view is upside-down or backwards -as DogmaDebate brilliantly illustrated. What these religionists preach actually diminishes the very meaning of life. Humans tend to value most that which is rare and fleeting. Such is life. The more you have of anything, the less valuable it is. They’re claiming immortality for eternity, rendering the value of life infinitely worthless. They sell their imaginary after-life as if it is sooo much better than this period of discomfort we have to endure before we achieve paradise. Having to toil in this fallen, sin-corrupted, dead-and-damned world. They hate existence itself so much that they actually long for the end-of-days, and only seem to get happy when they think Armageddon is upon us."

"Jack Chick was a graphic artist who lived his delusional life in lies, prejudice and paranoia, promoting racist, sexist credo-specific bigotry against everyone smarter than him, or who understood things better than he did: which is pretty much everyone since he was really impressively fucking stupid -even compared to other creationists. He was so bad that Chick Publications is recognized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. So now I hear that this creepy old dogmatic fucktard has finally stopped breathing at 92 years old. I’m unapologetically glad about that. His death makes our world a better place. I think that everyone who believes the way that he did should show solidarity by burying their faces in the sand and holding their breath until Jack Chick breathes again. Because our world just doesn’t need anyone like that -making life irritating for everyone capable of rational or compassionate thought."

"No Mr Huckabee, history –and criminal statistics- have both shown that tragedies will only increase, the more religious any society becomes. The more influence religion has over law, the lower our quality of life, and the more human rights are violated. It is true that any population of hundreds of millions will produce a proportionate percentage of sociopaths. But what we need there is more efficient provisions of mental health care –so that those suffering dementia and other disorders will be identified, treated, or isolated as need be –BEFORE they go berserk. Religion doesn’t want that either –as a matter of self-preservation. Because a fair amount of divine revelation can be cured with the same medications that treats schizophrenia. Where would the churches be if that many of their clergymen were clothed in straight-jackets?"

"Religion doesn’t solve the problem of rape at all; it exacerbates it. It should be (and in some atheist societies, it is this way) that women could walk about scantily-clad or even nude, and that men would have respect or sanity enough not to be violent against them on such paltry excuses as a lack of human decency or self control. I mean, you don’t bludgeon children to death when someone’s kid is crying loudly and annoying you, right? So why would you victimize a woman just because you find her attractive? That’s sick, but that is the attitude that is typically perpetuated by religion."

"Everything that we set up for legislation that will promote Christianity will only pave the way for Islam later on because it is the fastest growing religion while Christianity is in a state of decline. Demographics change; you can’t fight religion with religion. What will happen is Islam will eventually dominate Christianity; there won’t be any Christians left. Fortunately, secularists, atheists, and nonbelievers are on the rise faster than even the fastest growing religion. You can’t fight religion with religion, but you can fight it with reason. That’s what the atheist groups are really all about."

"You’re not immortal, you’re not eternal and to believe otherwise is to diminish everything that you really have. Life is precious because it is short and there is nothing after it. There is no purpose and there is no destiny beyond anything you give it yourself. If you want your life to mean something try making someone else’s life meaningful. - “Give the Devil His Due”, 1st November 2014,"

"This is just my opinion, but when I listen to Muslims explaining their religion to each other, I get the impression that Islam is hateful and violent, but that it’s also pretty stupid; “full of shit”, as my dad would say -because none of it can be justified or shown to be true, and what little they do know can’t really imply what they say it does. The same thing goes for Christians. When I listen to Christians discussing their religion, I get the impression that they’re hateful too, but their violent reactions are culturally inhibited. So they compensate for that with a staggering level of bewildering stupidity, coupled with dishonesty. It sounds to me like pots and kettles accusing each other in the perfect example of the blind leading the blind. But when I listen to those Jews who still believe in God and the Bible, and I hear them arguing aspects of their beliefs, it strikes me that the foundation of Abrahamic religion is utterly empty, devoid of any possible meaning or value. I don’t want to say “who cares?”, because way too many people do. That’s what confuses and alarms me! How could anyone imagine that any of this is really true or really matters?"

"When people use religion as their only reason for whatever laws they want to impose of people or on other things, these are always mostly unjust."

"All I knew of Israel growing up was that they’ve been the hot-bed of militant violence forever. Abraham’s god of infinite love, forgiveness, and mercy spawned three major faiths, all of whom have been at war with each other, each since their inception, and it seems that God’s spyglass of magnified torment was usually focused right there. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the Old Testament and noticed the patterns therein. If YHWH promised a holy land to his chosen people, they should expect more damnation than paradise. That would be consistent with the Bible’s blood-stained stories, and that’s the way we’ve always seen it on the news in my country. There would be less milk and honey, and more uprisings and explosions, especially when it means mixing or displacing so many fundamentally polarized religious and cultural groups. If I have not been completely mislead by the media, then maybe that’s why there are so many atheists in that area now."

"The idea that certain races (or species) are ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ was not Darwin’s idea but the universal language of all prior naturalists since forever. Darwin acknowledges this, but does not contribute to it, other than to suggest that Caucasians are not the ultimate form of mankind."

"The zealots imposing their religion in public schools never understand that they’re even doing anything wrong. They think they’re being oppressed or attacked if they’re disallowed from indoctrinating everyone else’s kids. And it doesn’t help that all the kids in town have already been indoctrinated. Because they don’t understand what the problem is either, and and secular government requirement will invariably be seen as some sort of victimization, which feeds right into the typical Christian persecution complex. People like this never seem to understand the necessity of secular government until or unless they have to give fair consideration to Muslims. Then suddenly the Christians leap over to my side of the political spectrum, demanding separation of church and state just as I do. Hypocrites."

"Now I would say that any honest earnest quest for truth must begin with the abandonment of faith. Are you prepared to lie in order to maintain your self-induced delusion? Or are you bold enough to question your own convictions and even test them to find out if they’re true, and discard them if they are not? That’s the rift. That’s the difference between us."

"If you believe in God, if you believe in miracles, then you believe in magic. You believe in magic. People argue against that all of the time, but that’s actually true. If you look up a collection of dictionaries, online it is easy to do. Open up a bunch of them, and see where they all agree, find the points in the context where all of the dictionaries agree. You will discover that if you compare the definitions between a miracle and magic, you will see that they are both the ‘evocation of supernatural forces or entities to control or forecast natural events in ways which are inexplicable by science because they defy the laws of physics, meaning they are physically impossible.’ That’s what both miracle and magic mean. So miracle is the same things as magic in the same way a boat is a yacht is if it is big enough."

"I would say the better part of my family identifies as Mormon or they identify as Christian – not that that’s a different thing because all of them identify as Christian because they all think that Mormon is Christian, just like every Mormon seemingly does. It is just other denominations that don’t think Mormons are Christians, just like they don’t think Catholics are Christian. This was an advantage for me growing up. I got to see the interdenominational bigotry within Christianity."

"“Let’s think hypothetically”, I said to someone, which is another thing the believers can’t really do, because that is kind of what they’re already doing. It destroys the self-made illusion to step in and jack that up with another illusion, even for a moment."

"There are so many people who tell me, “if I had a time machine and could prove that Jesus never rose from the dead”, with the admission that “I hope my faith and I are strong enough that I can keep on believing, even when my eyes tell me otherwise.” That’s make-believe! That’s lying to yourself. That’s the entirety of what religion is."

"Religion’s preferred punishment is almost always death, regardless of the crime. But the death penalty is a statistical failure just like all their proposed solutions to other problems always are. Here in the US, the states that still have the death penalty also have the highest murder rates; its a negative correlation. The problem there is one of society, the conditions imposed and the types of responses that are culturally coaxed. When murder happens, and that person is caught and tried, we should remove them as a threat, and whether they are imprisoned, institutionalized, or what have you should be determined by the particulars in each case."

"Truth is really whatever can be shown to correspond to reality. Truth is what the facts are essentially. Facts are after all points of data that you can verify to be accurate. A lot of people hate these definitions because it completely undermines their theology. They can’t make the assertions that they want to by saying anything is the absolute truth, because under the definition of either word no you don’t!"

"I’m gonna miss the old sith lord. He was the best pope atheists could hope for. He started out as a Hitler youth actually wearing a Nazi uniform. As a Cardinal, he famously conspired to conceal sex crimes against children for the sake of the church. As pope, he addressed an audience in an AIDS ravaged area of Africa, and told them that use of condoms actually increased risk of STDs. His objection to birth-control took precedence over human life. That is how evil he is."

"I don't believe in marriage, myself. It's an arbitrary human concept with no reality beyond that. It isn't always necessarily romantic; it is often political. Even if you believe in God, and swear to love one another for better or worse, till death do you part, none of that is assured. In fact, evangelicals are statistically more likely to get divorced than people with no religion."

"There is nothing reasonable about faith. Those two words mean completely opposite things. Putting them together creates an oxymoron, That’s why William Lyin’ Craig thought it would make a clever book title. Faith is an unreasonable conviction which is assumed without reason and defended against all reason. That’s why faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have. It really is!"

"There certainly seems to be a strong correlation between religion and insanity. I’ve read a few papers comparing the logical and psychological aptitude of strong believers vs those with little or no faith at all, and the trends there all seem to be in our favor, but not to the point that religion causes the disorder. I think certain mental disorders can prompt religious beliefs, but that’s a different claim. I think religion provides a haven to conceal quite a lot of cognitive and psychiatric disorders as well as some social dysfunctions. But that doesn’t mean religion is a mental illness, regardless how accurate analogies of the God virus might be. I think there are circumstances when religion can be treated as a psychological condition, especially when it is the result of detrimental conditioning, but I wouldn’t confuse that with a psychiatric malady, which (I think) would have to be physiological/chemical."

"According to mainstream non-religious sources, a fool is one who too readily accepts improbable assertions from questionable sources on insufficient evidence. So it is no wonder that the Bible and the Qur’an both use the opposite definition, so that the wise are called foolish and only fools are wise. By definition, one would have to be a fool to be fooled by either book. As for “putting things right”, the only way to do that is to identify unsupported assertions and examine what the facts really indicate, and that always goes against faith."

"Ignore for a moment the obviously sound national financial strategy behind having a competent and productive populace trained in fact-based knowledge as opposed to baseless belief with no practical application. All attempts to rid science from the lessons, to revise history, and corrupt other classes for the sake of promoting Christianity –will only serve to empower Muslims too. The very laws and customs enabling Christians to oppress others today will also give Islam power to oppress Christians tomorrow. You can’t have freedom *of* religion without freedom *from* religion, and that means keeping it out of government. So if Christians are really concerned about “Islamification”, then they ought to do the very opposite of everything they’re currently doing, and rally with the atheists to stay secular."

"[The] idea of sharing the gospel with Muslims simply will not work. (1) Islam is famously strict against apostasy, and Christians influence very few from their side in any case. (2) Muslim theology is much more efficient at gaining converts. That’s why they’re the fastest-growing religion, remember? More Christians turn Muslim than vice versa. (3) Christianity can’t even hang onto the people they already have. Religion is not the same thing as ‘race’. You can’t change your ancestors, but you can discard their traditions. Even if Christians did out-reproduce Muslims, statistics indicate that less than half of those kids would still be Christian by the time they grew up. A few might adopt some other religion; most of the rest will likely reject all religions, and that trend is rising. Therein lies the answer. You can’t fight religion with religion. Everything Christians do trying to fuse church and state, all the power they give to their own faith, –will be used to pave the way for the next dominant dogma. Every time any religion has had power to enforce their own laws, the result has invariably been a violation of human rights. The only answer –and the founding fathers said this from the beginning- is a secular government with a “wall of separation” between church and state. Maintain that and you might keep mosque and state separate too."

"How dare Huckabee say that school is where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, responsibility, or accountability. I do want to talk about those things -where religion does not. Why? Because religion offers a way to deny accountability for anything. Reverse the burden of proof. Assert as fact that which is not evidently true. Don’t have a basis for any claim; assume your conclusions on the veracity of your own conviction unsupported by anything, or on citation of any false-authority who’s comments you can present as though they agree with you. Announce in advance that you will never admit when you’re wrong; that you will continue to defend your biased preconceptions to the automatic rejection –without consideration- of any evidence or arguments that will ever arise to the contrary. This is what every creationist organization says in their ‘statement of faith’. Look them up. This is where they openly admit that they have no accountability."

"... I think it's funny when any Christian organization pretends to be about "family values", because Jesus did not value families... So maybe it's not surprising that all these christian organizations with the word "family" in their name are really hate groups."

"So the failure of scripture to describe anything accurately is obfuscated by assuming the conclusion with confirmation bias. Once again it is God who leads the unbelievers astray, and not their desire to understand the world as it is. And even though several of the world’s richest and most successful, and even the most charitable people are unbelievers, they are still considered losers. Of course the Qur’an is wrong about all these things, and I’m glad to be back in a country where I am allowed to say that. But those are the sort of lies that religion needs to sell itself."

"To the best of my understanding, bigotry, intolerance and hatred are not values, but then faith isn't a virtue either."

"Jack Chick was one of the skid marks in the tighty-whiteys of my generation, and the world is a better place that he’s not stinking it up with his fecal fallacies anymore. Welcome to oblivion Mr Chick, where you will rot without grace in a reality that never had a god in it, and where none of your lies ever came true. The only sad part (for me) is that the moment your brain shut off, you were never able to know how wrong you were about everything you ever said. You never even had the chance to be disappointed, and are blissfully unaware of your eternal failure, you miserable awful piece of shit."

"Your greatest strength, Ray, and possibly your only strength, is in pretending that you don't understand simple things."

"As a little child, I remember having conflicts with other people over religion at 5-years-old, at 8-years-old, and without realising it. Certainly, not realising my whole life would be this whole argument. I would ask simple questions to my babysitter when I was a little boy, like, “How does Jesus turn water into wine? I know water is H2O. I know that wine is alcohol and fruit juice, and I don’t know what the chemical components of that are.” But as it turned out, when I grew up I looked it up. It is only the difference of a carbon atom. The molecules are much more complex. But they involve oxygen, hydrogen, and some additional carbons. That’s it. But all I knew at the time, water is H2O, and alcohol and fruit juice are something else. How does Jesus turn water from H2O into H2O and whatever else? I thought someone would give me some kind of intelligible answer. Like how Jesus does that, whether he uses telekinesis or whatever he does... But they don’t come up with explanations like that, they didn’t want explanations. They didn’t even want to believe people had explanations. When I was growing up, I found believers not only hated accurate scientific answers, but they hated any answer that sounded scientific. It was a funny thing. I was told all of the time that “sceptics were cynics” because we miss out on the big picture that only the believers can see."

"People that make up stuff and call it truth have the power to imagine all kinds of nonsense. But that’s what it is all about. It really is make believe, and it took me the longest time to figure that out. I thought, honestly, naively, even into middle age. I was in my 30s before I realised there were some people who do not believe what they do for a reason."

"Think about every example, every time someone comes up with religion as the reason why they want to impose it. It is always stupid. It is always imposing bigotry or limitations against somebody else’s freedom because you want to pretend in your special brand of pixie dust that is different from the gods and monsters other people want to make up. That’s what it is all about. There is simply no true religion because literally none of it is true."

"Let’s forget for the moment the generalizations about what the Muslim religion as a whole had to do with September 11th. How did anyone ever get the idea that Hinduism had anything to do with that whatsoever? And how is it that no one in this country can tell a Muslim or a Hindu apart from a Sikh? How do these people justify their own senseless stupidity? It pains me that our paranoid reactionary religiously-bigoted society produces people of such stark hatred and bewildering inanity."

"I can show you the truth of evolution. I can show you the facts of evolution. I can show you the positively indicative and physical evidence that is exclusively concordant with one conclusion over any other. I can do that all day, but religion can’t. No religion can because they’re all just made up. They don’t have any truth at all in them, none of them. The best that you can get out of people is that they can give anecdotal nonsense or will cite logical fallacies or they will say, “Somebody wrote once that there were Christians back in the 1st century and that means Jesus existed.”"

"There is no question on whether the prophets existed. We are talking about whether the religions they invented were true. Can you show me the truth of that? Of course, they can’t. None of them can. They don’t want to. They don’t need to. I have seen people make that admission too."

"The pledges come from a believers’ standpoint. The country needs to earn the support of its citizenry. You can’t extort it. You can’t get people indoctrinated by always saying every morning before class where they’ll never question what you’ll do."

"“Evolution is the long blur, a constant and living flow of branching relationships. One thing is always connected to another and another. Having no regard for our love of labels and organization, life rolls on as a continual stream of organic matter. The important thing about the origin of the human brain is not pinpointing some specific time, event, or fossil to declare a beginning in order to satisfy our desire for order. What matters is that we understand the process from which it emerged and how deeply rooted the modern human brain is to its past.”"

"“Don’t passively accept contagions. Turn your mind into an immune system that intercepts invading ideas, assesses them, and destroys the bad ones.”"

"“We have magnificent brains—and use them to believe nonsense and behave as fools. . . . We are enslaved to delusions and too often the servants of subconscious biases. . . . Our great challenge is to use our brains to overcome our brains.”"

"“The brain produces a customized representation of a scene. What we see, as a matter of routine, are functional fantasies meant to be of practical use. If more people filtered every important observation through an awareness of this, it could significantly reduce self-deception and irrationality. And that would be a big step toward a more sensible world."

"“Mozart's music on a smartphone can't redeem or compensate for our lust for the ludicrous. Suckers for empty promises, false hopes, and pseudoscientific babble, we are our own worst enemies. Few people take the time to learn how brains process sensory input in misleading ways and how subconscious biases influence conscious thinking. The result is a global population teeming with easy targets for digitized nonsense and deception.”"

"“The crucial ever-present factor in 2020 was critical thinking. Those who thought well were less likely to tumble into the rabbit holes of QAnon, COVID is a hoax, 5-G towers help spread the virus, racism is scientific, hydroxychloroquine cures COVID, demon sperm is a problem, tracking devices are in vaccines, mass election fraud, etc. The ability and willingness to lean toward evidence and logic rather than side with blind trust and emotion was the key metric behind the madness.”"

"“I am confident that we will continue to move toward greater political and legal freedoms, but with many ups and downs along the way. However, we may find that total freedom or something close to it is a difficult challenge, too. Winning freedom of thought and action is one thing, deciding what to do with it will be quite another.”"

"“It’s scary to think about, but we may finally find unity as a species in self-destruction. The first minute of World War III will render nations, races, and religions meaningless concepts because the first thing to die in nuclear fire will be all our beloved imaginary borders.""

"“Evolution does not mean improvement. There is no ladder of progress, no foresight, no plan, no goal. Evolution is the unintelligent and indifferent process of life changing over time. It doesn’t prepare lifeforms for the future. It can’t because the future is unknown. With evolution, the only winning is being alive right now and the only losing is being extinct. Every species on Earth today is tied for first. We can’t rank contemporary lifeforms as more or less evolved than others. And we can’t rank the long-term survivability of species because today’s big flashy advantage could be tomorrow’s death sentence. The mighty human brain, for example, might turn out to be a doomsday device. If we destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons then big primate brains would have been just another evolutionary dead-end.”"

"“QAnon is a claim so extraordinarily vacuous that it can almost serve as the perfect litmus test for the pathological absence of critical thinking.”"

"“When we jump to a conclusion before doing research, we tend to look for evidence that supports our beliefs and ignore facts that contradict them. This deprives us of the opportunity to grow our knowledge.”"