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 | David Anderson: "The God or Gods we worship are more a part of us than we realize....Only by understanding how in our own minds we have defined their nature can we begin to understand the underlying forces that make us behave the way we do.." | ||||||||||||
| Anon:
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| Karen Armstrong: "Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves." | ||||||||||||
| Louis Agassiz (famous 19th century scientist): "It is the job of prophets and scientists alike to proclaim the glories of God." | ||||||||||||
| David Anderson, "We pattern our thoughts and actions after the God or Gods we worship. They are more a part of us than we realize. Only by understanding how in our own minds we have defined their nature can we begin to understand the underlying forces that make us behave the way we do." | ||||||||||||
| Ron Buford: "God is still speaking," A slogan adopted by the United Church of Christ. It was partly inspired by a statement by Gracie Allen allegedly written to her husband George Burns: "Never place a period where God has placed a comma." 1 | ||||||||||||
| President George W. Bush: "I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord," 2004-JAN-11 in an interview with The Washington Times. 2 | ||||||||||||
| Joseph Campbell: "God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought." | ||||||||||||
| Richard Dawkins:
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| Meister Eckhart: "Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness." | ||||||||||||
| Jonathan Edwards: "The smallest sin is an act of Cosmic Treason against a Holy God." | ||||||||||||
| Bart Ehrman: "Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord. But there could be a fourth option -- legend." | ||||||||||||
| Albert Einstein:
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| Richard Feynman: "God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out." 9 | ||||||||||||
| Charles Fort: "If there is a universal mind, must it necessarily be sane?" | ||||||||||||
| Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: "God has no religion." | ||||||||||||
| Goethe: "As man is, so is his God. And thus is God oft strangely odd." | ||||||||||||
| Sherwood Goozee: "Christian reference to 'God the Father' also poses a problem. Show me a father who wants his children prostrate before him, praying, pleading for mercy, worshiping him, and who then doles out rewards to the chosen submissive ones, and I'll show you a bad father." From the essay IZ Sense. | ||||||||||||
| Sam Harris: "Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal' or they will unmake our world." Sam Harris is author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. | ||||||||||||
| Christopher Hitchens: "God did not make man in his own image. Evidently it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilizations." | ||||||||||||
| Thomas Jefferson: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." | ||||||||||||
| Arthur Koestler: "God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out." | ||||||||||||
| Anne Lamott: "You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image, when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." | ||||||||||||
| C.S. Lewis: "I think we must attack wherever we meet it the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true." | ||||||||||||
| Thomas A. Lewis, posting to an Amazon.com chat: "I don't believe in God for the same reason that most people don't believe in Apollo or Zeus. ... God is just human beings' way of personifying an otherwise completely natural universe." | ||||||||||||
| Rev. Mackeral: "... one of the evidences of the greatness of God is that he doesn't have to exist in order to save us." [A paraphrase] | ||||||||||||
| "A Pilgrim:" "Boycotting anti-Christian movies and picketing abortion clinics only serves to fuel the God-haters of this world and leads to even more God-hating. What the unbelieving world needs to see from the Church is a 'peculiar people' who are not of this world, but are truly transformed by the Gospel." From an Amazon.com book review | ||||||||||||
| Pope John Paul II: "An effective proclamation of the Gospel in contemporary Western society will need to confront directly the widespread spirit of agnosticism and relativism which has cast doubt on reason's ability to know the truth, which alone satisfies the human heart's restless quest for meaning." | ||||||||||||
| Anne Provoost: "If your God is going to drown the world; if your God is going to bring a flood, then why don't you pick a different God?" | ||||||||||||
| Ronald Reagan: "Without God, there is no virtue, because there's no prompting of the conscience. Without God, we're mired in the material, that flat world that tells us only what the senses perceive. Without God, there is a coarsening of the society. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under." 3 | ||||||||||||
| Brian Robertson:
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| "Setarcos'" posting to an Amazon.com chat: When asked: "I am a religious person but I like to hear people's reasons for not believing in god," Setarcos answered: "Is 'which one?' a good enough answer? | ||||||||||||
| Dorothea Soelle: "God has no other hands than ours. If the sick are to be healed, it is our hands that will heal them. If the lonely and the frightened are to be comforted, it is our embrace, not God's, that will comfort them." | ||||||||||||
| John Spong, retired Episcopal bishop: "I don't want a God that would go around killing people's little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son." | ||||||||||||
| George A. Staffa: "Beware of 'God of the Gaps', the Incredible Shrinking Deity who fills the gaps in our understanding until understanding shrinks both gaps and God down to nothing." | ||||||||||||
| UCADIA web site: "...the image of a deity capable to intervening to stop evil but choosing not to act is probably a worse concept than an impotent God that can do nothing." 4 | ||||||||||||
| James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA): "Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours." 5 | ||||||||||||
| Steven Weinberg: "I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer. But in fact the perception that God cannot be benevolent is very old. Plays by Aeschylus and Euripides make a quite explicit statement that the gods are selfish and cruel, though they expect better behavior from humans. God in the Old Testament tells us to bash the heads of infidels and demands of us that we be willing to sacrifice our children's lives at His orders, and the God of traditional Christianity and Islam damns us for eternity if we do not worship him in the right manner. Is this a nice way to behave? I know, I know, we are not supposed to judge God according to human standards, but you see the problem here: If we are not yet convinced of His existence, and are looking for signs of His benevolence, then what other standards can we use?" 7 | ||||||||||||
| Fr. John Weston: "You know that you have created God in your image when God hates the same people that you do." |
References used:
The following information sources were used to prepare and update the above essay. The hyperlinks are not necessarily still active today.
- "God is still speaking," United Church of Christ, at: http://www.stillspeaking.com/
- James G. Lakely, "President outlines role of his faith," The Washington Times, 2004-JAN-12, at: http://washingtontimes.com/
- Quoted in the Massachusetts Family Institute's E-Alert for 2004-JUL-09.
- "The Existence of God," UCADIA.com, at: http://www.ucadia.com/
Roger Highfield, "DNA pioneers lash out at religion," London Daily Telegraph, 2003-MAR-24, at: http://washingtontimes.com/
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Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion," Houghton Miffin, (2006). Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store
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Steven Weinbert, "A Designer Universe."
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Christopher Hitchens, "god is not Great: How religion poisons everything," Twelve Books, (2007). Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store
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Quoted by P.C.W. Davies and J. Brown in "Superstrings: A Theory of Everything," Page 208.
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Copyright © 1996 to 2008 by Ontario
Consultants on Religious Tolerance.
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Last updated: 2008-MAR-22
Compiled by: B.A. Robinson
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