But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.

Robert Frost

tink

Quote from: Maebh on January 22, 2008, 05:51:32 PM
"Better to buid a fence at the top of the cliff than park an ambulance at the bottom"

"As I walked back to the car, I chatted with an Englishman, who confirmed that, indeed, sheep are dropping into the oceans around Ireland at a regular rate"
Margeret Lynn McLean, noting the general lack of fences along cliff edges on Irish farms

Beverly

"The god of the Bible measures up to the level of a petty and vicious tyrant. The god of the bible punishes babies for the sins of their parents (Exodus 20:5, 34:7; Numbers 14:18; 2 Samuel 12:13-19); punishes people by causing them to become cannibals and eat their children (2 Kings 6:24-33, Lamentations 4:10-11); gives people bad laws, even requiring the sacrifice of their firstborn babies, so that they can be filled with horror and know that god is their lord (Ezekiel 20:25-26); causes people to believe lies so that he can send them to hell (2 Thessalonians 2:11), and many other atrocities, far too many to list here. It would not be hard to measure up to, and exceed, that level of moral purity.  Atheists surpass it every day."
- Doug Krueger -

"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but tis it the God o' the Catholics or the God o' the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
Quentin Crisp

Beverly

The man who believes things are there only by chance cannot give things a real intrinsic value. But for the Christian, there is an intrinsic value. The value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it. It deserves this respect as something which was created by God, as man himself has been created by God.
- Francis A. Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man

Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you.


Ian McEwan

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

Rabindranath Tagore

tink

Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone I love. Woody Allen

Quote by Joseph Lewis:

"Atheism has given to the human race the intellectual monarchs of the world. When the great Darwin discovered the law of the origins of species, he was called an Atheist because he disproved the special creation of Man. When the Chemist went into his laboratory and discovered the indestructibility of matter, he was called an Atheist because he proved the impossibility of a Creator. When the Astronomer pointed his telescope toe sky and explored the regions of unlimited space, he was called an Atheist because he found no God within the confines of space, no heaven within the region of his explorations. When the Geologist determined the age of the earth through its rock and soil and formations, he was called an Atheist because he, too, destroyed a belief in the special six-day creation, and exposed the falsity of the biblical cosmogony. When the Historian went back to ancient and prehistoric times, and discovered civilizations of high ethical and moral culture, of intellectual achievements that are still an amazement to us, he was called an Atheist because he exposed the myth of Adam, uncovered the mistakes of Moses, and branded with the epithet of fraud the commands of Jehovah. When the Physician sought to alleviate the pain and suffering of Man, he was called an Atheist because he refused to accept disease as a special visitation of a vengeful God.

When religion expresses a nobler sentiment than that contained in these words of Robert G. Ingersoll, then, and only then, might it assume a superior attitude. He said:"

"Call me infidel, call me Atheist, call me what you will, I intend to so treat my children that they can come to my grave and truthfully say, 'He who sleeps here never gave us one moment of pain. From his lips, now dust, never came to us an unkind word.'"

Compare that statement with the words of Jesus Christ, and then decide whose mantle you prefer to wear, when he said:

"For I come to set man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: he that loveth his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."
(Matthew 10, 35, 37).

"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."

--C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity

Everyone is like a butterfly, they start out ugly and awkward and then morph into beautiful graceful butterflies that everyone loves.

Drew Barrymore

tink

Yoda: Do, or do not.  There is no try.

-Yoda


(okay so it's a little geeky but I love sci fi and I think the little green bugger has a point :-)

You know that look women get when they want sex? Me neither! Drew Carey

quote by Bertrand Russell:

"Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in Hell. I do not myself feel that any person that is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence."

"As I said before, I do not think that the real reason that people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to do to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous." ... "That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called Ages of Faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion. You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or ever mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."

"Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place the churches in all these centuries have made it."

"The significance and joy in my science comes in those occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, 'So that's how God did it.' My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan."

- Henry "Fritz" Schaefer (Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia)

"Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti. and Mr. Winston Churchill? Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe." I am not very impressed by the splendor of those people. Therefore I think that this argument of design is really a very poor argument indeed. Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless."
- Bertrand Russell,

"It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious. . . . I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life."

- Arthur L. Schawlow (Professor of Physics at Stanford University, 1981 Nobel Prize in physics)

And whether this happiness lasted a hundred seconds or ten minutes, it was so far removed from time that it resembled every other genuine happiness as completely as one fluttering blue lycaenid butterfly resembles another.

Herman Hesse

tink

"Le vin est la plus saine et la plus hygienique des boissons."

"Wine is the healthiest and most hygienic of all drinks."

Louis Pasteur.

I'll drink to that!

LLL&R

Maebh

-12-14 billion years ago god created the Universe
-5 billion years ago he started with our Earth
-3 million years ago he started with humankind
-150,000 years ago he started with the current version of humankind
-5,000 years ago he revealed himself to humankind (so they say)
-And for only 2,000 years he has been able to "enjoy" Christian people

On a timescale of the Universe (100 percent):

-the Earth has existed for 42 percent of the time
-Apeman existed since 0.025 percent of the time
-Humankind itself has existed for 0.00125 percent of the time
-The Christian faith has existed for 0.000042 percent of the time (rounded upwards)
-The time God has been able to enjoy Christian people is 0.000017 percent (rounded upwards).

Thus, god has, for 99,999982 percent of time (rounded downwards = 1,199,999,784,000 years), been bored, has done nothing.  He has been waiting for us, only to leave us behind "alone" once again. Why? For eating an apple, that's why! I know time is nothing to God, but this is preposterous.

- Sogree -