Quote: Preaching

When believers tell others about their ideas, it is 'preaching'. When nonbelievers do it, it is 'aggressive atheism'.

Richard Wiseman
(Twitter, 23/09/2010)

Quote: An Enemy of Humanity

Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity.

He is an enemy of children, whose bodies he has allowed to be raped and whose minds he has encouraged to be infected with guilt. It is embarrassingly clear that the church is less concerned with saving child bodies from rapists than with saving priestly souls from hell: and most concerned with saving the long-term reputation of the church itself.

He is an enemy of gay people, bestowing on them the sort of bigotry that his church used to reserve for Jews.

He is an enemy of women – barring them from the priesthood as though a penis were an essential tool for pastoral duties. What other employer is allowed to discriminate on grounds of sex, when filling a job that manifestly doesn’t require physical strength or some other quality that only males might be thought to have?

He is an enemy of truth, promoting barefaced lies about condoms not protecting against AIDS, especially in Africa.

He is an enemy of the poorest people on the planet, condemning them to inflated families that they cannot feed, and so keeping them in the bondage of perpetual poverty. A poverty that sits ill with the obscene riches of the Vatican.

He is an enemy of science, obstructing vital stem-cell research, on grounds not of morality but of pre-scientific superstition.

Less seriously from my point of view, Ratzinger is even an enemy of the Queen’s own church, arrogantly endorsing a predecessor's dissing of Anglican Orders as “absolutely null and utterly void”, while shamelessly trying to poach Anglican vicars to shore up his own pitifully declining priesthood.

Finally, perhaps of most personal concern to me, he is an enemy of education. Quite apart from the lifelong psychological damage caused by the guilt and fear that have made catholic education infamous throughout the world, he and his church foster the educationally pernicious doctrine that evidence is a less reliable basis for belief than faith, tradition, revelation and authority – his authority.

Richard Dawkins
(from speech given in Rally against the Pope, 18th September 2010)

Quote: National Security

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom."

***

"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"

Dwight D. Eisenhower
34th President of the United States
14.10.1890 - 28.03.1969

Quote: Web of Discourses

"The strangest and most wonderful construction in the whole animal world are the amazing, intricate constructions made by the primate, Homo sapiens. Each normal individual of this species makes a self. Out of its brain, it spins a web of words and deeds, and, like the other creatures, it doesn't have to know what it's doing; it just does it. The web protects it, just like the snail's shell, and provides it livelihood, just like the spider's web, and advances its prospects for sex, just like the bowerbird's bower. Unlike a spider, an individual human doesn't just exude its web; more like a beaver, it works hard to gather the materials out of which it builds it's protective fortress. Like a bowerbird, it appropriates many found objects which happen to delight it - or its mate - including many that have been designed by others for other purposes.
[...]
So wonderful is the organisation of a termite colony that it seemed to some observers that each termite colony had to have a soul (Marais, 1937). We now understand that its organisation is simply the result of a million semi-independent little agents, each itself an automaton, doing its thing. So wonderful is the organisation of a human self that to many observers it has seemed that each human being had a soul, too: a benevolent Dictator ruling from Headquarters."

Daniel C. Dennett
(in "Conciousness Explained", 1991)

Quote: Only a few decades

“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?”

Richard Dawkins
(in "Unweaving the Rainbow", 1998)

Quote: Small Lies

'Thank you. Now...tell me...'
WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM?
'Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?'
NO
'Oh come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact!'
THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.
She turned on him.
'It's been a long night, Grandfather! I'm tired and I need a bath! I don't need silliness!'
THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.
'Really? Then what would have happened, pray?'
A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.
They walked in silence for a moment.
'Ah,' said Susan dully. 'Trickery with words. I would have thought you'd have been more literal-minded than that.'
I AM NOTHING IF NOT LITERAL-MINDED. TRICKERY WITH WORDS IS WHERE HUMANS LIVE.
'All right,' said Susan. 'I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable.'
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
'Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little--'
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
'So we can believe the big ones?'
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
'They're not the same at all!'
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET-- Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME . . . SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
'Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point--'
MY POINT EXACTLY.

Terry Pratchett
(in "Hogfather", 1996)

Quote: Freedom to doubt

"The freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away. I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations."

Richard P. Feynman
(in "The Meaning of It All", Lecture 1, 1998)