Cheerio my brethren! It is I, Dr. Reverend Lucius Chewbuculus, descendant of an ancient lineage of hairy creatures, who seeks peaceful progression by way of the warrior spirit of pre-colonial American antiquity. I hath come across an atheist blog post listing 101 quotes with regard to atheism or religion in general. Here I list and expand upon several quotes that stand out to me. Check out the link above to view all 101 quotes should this sort of thing suit your fancy.
First I would like to point to a few quotes that made me laugh. While I don’t necessarily believe in the magic of fairies, I certainly believe in the magic of laughter. What magic is this? It is impossible to say at this time, however reliable sources in my head say laughter amplifies and reverberates ones Chi, thus realigning the liquid crystalline structure of water in our cells thereby reducing the stress associated with stale rigidity. Laughter is clearly a complicated matter, so you’ll have to just trust me on this. I’ve seen mystical occurrences in the desert, so I am practically a prophet.
“The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” - Penn and Teller
“Remember, Jesus would rather constantly shame gays than let orphans have a family.” - Steven Colbert
“It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.” - Ludwig Feuerbach
“Gods don’t kill people. People with Gods kill people.” - David Viaene
Perhaps some or none of these quotes strike you as funny. No problem, I actually laughed at some and then cried a little. While I don’t necessarily believe in challenging all elves I should encounter at a crossroads to a dueling of swords, I do believe in the power of tears! Nothing in the physical universal is stable or static, this is especially true of life. Actually these conditions exhibit robust inhibitory effects on life. Our cells terminate at lipid structures that crash upon other cells and extracellular matrix and then recede, continually, much like the waves of the ocean. Just as the gravitational force of the moon impacts ocean swells, prophetic insight tells me that the cohesive forces of our tears induce dynamic fluidity of our cell membranes counteracting the stress associated with stale rigidity.
“Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived.” - Isaac Asimov
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” - Richard Dawkins
Many aspects of “religion” are stale, rigid and detrimental to inhabitants of earth. Laughter and tears can attest. The division of people into distinctly characterized sects, the installation of fear and manipulation by it, the intolerance of differences… just to name a few. These stale and rigid aspects of religion stand against life and unity! Religion as we know it is obsolete! I will however concede that many elements of “religion” are conducive to life and unity, such as the elements of “open” community gatherings that encourage interaction and celebration. While I would warn the “religious” to be wary of passing though life without questioning their beliefs and perspectives, I would warn atheists against the same. Perhaps “religion” doesn’t need to be abandoned altogether, just transfomed in a massive evolution towards a new age of enlightenment on earth. A progression that seeks to cultivate and harness free thought, to respect reason and diversity and to unite rather than divide.
VIVA LA TOM PAINE’S GHOST!
“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” - Frank Lloyd Wright
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Religion is stale and rigid, life is not.
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"The division of people into distinctly characterized sects, the installation of fear and manipulation by it, the intolerance of differences… just to name a few. These stale and rigid aspects of religion stand against life and unity!"
Some of these aspects may, on the contrary, sustain life and be key survival mechanisms. If the persistence of religious sects throughout history is any indicator of their evolutionary longevity in terms of cultural evolution perhaps religions do help those, who would not otherwise make the cut, sneak their genes through to the next round of reproduction.
It has been suggested that the ultimate truth of any religion is really of no consequence and that its survival or extinction are directly proportional to the survivability it confers to its living parishioners overthe generations. If something is true but it is not useful to people then why should they believe it? The problem that so many faithful encounter when coming to learn about the theory of human evolution is that it dethrones homo sapiens from their privileged position in the hierarchy of life and makes people feel bad for their genetic shortcomings. religion says you are created in the "image of god." That thought fills people with purpose and is useful to their survival. Only when we as a global civilization can fully comprehend that understanding human evolution can actually help our survival from generation to generation, eliminating cancer through genetic screens, staying one step ahead of viral evolution, can science "sell skepticism" to the masses, only when it becomes apparently useful to us in terms of our survival will that acceptance happen. Look at Thomas Paine, it was much less than useful for him not to believe in the divinity of Jesus, to the contrary his beliefs were quite detrimental to his later career. It is only now in the post-genetic era that people like Paine can be resurrected as heroes for reason. The dance of the generations continue but I do feel we are at a nexus of consciousness regarding science and religion.
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