Great Minds on God, Religion and Science

Robert Green Ingersoll

2010-06-13T20:43:00.005+05:30

1833 - 99, called 'The Great Agnostic' and the 'Shakespeare of Oratory', Robert Green Ingersoll was the son of a poor itinerant Protestant Minister who went on to become America's foremost critic of orthodox Christianity and greates champion of science and reason in the second half of the 19th century. He was a top-notch lawyer and Attorney General of the State of Illinois, a Colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, and a prominent Republican politician who could have become Governor of Ilinois, and possibly even the President of the USA but for his agnostic views. A hugely popular orator, he used to address gatherings of 50,000 men and charge $3,500 per talk even in those days. A fine master of English prose, he is considered by many to have been second only to William Shakespeare in his felicity of expression and turn of phrase. Great writers like Mark Twain and scientists like Thomas Edison and Luther Burbank were among his admirers.

1. Every religion has for its foundation a miracle -- that is to say, a violation of nature -- that is to say, a falsehood.

2. A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.

3. My creed is that: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.

4. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.

5. No man with a sense of humour ever founded a religion.

6. No human being has brain enough, or knowledge enough, or experience enough, to say whether there is, or is not, a God. Into this darkness Science has not yet carried its torch. No human being has gone beyond the horizon of the natural. As to the existence of the supernatural, one man knows precisely as much, and exactly as little as another. Upon this question, chimpanzees and cardinals, apes and popes, are upon exact equality.

7. Every cradle asks us, "Whence?" and every coffin, "Whither?" The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed.

8. Reason, Observation and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science.

9. An intelligent man cannot believe that a miracle ever was, or ever will be performed. Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.

10. There are two ways -- the natural and the supernatural. One way is to live for the world we are in, to develop the brain by study and investigation, to take, by invention, advantage of the forces of nature, to the end that we may have good houses, raiment and food, to the end that the hunger of the mind may be fed through art and science. The other way is to live for another world that we expect, to sacrifice this life that we have for another that we know not of. The other way is by prayer and ceremony to obtain the assistance, the protection of some phantom above the clouds.

11. An honest God is the noblest work of man.

12. Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

13. These gods have been manufactured after numberless models, and according to the most grotesque fashions. Some have a thousand arms, some a hundred heads, some are adorned with necklaces of living snakes, some are armed with clubs, some with sword and shield, some with bucklers, and some have wings as a cherub; some were invisible, some would show themselves entire, and some would only show their backs; some were jealous, some were foolish, some turned themselves into men, some into swans, some into bulls, some into doves, and some into Holy Ghosts, and made love to the beautiful daughters of men. Some were married -- all ought to have been -- and some were considered as old bachelors from all eternity. Some had children, and the children were turned into gods and worshiped as their fathers had been. Most of these gods were revengeful, savage, lustful, and ignorant. As they generally depended upon their priests for information, their ignorance can hardly excite our astonishment.

14. Give me the storm and stress of thought and action rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will but first let me eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

15. The agnostic does not simply say, "l do not know." He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of others, and on the fear of others. He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know -- he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact -- he drives you from the realm of reason -- he drives you from the light, into the darkness of conjecture -- into the world of dreams and shadows, and he compels you to say, at last, that your faith has no foundation in fact.

16. Is it possible that an infinite Deity is unwilling that a man should investigate the phenomena by which he is surrounded? Is it possible that a god delights in threatening and terrifying men? What glory, what honour and renown a god must win on such a field! The ocean raving at a drop; a star envious of a candle; the sun jealous of a fire-fly.

17. If, with all the time at my disposal, with all the wealth of the resources of this vast universe, to do with as I will, I could not produce a better scheme of life than now prevails, I would be ashamed of my efforts and consider my work a humiliating failure.

18. I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this.

19. On every hand there seems to be design to defeat design. If God created man -- if he is the father of us all, why did he make the criminals, the insane, the deformed and idiotic? Should the mother, who clasps to her breast an idiot child, thank God?

20. We cannot depend on what are called “inspired books,” or the religions of the world. These religions are based on the supernatural, and according to them we are under obligation to worship and obey some supernatural being, or beings. All these religions are inconsistent with intellectual liberty. They are the enemies of thought, of investigation, of mental honesty. They destroy the manliness of man. They promise eternal rewards for belief, for credulity, for what they call faith. This is not only absurd, but it is immoral.

21. These religions teach the slave virtues. They make inanimate things holy, and falsehoods sacred. They create artificial crimes. To eat meat on Friday, to enjoy yourself on Sunday, to eat on fast-days, to be happy in Lent, to dispute a priest, to ask for evidence, to deny a creed, to express your sincere thought, all these acts are sins, crimes against some god, To give your honest opinion about Jehovah, Mohammed or Christ, is far worse than to maliciously slander your neighbour. To question or doubt miracles is far worse than to deny known facts. Only the obedient, the credulous, the cringers, the kneelers, the meek, the unquestioning, the true believers, are regarded as moral, as virtuous. It is not enough to be honest, generous and useful; not enough to be governed by evidence, by facts. In addition to this, you must believe. These things are the foes of morality. They subvert all natural conceptions of virtue.

22. I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the starless night -- blown and flared by passion's storm -- and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.

23. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

24. To hate man and worship God seem to be the sum of all creeds.

25. The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray.

26. The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know.

27. My principal objections to orthodox religion are two - slavery here and hell hereafter.

28. All “inspired books,” teaching that what the supernatural commands is right, and right because commanded, and that what the supernatural prohibits is wrong, and wrong because prohibited, are absurdly unphilosophic. And all “inspired books,” teaching that only those who obey the commands of the supernatural are, or can be, truly virtuous, and that unquestioning faith will be rewarded with eternal joy, are grossly immoral.

29. Through all the centuries gone, the mind of man has been beleaguered by the mailed hosts of superstition. Slowly and painfully has advanced the army of deliverance. Hated by those they wished to rescue, despised by those they were dying to save, these grand soldiers, these immortal deliverers, have fought without thanks, laboured without applause, suffered without pity, and they have died execrated and abhorred. For the good of mankind they accepted isolation, poverty, and calumny. They gave up all, sacrificed all, lost all but truth and self-respect.

30. Who at the present day can imagine the courage, the devotion to principle, the intellectual and moral grandeur it once reuired to be an infidel, to brave the Church, her racks, her fagots, her dungeons, her tongues of fire -- to defy and scorn her heaven and her hell -- her devil and her God?

31. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak.

32. The Church hates a thinker for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.

33. The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels.

34. The church in all ages and among all peoples has been the consistent enemy of the human race. Everywhere and at all times, it has opposed the liberty of thought and expression. It has been the sworn enemy of investigation and of intellectual development. It has denied the existence of facts, the tendency of which was to undermine its power. It has always been carrying fagots to the feet of Philosophy. It has erected the gallows for Genius. It has built the dungeon for Thinkers. And to-day the orthodox church is as much opposed as it ever was to the mental freedom of the human race.

35. How has the church in every age, when in authority, defended itself? Always by a statute against blasphemy, against argument, against free speech. And there never was such a statute that did not stain the book that it was in and that did not certify to the savagery of the men who passed it.

36. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and imprisonment.

37. Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense. Whoever investigates a religion as he would any department of science is called a blasphemer. Whoever contradicts a priest; whoever has the impudence to use his own reason; whoever is brave enough to express his honest thought, is a blasphemer. When the missionary speaks slightingly of the wooden god of a savage, the savage regards him as a blasphemer. To laugh at the pretensions of Mohammed in Constantinople is blasphemy. To say in St Peter's that Mohammed was a prophet of God is blasphemy. There was a time when to acknowledge the divinity of Christ in Jerusalem was blasphemy. To deny his divinity is now blasphemy in New York.

38. Nature never prompted a loving mother to throw her child into the Ganges. Nature never prompted men to exterminate each other for a difference of opinion concerning the baptism of infants. These crimes have been produced by religions filled with all that is illogical, cruel and hideous. These religions were produced for the most part by ignorance, tyranny and hypocrisy.

39. A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.

40. In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences.

41. Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?

42. Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbours, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments would be urged.

43. For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between science and faith.

44. There is the same difference between religion and science that there is between a madhouse and a university -- between a fortune teller and a mathematician -- between emotion and philosophy -- between guess and demonstration.

45. Supernatural religion will fade from this world, and in its place we shall have reason. In the place of worship of something we know not of, will be the religion of mutual love and assistance - the great religion of reciprocity. Superstition must go. Science will remain.

46. When I became convinced that the Universe is natural — that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world — not even in infinite space. I was free — free to think, to express my thoughts — free to live to my own ideal — free to live for myself and those I loved — free to use all my faculties, all my senses — free to spread imagination’s wings — free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope — free to judge and determine for myself — free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past — free from the popes and priests — free from all the “called” and “set apart” — free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies — free from the fear of eternal pain — free from the winged monsters of the night — free from devils, ghosts, and gods.

47. The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.

48. If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

49. I gave up the Old Testament on account of its mistakes, its absurdities, its ignorance and its cruelty. I gave up the New because it vouched for the truth of the Old. I gave it up on account of its miracles, its contradictions, because Christ and his disciples believe in the existence of devils — talked and made bargains with them, expelled them from people and animals...These stories about devils demonstrate the human, the ignorant origin of the New Testament. I gave up the New Testament because it rewards credulity, and curses brave and honest men, and because it teaches the infinite horror of eternal pain.

50. Did it ever occur to you that if God wrote the Old Testament, and told the Jews to crucify or kill anybody that disagreed with them on religion, and that this God afterward took upon himself flesh and came to Jerusalem, and taught a different religion, and the Jews killed him -- did it ever occur to you that he reaped exactly what he had sown?

51. If Christ, in fact, said "I came not to bring peace but a sword," it is the only prophecy in the New Testament that has been literally fulfilled.

52. If Christ was in fact God, he knew all the future. Before him, like a panorama, moved the history yet to be. He knew exactly how his words would he interpreted. He knew what crimes, what horrors, what infamies, would be committed in his name...Why did he not tell his disciples, and through them the world, that man should not persecute, for opinion's sake, his fellow-man? Why did he not cry, You shall not persecute in my name; you shall not burn and torment those who differ from you in creed?

53. Christ never wrote a solitary word of the New Testament - not one word. There is an account that he once stooped and wrote something in the sand, but that has not been preserved. He never told anybody to write a word. He never said, "Mathew, remember this. Mark, do not forget to put that down. Luke, be sure in your gospel you have this. John, do not forget it." Not one word. And it has always seemed to me that a being coming from another world, with a message of infinite importance to mankind, should at least have verified that message by his own signature.

54. I know that religious people cling to the Bible on account of the good that is in it, and in spite of the bad. I know that Freethinkers throw away the Bible on account of the bad in it, in spite of the good. I hope the time will come when the book will be treated like other books and will be judged upon its merits, apart from the fiction of inspiration.

55. The Bible is not inspired in its morality, for the reason that slavery is not moral, that polygamy is not good, that wars of extermination are not merciful, and that nothing can be more immoral than to punish the innocent on account of the sins of the guilty...Suppose there were no passages in the bible except those upholding slavery, polygamy, and wars of extermination, would anybody claim that it was the word of God? I would like to ask if there is a Christian in the world who would not be overjoyed to find that every one of these passages was an interpolation?

56. God improves as man advances.

57. The Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered his wife Fausta, and his eldest son Crispus, the same year that he convened the Council of Nice to decide whether Jesus Christ was a man or the Son of God. The Council decided that Christ was consubstantial with the Father. This was in the year 325. We are thus indebted to a wife-murderer for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the Saviour.

58. [Christ] came, they tell us, to make a revelation, and what did he reveal? "Love thy neighbor as thyself"? That was in the Old Testament..."Return good for evil"? That was said by Buddha seven hundred years before he was born. "Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you"? This was the doctrine of Lao-tsze. Did he come to give a rule of action? Zoroaster had done this long before: "Whenever thou art in doubt as to whether an action is good or bad, abstain from it." Did he come to teach us of another world? The immortality of the soul had been taught by Hindus, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans hundreds of years before he was born.

59. For many centuries the church filled the world with devils -- with malicious spirits that caused storm and tempest, disease, accident and death -- that filled the night with visions of despair; with prophecies that drove the dreamers mad. These devils assumed a thousand forms -- countless disguises in their efforts to capture souls and destroy the church. They deceived sometimes the wisest and the best, made priests forget their vows. They melted virtue's snow in passion's fire, and in cunning ways entrapped and smirched the innocent and good. These devils gave witches and wizards their supernatural powers, and told them the secrets of the future. Millions of men and women were destroyed because they had sold themselves to the Devil.

60. But let me ask the clergy a few questions: How did your Devil, who was at one time an angel of light, come to sin? There was no other devil to tempt him. He was in perfectly good society -- in the company of God -- of the Trinity. All of his associates were perfect. How did he fall? He knew that God was infinite, and yet he waged war against him and induced about a third of the angels to volunteer...Why did God create those angels, knowing that they would rebel? Why did he deliberately sow the seeds of discord in heaven, knowing that he would cast them into the lake of eternal fire?... Why does God allow these devils to enjoy themselves at the expense of his ignorant children?...Does he want his children misled and corrupted so that he can have the pleasure of damning their souls?

61. All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr — never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth.

62. Every fact is an enemy of the church. Every fact is a heretic. Every demonstration is an infidel. Everything that ever really happened testifies against the supernatural.

63. Let every minister answer: If you knew the devil had written a work on human slavery, in your judgment, would he uphold slavery, or denounce it? Would you regard it as any evidence that he ever wrote it, if it upheld slavery? And yet, here you have a work upholding slavery, and you say that it was written by an infinitely good God!

64. The absurdity of the doctrine known as "The Fall of Man," gave birth to that other absurdity known as "The Atonement." So that now it is insisted that, as we are rightfully charged with the sin of somebody else, we can rightfully be credited with the virtues of another. Let us leave out of our philosophy both these absurdities.

65. If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child...What right have you...Mr.Clergyman...to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear?

66. It is told that the great Michelangelo, in decorating a church, painted some angels wearing sandals. A cardinal looking at the picture said to the artist: "Whoever saw angels with sandals?" Michelangelo answered with another question: "Whoever saw an angel barefooted?"

67. It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions--some one who had the grandeur to say his say. I believe it was Magellan who said, "The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church." On the prow of of his ship were disobedience, defiance, scorn, and success.

68. Let us be honest. Did all the priests of Rome increase the mental wealth of man as much as Bruno? Did all the priests of France do as great a work for the civilization of the world as Diderot and Voltaire? Did all the ministers of Scotland add as much to the sum of human knowledge as David Hume? Have all the clergymen, monks, friars, ministers, priests, bishops, cardinals and popes, from the day of Pentecost to the last election, done as much for human liberty as Thomas Paine? — as much for science as Charles Darwin?

69. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called "faith."

70. What man can believe that blood can appease God? And yet, our entire system of religion is based upon that belief. The Jews pacified Jehovah with the blood of animals, and according to the Christian system, the blood of Jesus softened the heart of God a little, and rendered possible the salvation of a fortunate few. It is hard to conceive how the human mind can give assent to such terrible ideas, or how any sane man can read the Bible and still believe in the doctrine of inspiration.

71. Who can estimate the misery that has been caused by this most infamous doctrine of eternal punishment? Think of the lives it has blighted, of the tears it has caused, of the agony it has produced. Think of the millions who have been driven to insanity by this most terrible of dogmas. This doctrine renders God the basest and most cruel being in the universe. Compared with him, the most frightful deities of the most barbarous and degraded tribes are miracles of goodness and mercy. There is nothing more degrading than to worship such a god.

72. Ministers say that they teach charity. This is natural. They live on alms. All beggars teach that others should give.

73. It may be that ministers really think that their prayers do good and it may be that frogs imagine that their croaking brings spring.

74. I do not say, and I do not believe, that Christians are as bad as their creeds. In spite of church and dogma, there have been millions and millions of men and women true to the loftiest and most generous promptings of the human heart.

75. The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever.

76. The church has always been willing to swap off treasuries in heaven forcash down.

77. Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of ‘inspiration.’ It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge—that is to say, of science.

78. When worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilized.

79. Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labours of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.

80. The hope of science is the perfection of the human race. The hope of theology is the salvation of a few, and the damnation of almost everybody.

81. We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles...Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years.

82. I do not believe in forgiveness as it is preached by the church. We do not need the forgiveness of God, but of each other and of ourselves. If I rob Mr. Smith and God forgives me, how does that help Smith? If I, by slander, cover some poor girl with the leprosy of some imputed crime, and she withers away like a blighted flower and afterward I get the forgiveness of God, how does that help her? If there is another world, we have got to settle with the people we have wronged in this. No bankrupt court there. Every cent must be paid.

83. The old lady who said there must be a devil, else how could they make pictures that looked exactly like him, reasoned like a trained theologian -- like a doctor of divinity.

84. With soap, baptism is a good thing.

85. Nothing has the same prospect of longevity as a good religious lie.

86. One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests.

87. Is it possible that an infinite God created this world simply to be the dwelling place of slaves and serfs? Simply for the purpose of raising orthodox Christians? That he did a few miracles to astonish a few of them? That all the evils of life are simply his punishments, and that he is finally going to turn heaven into a kind of religious museum filled with Baptist barnacles, petrified Presbyterians and Methodist mummies?

88. I would have the Pope throw away his tiara, take off his sacred vestments, and admit that he is not acting for God -- is not infallible -- but is just an ordinary Italian. I would have all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests and clergymen admit that they know nothing about theology, nothing about hell or heaven, nothing about the destiny of the human race, nothing about devils or ghosts, gods or angels. I would have them tell all their "flocks" to think for themselves, to be manly men and womanly women, and to do all in their power to increase the sum of human happiness.

89. When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few. To nearly all the children of men, reading and writing were unknown arts. The poor were clad in rags and skins -- they devoured crusts, and gnawed bones. The day of Science dawned, and the luxuries of a century ago are the necessities of to-day. Men in the middle ranks of life have more of the conveniences and elegancies than the princes and kings of the theological times. But above and over all this, is the development of mind. There is more of value in the brain of an average man of to-day -- of a master-mechanic, of a chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four hundred years ago. These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. They were not found in cathedrals or behind altars -- neither were they searched for with holy candles. They were not discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation and experience -- and for them all, man is indebted to man.

90. It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon the book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people and for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have had nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemnly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah.

91. [On Thomas Paine] He had more brains than books; more sense than education;more courage than politeness; more strength than polish. He had no veneration for old mistakes -- no admiration for ancient lies. He loved the truth for the truth's sake, and for man's sake. He saw oppression on every hand; injustice everywhere; hypocrisy at the altar, venality on the bench, tyranny on the throne; and with a splendid courage he espoused the cause of the weak against the strong, of the enslaved many against the titled few.

92. [On William Shakespeare] More than three centuries ago, the most intellectual of the human race was born. He was not of supernatural origin. At his birth there were no celestial pyrotechnics...The cradle in which he was rocked was canopied by neither myth nor miracle, and in his veins there was no drop of royal blood. This babe became the wonder of mankind. Neither of his parents could read or write. He grew up in a small and ignorant village on the banks of the Avon, in the midst of the common people of three hundred years ago. There was nothing in the peaceful, quiet landscape on which he looked, nothing in the low hills, the cultivated and undulating fields, and nothing in the murmuring stream, to excite the imagination -- nothing, so far as we can see, calculated to sow the seeds of the subtlest and sublimest thought. So there is nothing connected with his education, or his lack of education, that in any way accounts for what he did...Many have tried to show that he was, after all, of gentle blood, but the fact seems to be the other way. Some of his biographers have sought to do him honour by showing that he was patronized by Queen Elizabeth, but of this there is not the slightest proof. As a matter of fact, there never sat on any throne a king, queen, or emperor who could have honoured William Shakespeare.

93. [On Charles Darwin] This century will be called Darwin's century...Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity. He has not only stated, but he has demonstrated, that the inspired writer knew nothing of this world, nothing of the origin of man, nothing of geology, nothing of astronomy, nothing of nature; that the Bible is a book written by ignorance -- at the instigation of fear...He was held up to the ridicule, the scorn and contempt of the Christian world, and yet when he died, England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest. Charles Darwin conquered the intellectual world, and his doctrines are now accepted facts.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

2010-06-04T16:46:00.003+05:30

1919 - 95, an ordinary working woman who became America's best known atheist in 1963 when she challenged the practice prevailing in a Baltimore public school (where her son was studying) of beginning each day with the Lord's Prayer and a Bible reading. This led to two landmark judgments of the U.S Supreme Court banning compulsory prayer and Bible reading in schools funded by public money citing the doctrine of separation of the Church and the State. She also challenged the grant of tax exemption to Church properties. She went on to found American Atheists, the largest U.S. atheist organisation. She was kidnapped and murdered in 1995 along with her son and grand-daughter. She authored over 25 books.

1. Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.

2. Religion is induced insanity.

3. Religion -- all religions -- create a world of make-believe. Nothing in religion is related to objective reality, to science, to real life. Every religious idea you have goes on only in your head. Every bit of religion is subjective, not objective. No prayer you ever said, no outcry you ever made to god has ever been heard or answered.

4. Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

5. You need to be free of irrational ideas. You need to repudiate those who would attempt to return you to medievalism; you need to look forward, not backward; you need to strive for intellectual freedom, not mental bondage; you need to seek joy, not sorrow; love not fear; and you can do that only when you realize who and what your oppressor was -- and is.

6. This is your life: What you see is what you get. If you are gong to make your life better for yourself -- the task is yours. If you want to make the world better for all its inhabitants -- all animals, all vegetation, all life forms -- you need to work on it. There needs to be a scientific analysis of what we have, what we want, and how to get from one point to another. No god ever gave any man anything, nor ever answered any prayer at any time - nor ever will.

7. Do you know anybody who's come back with a firsthand report on heaven? If you do, let me know. Until then, you'll pardon me if I don't buy it. If a humanist or an atheist or an agnostic says, "We'll bake you a pie," we can go right into the kitchen and bake it, and you can eat it an hour later. We don't promise you a pie in the sky by and by. It's charlatanry to promise people something that no one can be sure will ever be delivered. But it's even worse to offer people a reward, like children, for being good, and to threaten them with punishment if they're not.

8. I support religious freedom. I feel everyone has a right to be insane...If they want religious schools, build them! Just do not ask for the land to be tax free. Do not ask for a government grant to build them...Do not ask for government money for teachers' salaries, or more books, or anything else. Just go ahead and do your thing...just exactly the same as if you were a nudist. Somebody doesn't get a tax break for being a Mason or whatever they are interested in.

9. I feel that religions can have administrative bodies, social services, hospitals, anything at all, as long as they pay for it totally themselves, and make certain that the people who are involved with them are aware that they are basing their premises on religious ideology.

10. In an unconstitutional partnership with the state, the church can impose the most irresistible, if covert, controls conceivable.

11. About six years ago, Life magazine ran an article on the historicity of Jesus, and I was floored to find that they conceded the only evidence we have for his existence is in the Gospels. But don't take Life's word for it. In his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the most definitive study that's ever been done on the subject, Albert Schweitzer admitted that there isn't a shred of conclusive proof that Christ ever lived, let alone was the son of God. He concludes that one must therefore accept both on faith.

12. Judeo-Christianity is basically a philosophy of life which espouses tenets that are anti-education, anti-science, anti-peace, anti-woman, anti-human sexuality, and anti-life.

13. Each and every one of you has, continually, feelings of personal inadequacy,...dependency, self-abnegation, obedience to authority, repentance, and guilt...reinforced by this religion. This religion gives you goals which are outside of reality...It fills you with ideas of guilt over the most common human experiences -- usually related to sex. In this room, right now, each of you, in your own lives, has agonized over the fact that you have masturbated. Masturbation isn't sinful.

14. But the most heinous crime of the Church has been perpetrated not against churchmen but against churchgoers. With its poisonous concepts of sin and divine punishment, it's warped and brainwashed countless millions. It would be impossible to calculate the psychic damage this has inflicted on generations of children who might have grown up into healthy, happy. productive, zestful human beings but for the burden of antisexual fear and guilt ingrained in them by the Church. This alone is enough to condemn religion.

15. [Why I am an Atheist?] Because religion is a crutch, and only the crippled need crutches. I can get around perfectly well on my own two feet, and so can everyone else with a backbone and a grain of common sense. One of the things I did during my 17 years as a psychiatric social worker was go around and find people with mental crutches, and every time I found one, I kicked those goddamn crutches until they flew. You know what happened? Every single one of those people has been able to walk without the crutches--better, in fact. Were they giving up anything intrinsically valuable? Just their irrational reliance upon superstitions and supernatural nonsense. Perhaps this sort of claptrap was good for the Stone Age, when people actually believed that if they prayed for rain they would get it. But we're a grown-up world now, and it's time to put away childish things.

16. I was about 12 or 13 years old when I was introduced to the Bible. I picked up the Bible and read it from cover to cover one weekend -- just as if it were a novel -- very rapidly, and I've never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism in it -- the whole thing shocked me profoundly. I remember l looked in the kitchen at my mother and father and I thought: Can they really believe in all that? Of course, this was a superficial survey by a very young girl, but it left a traumatic impression.

17. I think this would be the best of all possible worlds if everybody were an atheist or an agnostic or a humanist -- his or her own particular brand -- but as for compelling people to this, absolutely not. That would be just as infamous as their imposing Christianity on me. At no time have I ever said that people should be stripped of their right to the insanity of belief in God. If they want to practise this kind of irrationality, that's their business. It won't get them anywhere; it certainly won't make them happier or more compassionate human beings; but if they want to chew that particular cud. they're welcome to it.

18. An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.

19. Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.

20. An Atheist loves himself and his fellowman instead of a god. An Atheist knows that heaven is something for which we should work now -- here on earth -- for all men together to enjoy.

21. But people...don't even know what Atheism is. It's not a negation of anything. You don't have to negate what no one can prove exists. No, Atheism is a very positive affirmation of man's ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems. I'm thrilled to feel that I can rely on myself totally and absolutely; that my children are being brought up so that when they meet a problem they can't cop out by foisting it off on God.

22. I was shamed into it by my son, Bill, who came to me in 1960 -- he was 14 then -- and said: "Mother, you've been professing that you're an Atheist for a long time now. Well, I don't believe in God either, but every day in school I'm forced to say prayers, and I feel like a hypocrite. Why should I be compelled to betray my beliefs?" I couldn't answer him. He quoted the old parable to me: "It is not by their words, but by their deeds that ye shall know them" -- pointing out that if I was a true atheist, I would not permit the public schools of America to force him to read the Bible and say prayers against his will. He was right. Words divorced from action supporting them are meaningless and hypocritical. So we began the suit. And finally we won it. I knew it wasn't going to make me the most popular woman in Baltimore, but I sure as hell didn't anticipate the tidal wave of virulent, vindictive, murderous hatred that thundered down on top of me and my family in its wake.

23. Now, I'd been a psychiatric social worker for 17 years, but within 24 hours after I started the case, I was fired from my job as a supervisor in the city public welfare department. And I was unable to find another one, because the moment I would go in anywhere in town and say that my name was Madalyn Murray no matter what the job opening, I found the job filled; no matter how good my qualifications, they were never quite good enough. So my income was completely cut off. The second kind of reprisal was psychological. The first episode was with our mail, which began to arrive, if at all, slit open and empty -- just empty envelopes. Except for the obscene and abusive letters from good Christians all over the country, calling me a bitch and a lesbian and a communist for instituting the school-prayer suit -- they somehow arrived intact, and by the bushel-basketful... (We would) get incredible anonymous phone calls at every hour of the day and night, which were more or less along the same lines as the letters.

24. So my life and the life of my family has been completely disrupted in absolutely every way. But it's been worth it. It's uncovered a vast cesspool of illegitimate economic and political power in which the Church is immersed right up to its ears, and I intend to dive in headfirst and pull it out of there dripping wet for all the world to see -- no matter how long it takes, no matter whose feet get stepped on in the process, no matter how much it costs, no matter how great the personal sacrifice.

25. One of the things that I am most proud of is that people can say, "I am an Atheist," in the United States today, without being called a Communist Atheist, or an Atheist Communist. I separated those two words. I think that's probably the best thing that I did. What we are interested in is...that the human condition can be ameliorated somewhat by human beings working in concert to do something. We must do something about the pollution.We have to do something about the greed...We must stop war. And we're not going to do any of those things as long as we feel the solution is to go to church on Sunday, or funnel our energy into prayer or religious solutions.

26. Once involved in the school-prayer fight, I rapidly became aware of, and appalled by, the political and economic power of the Church in America -- all based on the violation of one of our nation's canon laws: the separation of church and state. The churches rose to power on the income from tax-free property. What earthly -- or heavenly -- right have they got to enjoy a privilege denied to everyone else, even including nonprofit organizations? None!

27. My contention is that with the churches exempted from property taxation, you and I have to pay that much more in taxes -- about $140 a year per family, according to a recent survey -- to make up for what they're not contributing. If this exemption were rescinded, our property taxes would be substantially lowered...It could have a profoundly salubrious effect on the entire economy. I decided that if nobody else was going to do anything to rectify this colossal inequity, I'd have to do it myself. So I instituted a suit against the city of Baltimore demanding that the city assessor be specifically ordered to assess the Church for its vast property holdings in the city, and that the city tax collector then be instructed to collect the taxes once the assessment has been made.

28. On a nationwide basis, I would guess that the various churches would have to pay annually an amount at least equal to the national debt. But it's impossible for me to make an exact estimate, because the churches hide their wealth in every way they can -- deliberate falsification as to the value of property, registering it under phony names in order to obscure the fact that the Church owns the property. In Baltimore alone, I know that the Roman Catholic Church alone would have to pay taxes of almost $3,000,000 a year...They have a tremendous amount at stake -- more than any other church, because they're the biggest property owners and they've dabbled in business more than any other church. More than any other church, they've been greedy about grabbing up land and property -- not just in Baltimore, but all over the country.

29. According to a Catholic priest writing in The Wail Street Journal, the assets and real-estate holdings of the Church "exceed those of Standard Oil, A.T.&T. and U. S. Steel combined." I'd make an educated guess that 20 to 25 percent of the taxable property in the U.S. is Church-owned. In a recent book, Church Wealth and Business Income, it was estimated that this property -- all of it tax-exempt -- is worth upwards of 80 billion dollars. I know that's a fantastic, unbelievable figure, but there's every reason to believe that it's on the conservative side; and this amount is increasing yearly at a geometric rate. They're moving into everything -- gas stations, banks, television stations, supermarket chains, hotels, steel mills, resort areas, farms, wine factories, warehouses, bottling works, printing plants, schools, theatres -- everything you could conceivably think of that has nothing to do with religion, they are moving into big. They're even coming in as stockholders in the big oil companies, and the Bank of America is almost entirely owned by the Catholic Church. And mind you -- they don't pay a penny in taxes on any of it, even on the income from rentals. The Roman Catholic Knights of Columbus, for example, pays no income tax on any of its vast rental revenue -- which comes from such sources as the land on which Yankee Stadium stands. Almost every constitutional authority has spoken on this issue, and the overwhelming consensus is that we will win if we can get it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Abraham Kovoor

2010-05-28T23:52:00.006+05:30

1898 - 1978, Kerala-born Sri Lankan academic who was a well-known crusader against superstition and obscurantism and the scourge of Satya Sai Baba and other godmen in India. In 1963, he threw an open challenge offering to pay 1 lakh Sri Lankan Rupees to anyone who could perform a paranormal or miraculous feat under fraud-proof conditions. He is the author of the books "Begone Godmen" and "Gods, Demons and Spirits".

1. He who does not allow his miracles to be investigated is a crook; he who does not have the courage to investigate a miracle is a gullible; and he who is prepared to believe without verification is a fool!

2. Some of the worst fears of my childhood were about ghosts, charms, curses, hell, and the anger of gods and demons. Systematic investigations and rational thinking from my university days made me doubt the veracity of numerous religious myths, occultism, prophetic predictions, immortal spirits, and claims of miracle performers.

3. I was a Christian in my youth because I was born and brought up in a Christian home by Christian parents. Most of us cling on to our parents' religion because we are indoctrinated by them from our childhood. But when I came of age to think and act independently, I discarded Christianity and became a rationalist because I could not accept the Bible as the word of an omniscient god. Similarly I discarded the beautiful land of my birth - Kerala - and adopted Sri Lanka - an equally beautiful country - because most of the Sri Lankans are followers of Gouthama Buddha who taught a more rational and tolerant philosophy than the founders of any other religion.

4. Nearly everyone in our midst believes foolishly in auspicious times, lucky numbers, omens, evil eye, evil tongue, lucky colours, lucky gems, charms, astrology, palmistry, light reading, tumbler talks, planchettes, kanapuwa, anjanamelia, card reading, numerology, necromancy, demonology, spiritualism, possession, materialisation, marvellous powers of prayers, poojas, manthras, sacrifices, pilgrimages, offerings to gods, pirith nool, holy ash, crucifix, relics, talisman, sacred places, sacred persons, sacred times, sacred objects, telepathy, clairvoyance, portent of gecko's chirp, dog's howl, owl's hoot and numerous other absurdities.

5. Sincere and honest persons earn their living by sincere and honest work. Dishonest persons do so by cheating those who work and earn. To the category of dishonest parasites who thrive by cheating the credulous among honest workers belong the teachers, preachers and priests of dubious religions and cults; mystics, saints, arahants and sidhas who claim that they have acquired enlightenment through meditation and penance; gurus, babas, anandas, rishis, swamijis and yogis who claim that they have obtained miraculous powers through yogic practices or as boons from gods; oracles, exorcists, charmers, soothsayers, fortune tellers and all types of occultists who claim that they have developed their special powers through spiritual exercises, astrology, palmistry, numerology, telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, precognition, necromancy, spirit possession, etc.

6. (On his open challenge first issued in 1963) I am prepared to pay an award of one lakh Sri Lanka rupees to any one from any part of the world who can demonstrate supernatural or miraculous powers under fraud-proof conditions. This offer will remain open till my death, or till I find the first winner. Godmen, saints, yogis, sidhas, gurus, swamis and all others who claim that they have acquired miraculous powers through spiritual exercises or divine boons, can win this award if they can perform any one of the following "miracles": (i). Read the serial number of a sealed-up currency note; (ii). Produce an exact replica of a currency note; (iii). Stand stationary on burning cinders for half a minute without blistering the feet with the help of his god; (iv). Materialize from nothing an object I ask; (v). Move or bend a solid object using psychokinetic power; (vi). Read the thought of another person using telepathic powers; (vii). Make an amputated limb grow even one inch by prayer, spiritual powers, Lourdes water, holy ash, blessing etc.; (viii). Levitate in the air by yogic power; (ix). Stop the heart-beat for five minutes by yogic power; (x). Walk on water; (xi). Leave the body in one place and materialize in another place; (xii). Stop breathing for thirty minutes by yogic power; (xiii). Develop creative intelligence or get enlightened through transcendental or any other type of meditation; (xiv). Speak an unknown language as a result of rebirth or by being possessed by holy or evil spirit; (xv). Produce a spirit or ghost to be photographed; (xvi). Disappear from a film when photographed; (xvii). Get out of a locked room by divine power; (xviii). Increase the quantity by weight of a substance; (xix). Detect a hidden object; (xx). Convert water into petrol or wine; (xxi). Astrologers and palmist who hoodwink the gullible by claiming that astrology and palmistry are scientific, can win my award if they can pick out correctly - within a margin of five per cent error - those of males, females, the living and the dead from a set of ten palm prints or ten astrological charts giving the exact time of birth correct to the minute, and places of birth with their latitudes and longitudes.

7. Although no god was responsible for the creation of the Universe and the living things in it, man on the Planet Earth was responsible for the creation of numerous gods in the past, and probably he will continue to do so in the future.

8. Intelligence, a mental attribute, cannot exist without the functioning of a brain tissue...There cannot be a mind or intelligence without life and body and there cannot be life without a body. Just as there cannot be fire without a fuel to burn, there cannot be life without a body conducting respiration. Thus to speak about impersonal intelligence is crazy nonsense.

9. Spiritualists believe that discarnate soul has both life and mind. This is an absurd belief, because it is impossible to have life and mind without a respiring body. These bodiless 'spirits' are said to materialize, fully clad of course, before neurotic visionaries. How these disembodied spirits can speak without lungs and vocal cord, or how they can do physical acts without muscular bodies, or from where do they get their dresses to be fully clad, do not seem to bother these blind believers in spirits.

10. The so-called soul is a combination of both life and mind since life and mind cannot survive the body it is meaningless to talk about "an everlasting life", or an immortal soul. Gouthama knew this truth and preached the doctrine of 'anathma' more than twenty-five centuries ago. It is unfortunate that the doctrine of re-incarnation, a Brahminical belief which militates against 'anathma' doctrine, crept into some Buddhist Scriptures long after the death of Goutama, the Buddha.

11. We have to accept the scientific fact that everything in the universe is material. The old distinction between matter and energy, matter and mind, material and spiritual, no longer exist in the light of modern science. The fundamental particles that constitute matter are nothing but energy. Thus the "mind over matter" concept of philosophers is now an out-moded one. Mind is purely material in origin and working.

12. The renowned neurologist, Walter Hess, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his marvellous discoveries about the working of the mind has proved the material natre of the so-called spiritual values ot spiritual attributes such as love, compassion, kindness, metta, muditha, karuna, etc. He has demonstrated that mental emotions such as love, hatred, compassion, cruelty, kindness, anger, hunger, amor, sympathy, apathy, pain, pleasure, dislikes, fear etc., could be induced at will by stimulating the respective brain centre with electrical impulse. Thus Walter Hess proved that the so-called spiritual values are nothing but electro-chemical activities of the neurons, and not divinely inspired.

13. Is there any purpose in nature? From our observation of nature we can derive no adequate basis for such a belief. On this Earth, which is a minute speck of the universe, simple algae can evolve over centuries of time into a magnificent forest. Again, the same beautiful forest can be destroyed by a tornado. There is no plan or purpose in all this.

14. If we look around us, we see good as well as bad things in nature. It is not understandable why a benevolent God has created so many evil things. If there is a creator, all things both beautiful and ugly, good and bad, must come from him. And why has a benevolent god created so many evil things? If everything that happens in the Universe is pre-ordianed by god, then the mysterious being should take full responsibility for all the miseries, murders, torturing, wars, genocides, famines, plagues, rapes, robberies, and all types of vices. But no; religions have always had to have it both ways: while god was omnipotent, man was also responsible. He had free will, and so was accountable for his evil thoughts and actions. Should not the blame fall on the omniscient creator who gave man free will to be evil?

15. When one looks at the immensity of the Universe, in comparison to which our Earth is less than a minute particle of dust, surely an intelligent power that could create such an immensity would have little interest in the Earth, let alone the man on it. Why should an omniscient god create a vast Universe for man when he cannot see even a billionth part of it? It just does not make sense.

16. What are the qualifications needed to become a successful godman? First, he must be skilled in woolly talks using meaningless jargon such as self-liberation, self-realisation, self-purification, ultimate reality, cosmic force, cosmic intelligence, cosmic soul, discarnate life, extra-cerebral mind, karmic force, nirvanic consciousness, divine force, divine light, extra-sensory perception, kundalini, etc. Secondly, he must be able to perform a few conjuring tricks under the pretext of 'miracles'. The third and the most important requisite is to have a few publicity agents to spread numerous cock-and-bull stories about the miraculous powers of the godman through books, newspapers, films, radio and the TV. With suitable publicity, devotees will gather around a godman like flies around a decomposing carcass.

17. Some of the local devotees of Sathya Sai Baba found fault with me for writing about their godman undergoing a surgical operation for appendicitis. One doctor devotee had the audacity and credulity to say at a meeting of devotees, without any feeling of shame that it was not for removing his own appendix that Sathya Sai Baba underwent surgical operation. "Out of compassion for a devotee whose appendix was giving him trouble, the Bhagwan took the diseased appendix into his own body in exchange for his healthy one, and it was that diseased appendix of the devotee that was removed from the Bhagwan's body."

18. Why do people fall easy prey to these charlatan cultures? The answer is mass hysteria. When two or three persons genuflect or prostrate before a godman, the others will simply follow. These imitators lack independent thinking and reasoning. If someone shouts "Haro Hara", "Hallelujah" or "Sadh Sadh" they too will shout. While the imaginary gods like jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, etc do not exist, godmen do exist, and are a menace to humanity.

19. Though all religious teachings postulate a 'life after death', there are no valid reasons or evidence to believe in it.

20. Stories about children recalling their memories of their previous life have to be discarded as "pure myths". All those who have investigated such cases dispassionately and scientifically have been able to discover the fictitious nature, and the fraud behind such stories.

21. To say that child prodigies are born with the memory of the acquired knowledge of the previous birth is as absurd as the assertion of some rebirth investigators like Prof. Ian Stevenson, Prof. H.N. Bannerji and Mr. V.F.Gunaratne that physical characteristics such as facial features, complexions, wounds and scars can reappear in the reborn bodies. If it is true, it will be a death blow to the Eye Donation Society. Fear of being reborn blind will prevent people from donating their eyes.

22. If minds can have extra-cerebral existence capable of being reborn again and again, where were these minds before life originated on our planet? Can there be thought without a thinker, memory without a person to remember, or consciousness without someone to be conscious?

23. Although astrology furnishes no true guide to the characters or fortunes of men, and although its pretensions to science are false, it will continue to flourish as long as there are gullible fools in this world. Astrologers give their clients excuses for the past, praise for the present, and hope for the future.

24. I have made a large collection of astrological predictions made by the so-called eminent astrologers of various countries. My analysis of such predictions has clearly showed that none of those astrologers has scored anything above the operation of simple chance.

25. While astrologers are mostly deluded persons, I cannot say so about those who claim to possess Olas or Saptha Rishi Vakkiam containing the horoscopes of all people dead, living and yet to be born, written by Rishis of old. They are utter frauds because such a thing is a physical impossibility.

26. Neurotics and psychotics in meditation, who claim to have rceived divine revelations, who claim to have achieved enlightenment, who claim to possess paranormal miraculous powers, and those who profess to possess the power to know all the secrets of the unknown and the unknowable, are all fit subjects for the psychiatrist's couch, and not saints and sages to be adored or worshipped. Diversity in religions is due to the diversity of the hallucinations of their respective founders.

27. When illiterate and ignorant persons suffer from mental aberrations, they are branded as lunatics, and nobody attaches any value to what they say. On the other hand, if the victim of hallucinations happens to be a talented intellectual, he may be able to convince his hearers and readers that he has experienced superconsciousness, ultimate reality, enlightenment, oneness with god, self-realisation, etc., and it may be that he will have numerous devotees and disciples. Mentally deranged persons of extraordinary ability often become founders and preachers of religions.

28. He who believes in sacredness is sure to get mentally tormented by acts of desecration too. Psychology tells us that such mental traumas are the causes of neurotic afflictions, mostly among the credulous and mentally feeble types. Among the numerous neurotics brought to me, I have found by statistics that the prevalence of neurosis among communities is directly proportional to the extent of superstitious beliefs held by them. Even in such communities, there are more women neurotics than men for the same reason.

29. The so-called beneficial effects of sacrifices, pilgrimages, offerings, prayers, blessings, worships, vows, consecrations, dedications, ordinations, Lourdes water, theerthams, prasadams, sacraments, baptism, anointing of holy ash, yagna, pooja, etc., are merely subjective experiences without any objective reality. Similarly curses, charms, 'vas kavi' hoonyams, ill omens, inauspicious times, horoscopes, evil spells, etc., can be harmful only to gullible fools.

30. Academic education and intelligence need not be considered as marks of non-gullibility. In fact, some of the highly educated persons in exalted positions are extremely gullible, even resorting to witchcraft. It is only persons capable of rational thinking who can free themselves from credulity. Blind believers are mentally blind in spite of their intelligence and education.

31. According to the well-known Bibliologist Marshall J. Gauvin, no other book in the world has such perverting influence on man than the so-called Holy Bible. Lying, cheating, stealing, slavery, murder, cannibalism, genocide, incest, prostitution, adultery, nudism, pornography, sexual permissiveness, tyranny and torture are some of the crimes the Bible sanctions and defends...Considered as a moral guide, the Bible is the most dangerous book in the world...Those Christian apologists who clamour for the teaching of the Bible in our schools should read their Bible themselves before they press their demand.

32. Yet we may admit that the vast majority of mankind today are living in a much more advanced condition morally, socially and economically than in any previous age. The burning at the stake, the torture chamber and the casting into the den of lions are things of the past. To what cause should this progress be attributed? Certainly not to any one of the existing creeds or religions. Religions, at all times, did their best to keep human beings in ignorance, superstition and divided among themselves.

33. The forerunners of the French Revolution, the great Holbach, La Mattrie, Descartes and Leibnitz in Europe, and Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Paine and others in America prepared the way for the new age, 'the Age of Reason'... It was rationalistic and atheistic science and philosophy that inaugurated the age of Humanism with the new morality based on a real brotherhood of man regardless of race, creed, colour or caste.

Osho

2010-05-16T20:45:00.005+05:30

1931 - 1990, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Osho was a famous Indian mystic, philosopher, guru, and cult leader with a large international following. He was a silver-tongued orator and a prolific writer (over 600 books). He courted controversy by being critical of Mahatma Gandhi, socialism, and of all organised religions. He became known as the "sex guru" because of his advocacy of sexual freedom. His syncretic teachings emphasised the importance of meditation, awareness, love, celebration, creativity and humour – qualities that he viewed as being suppressed by adherence to static belief systems, religious tradition and socialisation. He established an Ashram in Pune, India and in Oregon, USA - the latter closed down in 1985 and Osho was deported by the US Government on charges of immigration violations.

1. There is no God. All the arguments for God are refuted. Those who have really reached the highest point of consciousness have never accepted the idea of God. Patanjali, the man who single-handedly created the whole science of Yoga, did not believe in God. Buddha, perhaps the greatest man who has ever walked on the earth was, as H.G Wells wrote about him, “the most godless person yet the most godly".

2. God is not a discovery, it is an invention. Priests found it very convenient to exploit in the name of God. The Vedas say that they are written by God, and there are such stupid things in the old Vedas that if God has written them, then God is condemned along with the Vedas. Christians say The Bible is written by God, and if The Bible is written by God — there are at least five hundred pages of sheer pornography in The Bible — then God is the greatest pornographer in the whole existence. If you look in the Hindu Puranas you will find just pornography. Hindus have even made shivalinga a god. It is good that Sigmund Freud never came to know about shivalinga — that there are people who are worshipping phallic symbols in their temples without any idea what they are worshipping.

3. There is not a single argument in favour of God. It is an absolutely useless hypothesis, and it will be good if we drop that hypothesis completely, because with that dropping, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity — all simply disappear. And their churches and their thousands of cardinals and bishops and Popes, who are simply nothing but parasites on humanity, also disappear.

4. God is the greatest calamity. Yes, people should be godly — that means they should be truthful, they should be sincere, they should be loving, they should be conscious. That makes them godly, but that does not make them God. I am destroying God and spreading godliness to every human being. It is better that it is spread far and wide as a quality, as a fragrance, rather than being confined to a statue in a temple and worshiped. When you can be it, why worship it?

5. The basic, the most fundamental thing is to be aware of your own innermost core, because that is the secret of the whole existence. That’s where the Upanishads are tremendously important. They don’t talk about a God, they talk about godliness. They don't bother about prayer; their whole emphasis is on meditation.

6. The old religions have not helped humanity to progress in consciousness, in being. On the contrary they have hindered man’s growth, his spirituality, in every possible way. The old religions became simply a facade of politics. In the name of religion, politics has reigned all over the world.

7. One thing that is most important to understand is that truth cannot be organised. The moment you organise it, you kill it. Truth is an individual experience, and it can never become a collective phenomenon. Those who have attained the experience of it were individuals, not crowds, not mobs, not Hindus, not Mohammedans, not Christians, not Jews; but just individuals. Moses is an individual, just as Mahavira is; Gautam Buddha is an individual just as Jesus Christ is. They experience something in their aloneness, in their silence, in their innermost shrine of being. The church is not outside, it is within you.

8. Any human being who is becoming independent of conditionings, of religions, scriptures, prophets and messiahs, has arrived home. He has found the treasure which was hidden in his own being.

9. The old religions are just corpses, stinking; still they are immensely powerful, because the whole past has given them prestige, authority. And nobody wants to leave power and authority. They go on manipulating humanity, exploiting human beings; they go on keeping you retarded. They don’t want you to evolve, because the moment you evolve and you become intelligent, you will be free from the bondage which is their vested interest.

10. Anybody who is intelligent cannot be a Hindu, cannot be a Mohammedan, cannot be a Christian — because all these religions have done so many ugly actions in the past, they have killed millions of people, burned people alive in the name of God, in the name of love. They have been simply destructive; they have not enhanced beauty, they have not contributed to humanity in any way. They are parasites. They have sucked you for centuries, they have been living on your blood.

11. It is time that churches should be transformed into schools, into hospitals. Temples and mosques, synagogues and gurudwaras should be used for art galleries, music schools, for teaching painting and sculpture. And the priests should cease to exist. It is ugly; the priesthood should simply disappear from the earth, because man does not need anybody to mediate between himself and existence.

12. Existence and you are enough. There is no need for any agent between you and existence to interpret, to say, “How beautiful!”, to take messages from you to existence and bring messages from existence to you. That’s what the priests have been doing down the ages; they have kept you away from reality. They have been standing between you and reality. A truly religious person does not need anybody between himself and the sunrise, between himself and the stars in the sky, between himself and the fragrance of the flower. It is all divine, you just have to be open to it.

13. All that you need is just to be silent and listen to existence. There is no need of any religion, there is no need of any God, there is no need of any priesthood, there is no need of any organisation.

14. It seems unbelievable, that even in the twentieth century the Pope could declare, a few months ago, that to communicate with God directly is a sin. You should go through the priest, the right channel — because if people start going directly to God, confessing to God, praying to God, the millions of priests will be unemployed.

15. The priests don’t do anything; their whole function is to deceive you. Because you don’t understand the language of God, and you are not so evolved, just for some fee — a donation to their church or to their temple — they will do the job for you. All those donations go in the pockets of the priests. They don’t know anything about God, but they are very learned — they can repeat scriptures like parrots. But their inner desire is not for God, not for truth — they are not seekers, they are exploiters.

16. Your priests' prayers are for power, for prestige, for money. They are politicians in disguise; they are doing politics in the name of God — the politics of numbers. There are now seven hundred million Catholics; naturally the Pope is the most powerful religious man in the world. Every religion has been trying to increase its population by different methods. Mohammedans are allowed to marry four women so that they can produce four children per year. And they have been successful: they are the second largest religion after Christianity. Organised religion is only a content-less, meaningless word; hidden inside is the politics of numbers.

17. I have to make it clear to you that authentic religion is always individual. The moment truth is organised, it dies; it becomes a doctrine, a theology, a philosophy — but it is no longer experienced, because the crowd cannot experience. Experience happens only to individuals — separately. It is almost like love. You cannot have organizations of love — so that you need not bother; the organization will take care, the priest will love on your behalf.

18. Organised religion is another form of politics. Just as I have always condemned politics as the lowest activity of human beings, the same is my attitude about organised religions. You can see it: the priests and the politicians have always been in conspiracy against humanity. They have been supporting each other. They have divided things between themselves so that your worldly life belongs to the politician, he is the ruler there, and your inner life belongs to the priest, he is the ruler there.

19. God is a presence, not a person. Hence all worshipping is sheer stupidity. Prayerfulness is needed, not prayer. There is nobody to pray to; there is no possibility of any dialogue between you and God. Dialogue is possible only between two persons, and God is not a person but a presence – like beauty, like joy.

20. God simply means godliness. It is because of this fact that Buddha denied the existence of God. He wanted to emphasize that God is a quality, an experience – like love. You cannot talk to love, you can live it. You need not create temples of love, you need not make statues of love, and bowing down to those statues will be just nonsense. And that’s what has been happening in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques.

21. Man has lived under this impression of God as a person, and then two calamities have happened through it. One is the so-called religious man, who thinks God is somewhere above in the sky and you have to praise him. to persuade him to confer favors on you, to help you to fulfill your desires, to make your ambitions succeed, to give you the wealth of this world AND of the other world. And this is sheer wastage of time and energy. And on the opposite pole the people who saw the stupidity of it all became atheists; they started denying the existence of God. They were right in a sense, but they were also wrong. They started denying not only the personality of God, they started to deny even the experience of God.

22. The theist is wrong, the atheist is wrong, and man needs a new vision so that he can be freed from both the prisons. God is the ultimate experience of silence, of beauty, of bliss, a state of inner celebration. Once you start looking at God as godliness there will be a radical change in your approach. Then prayer is no more valid; meditation becomes valid.

23. Martin Buber says prayer is a dialogue; then between you and God there is an ”I-thou” relationship – the duality persists. Buddha is far closer to the truth: you simply drop all chattering of the mind, you slip out of the mind like a snake slipping out of the old skin. You become profoundly silent. There is no question of any dialogue, no question of any monologue either. Words have disappeared from your consciousness. There is no desire for which favors have to be asked, no ambition to be fulfilled. One is now and here. In that tranquility, in that calmness, you become aware of a luminous quality to existence.

24. The scriptures are not meant to make you lame but to give you the capacity to fly. If the scriptures have made you lame, then it is sure that you have misunderstood them or you have interpreted them wrongly. If the scriptures have made you sad, then you must have missed something in them or must not have understood them properly. The scriptures which have snatched away your natural capacity to fly or flow are not your friends – you have turned them into your enemies. A scripture is a scripture only if it gives you freedom. A scripture is a scripture if it makes you natural. A scripture is a scripture if it does not fill you with condemnation for others and is able to make you realize that the divine is hidden also within them.

25. Any religion which considers life meaningless and full of misery, and teaches the hatred of life, is not a true religion. Religion is an art that shows how to enjoy life.

26. Down the centuries millions of people have sacrificed themselves and everything they had to become enlightened. But nothing has happened; there seems to be something fundamental missing. They forgot one thing: that Gautam Buddha was not following anybody, and they are following Gautam Buddha; that Jesus Christ was not following anybody, and they are following Jesus Christ...You have to be just yourself, individual, not a carbon copy of anybody else. You have to assert your original face. Existence believes in originality, not in imitation. There are millions of Christians, but not a single Christ.

27. I am reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement — he said that the first Christian and the last Christian died on the cross two thousand years ago, the first and the last. Then what are these crowds doing? Almost half of humanity is Christian. What is this half of humanity doing if the first and the last Christian has already died two thousand years ago? They are simply deceiving themselves. The days of organized religion are finished.

28. I declare a totally different conception. I will not even call it religion because that word is associated with the old religions; I will call it only religiousness. I am the beginning of religiousness. Religion is bound to be Hindu, bound to be Mohammedan, bound to be Christian. Religiousness need not be Hindu, how can it be Hindu? How can it be Mohammedan? If love cannot be Hindu, cannot be Christian, if silence cannot be Jewish, then why should religiousness — a quality, a fragrance — have any adjective to it?

29. Yes, I am the beginning of something new, but not the beginning of a new religion. I am the beginning of a new kind of religiousness which knows no adjectives, no boundaries; which knows only freedom of the spirit, silence of your being, growth of your potential; and finally the experience of godliness within yourself — not of a God outside you, but a godliness overflowing from you.

30. Organised religions — whether it is Christianity or Hinduism or Mohammedanism — have not been seekers of truth. In two thousand years, what truth has organised Christianity added to the statements of Jesus? So what is the need of this organisation? It is not increasing religiousness in the world, it is simply repeating what Jesus has said — which is available in books for anybody to read. In twenty-five centuries, how many Buddhists have searched for the truth, or have found the truth? — just a long line of parrots repeating what Gautam Buddha has found. And you should be reminded that Gautam Buddha was not part of any organized religion; neither was Mahavira part of any organised religion, nor was Jesus part of any organised religion — they were individual seekers.

31. Truth has always been found by individuals. That is the privilege of the individual, and his dignity. Organised religions have created wars — just like politicians have done. Their names may be different…politicians fight for socialism, for communism, for fascism, for nazism, and organised religions have been fighting for God, for love, for their concept of what truth is. And millions of people have been killed in the clashes between Christians and Mohammedans, between Christians and Jews, between Mohammedans and Hindus, between Hindus and Buddhists. Religion has nothing to do with war; it is a search for peace. But organised religions are not interested in peace, they are interested in becoming more and more powerful and dominant.

32. I condemn the organised religions in the same way I condemn the politicians — they are nothing but politics. So when I said to you that religious people should be respected, honoured — the politicians should go to them for advice — I was not talking about organised religions; I was talking only about religious individuals. And a religious individual is neither Hindu nor Christian nor Mohammedan. How can he be? — God himself is not Hindu, not Mohammedan, not Christian. And the man who knows something of the divine becomes coloured with his divinity, becomes fragrant with godliness.

33. Organised religions should disappear from the world — they should drop this mask of being religious. They are simply politicians, wolves hiding themselves in the skin of sheep. They should come into their true colors; they should be politicians — there is no harm in that. And all the time they are politicians, but they are playing the game in the name of religion.

34. Organised religions don’t have any future. They should drop their disguise and come truly out in front as politicians, and be part of the political world so that we can find the authentic religious individual — who will be very rare. But just a few authentic religious individuals can lead the whole world towards light, towards immortal life, towards ultimate truth.

35. Each time a man discovers the truth, immediately one of the most cunning parts of humanity, the priests, surround him. They start compiling his words; they start interpreting his words; and they start making it clear to people that if you want to know truth, you have to go via them — they are agents of God. They may call themselves prophets, they may call themselves messengers; they may choose any name, but the reality is, they are self-appointed agents of God. They don’t know God, but in the name of God, they exploit humanity.

36. When the priesthood is dissolved, organised religions finished, then humanity will be one. Otherwise, they have created so many barriers between man and man. Every evening since I came here I have gone for a walk. The first day one man said, “Osho, this is not pranam that I am doing to you; this is salaam.” Pranam is Hindu, salaam is Mohammedan. I said to him, “To me, both mean the same.” The second day he said, “I have come again.” I said, “That’s good, but don’t say what you said on the first day.”Why create barriers? It is the same experience. A loving welcome… whether you call it pranam or whether you call it salaam, does it make any difference? But in his mind there must be great difference, that he wanted to indicate to me that he is a Mohammedan. Just to be human is enough. To be Mohammedan, to be Hindu, to be Christian is to be below your humanity, is to fall from your height, is to lose your dignity.

37. In the East people have condemned the body, condemned matter, called matter "illusory," maya - it does not really exist, it only appears to exist; it is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. They denied the world, and that is the reason for the East remaining poor, sick, in starvation. Half of humanity has been accepting the inner world but denying the outer world. The other half of humanity has been accepting the material world and denying the inner world. Both are half, and no man who is half can be contented. You have to be whole: rich in the body, rich in science; rich in meditation, rich in consciousness. Only a whole person is a holy person, according to me.

38. For five years, nobody goes to visit the Shankaracharya, but when the election comes near, then the Prime Minister goes to visit the Shankaracharya. He goes for a pilgrimage to the temples, high and deep in the mountains of the Himalayan range. For what?...These people need votes; they have to pay respect to the leaders of religions. And a Shankaracharya feels great that the Prime Minister is touching his feet. And the followers of the Shankaracharya, the Hindus, feel that “our Prime Minister is a very religious person.”

39. When the Pope comes to India, even the President and the Prime Minister with his whole cabinet, stand in line at the airport to receive him. For what? The third largest religion in India is now Christianity, and to pay respect to the Pope means all the votes of the Christians will be yours.

40. There have been only two source religions in the world: Hinduism and Judaism. Both are dead. Jainism and Buddhism are offshoots of Hinduism but because the root is dead, the branches are dead too. And Christianity and Islam are branches of Judaism, and because the root is dead, the branches are dead too. These are dead phenomena.

41. Just as I love Zen people in the tradition of the Buddha, I love Hassids in the tradition of Moses and I love Sufis in the tradition of Mohammed. These three are still alive in some small way because these three have never become established religions; they have always been anti-establishment, they have always been alternatives to the established religion, they have always been rebellious...My religion is something of a meeting of Zen, Sufism and Hassidism–and something more thrown in.

42. In the East, knowledge is transformation – and meditation is the instrument for that transformation. With Christianity, sin became the centre. And it is not only your sin. It is the original sin of humanity. You are burdened with a concept of sin. This creates guilt, tension. That is why Christianity could not really develop meditative techniques. It only developed prayer. What can you do to fight sin? You can be moral and prayerful!

43. Jains in particular have created a very deep feeling of inferiority. Guilt in the Christian sense is not there because there is no question of sin, but there is a deep feeling that unless one goes beyond certain things, one is inferior. This deep inferiority works in the same way as guilt. Jains have not created any meditative techniques either. They have only created different formulas: Do that. Do that. Don’t do this…The whole concept is centred around behaviour. A Jain monk is ideal as far as his behavior is concerned, but as far as his inner being is concerned he is very poor. He goes on behaving just like a puppet. That is why Jainism has become a dead thing. Buddhism is not dead in the same way because a different emphasis is there. The ethical part of Buddhism is just a consequence of the meditative part...You have to be transformed inwardly. Doing good can help, it can become a part, but meditation is the centre. So...only Buddhists have developed deep meditation.

44. Zen is not a believer's world. It is not for the faithful ones; it is for those daring souls who can drop all belief, unbelief, doubt, reason, mind, and simply enter into their pure existence without boundaries. But it brings a tremendous transformation. Hence, let me say that while other religions are involved in philosophies, Zen is involved in metamorphosis, in a transformation. It is authentic alchemy: it changes you from base metal into gold. But its language has to be understood, not with your reasoning and intellectual mind but with your loving heart...And a moment comes suddenly that you see it, which has been eluding you your whole life. Suddenly, what Gautam Buddha called "eighty-four thousand doors" open.

45. Meditation has two parts: the beginning and the end. The beginning is called dhyana and the end is called samadhi. Dhyana is the seed, samadhi is the flowering. Dhyana means becoming aware of all workings of your mind, all the layers of your mind – your memories, your desires, your thoughts, dreams – becoming aware of all that goes on inside you. Dhyana is awareness, and samadhi is when the awareness has become so deep, so profound, so total that it is like a fire and it consumes the whole mind and all its functionings. It consumes thoughts, desires, ambitions, hopes, dreams. It consumes the whole stuff the mind is full of. Samadhi is the state when awareness is there, but there is nothing to be aware inside you; the witness is there, but there is nothing to be witnessed. Begin with dhyana, with meditation, and end in samadhi, in ecstasy, and you will know what God is. It is not a hypothesis, it is an experience. You have to LIVE it – that is the only way to know it.

46. Scientology is...utter bullshit! Be aware of such stupid things. They move in the world in the name of science because science has credit, so any kind of stupidity can pretend to be scientific...People are very much impressed by shining gadgets, instruments…Man is so unaware and unconscious of himself that he falls a victim to anything! You just need to propagate it, advertise it – and our century has the most efficient media to advertise, to propagate things. Scientology is nothing but a kind of hypnosis – it can hypnotize you. And real religion is just the opposite: it is dehypnosis.

47. Scientology is an ideology. It talks in terms of science, and science has great appeal. Science is the modern superstition. The modern man is immediately impressed if you bring science in. So anything and everything has to be proved scientifically. And there are quacks who even go on proving God scientifically, and who are trying to measure states of meditation – as if meditation can be measured. Whatsoever you can measure will be mind; no-mind cannot be measured.

48. Mind is measurable, because mind is a machine. But no-mind is immeasurable, it has no limits. So all the nonsense that goes on in the name of measuring…and people are very much impressed. They are sitting before very shiny gadgets – it gives an impression of science – wires attached to the head, to the hands, just like a cardiogram. They are trying to figure out the inner silence. It is impossible! Whatsoever you come to record is mind. All waves are of the mind.

49. Meditation cannot be recorded; there can be no cardiogram, there can be no machine which can record it. It is very elusive, it is very subjective, it cannot be reduced to an object. But because the Western mind is very objective, is trained in science, now there are quacks around who are cashing in on this attraction and this training.

50. Scientology is one of those pseudo religions. The real religion has no need of any such thing. And scientology is destroying many people’s minds. Modern man is in a special situation: the old religions have lost their grip, their credibility, and the new religion has not yet arrived – there is a gap. And man cannot live without religion, it is impossible; religion is such a need. So if the true is not available, the false becomes prevalent, the false becomes a substitute. Scientology is a false religion, and there are many like scientology.

51. Real religion consists of becoming utterly silent, unconditioned, unhypnotized. It is going beyond mind, beyond ideology; it is going beyond scripture and beyond knowledge. It is simply falling into your own interiority, becoming utterly silent, not knowing a thing, and functioning from that state of not knowing, from that innocence. When you function out of innocence, your actions have a beauty of their own.

Paul Kurtz

2010-05-07T00:27:00.001+05:30

1925 - , Paul Kurtz is America's best known and the most energetic sceptic and secularist. He is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Chair Emeritus of the Committee for Sceptical Inquiry (CSI) and the Council for Secular Humanism, founder and Chair of Prometheus Books, and Editor-in-chief of Free Inquiry Magazine. He is also founder and Chair Emeritus of the Centre for Inquiry. He is a former Co-President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU); a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Humanist Laureate and President of the International Academy of Humanism. Author of nearly 50 books, including 'The Transcendental Temptation', 'A Sceptic's Handbook of Parapsychology', 'The New Scepticism', 'Living Without Religion' and 'Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Secularism', Paul Kurtz is also a prominent essayist, and TV and Radio personality.

1. The scientific rationalist is a sceptic about received myths. He believes the dominant religions of revelation to be mythological conjectures full of vain hopes and false illusions. These religious illusions are kindled by a fearful response to the ambiguities of mortal existence, and they weigh down frail human spirits who are seeking to find in their dreams some refuge from the vicissitudes of fortune...Paradoxically, as Kierkegaard admitted, the more absurd the claim, the more grandiose the dream; the more incredible the mystery, the more committed and devoted the true believers are likely to become.

2. The beginning of wisdom is the awareness that there is insufficient evidence that a god or gods have created us and the recognition that we are responsible in part for our own destiny. Human beings can cultivate this good life, but it is by cultivation of the virtues of intelligence and courage, not faith or obedience, that we will most likely be able to do so.

3. There was the supposition at one time that, given the availability of education, the increase in literacy, and the elimination of poverty and disease, humankind might someday outgrow the religiosity of its infancy. There was the hope that in its place might develop a mature scientific outlook and a responsible moral and social philosophy grounded in a naturalistic view of the human condition...But the belief that reason and science would properly emancipate human beings from false mythologies of illusion was mistaken; for the twentieth century has witnessed the growth of virulent new ideological religions (fascism and Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism) and the persistence of orthodox, supernaturalistic religious dogmas. It has also witnessed an outburst of a new set of beliefs in the paranormal and the occult: astrology, UFOlogy, psychic and space-oriented science-ficton religions, and a bizarre magical-spiritual world view.

4. As for myself, having been a professor of philosophy all my life, I have examined this question year in and year out: Does God exist? I've probably spent more time on the God question than anyone else here -- unless there are philosophy professors around -- and I find that none of the arguments can stand up to scrutiny. Many people have asked me, "Aren't you afraid that you don't believe in God? What will you do when you meet your Maker?" I quote Bertrand Russell, who would say, "You didn't give me sufficient evidence." If God is a rational being, surely He's not going to punish me for using my mind.

5. I am also skeptical about the claims of revelation...Do you accept the revelations of Mohammed, who denies Christianity and Judaism? Do you accept the revelations of Joseph Smith? Do you accept the revelations of Reverend Moon, or of Mary Baker Eddy? We can raise serious questions about revelations...the only way I could accept a revelation is if it is corroborated by independent, objective observers, whose testimony is reliable.

6. My only point here is that the phrase "God exists" is at the very least intended as a statement that has existential import, and that the theist in this sense is making a factual claim, which by definition is "non-factual" in that God exceeds the category of observable fact. That is why I can maintain, as a sceptic, that I am an igtheist, for I do not understand what the theist is talking about. I cannot say wheher or not such a being exists since I do not comprehend what is being asserted.

7. If one accepts revelation at face value, then it is relevant to ask which one should be taken as veridical? For the legitimacy of [one prophet] has been disputed by other prophets, in which case they cancel each other out. That revelations are messages from God is doubtful. Most likely, they are the internalised soliloquies spun out of the human imagination. The fact that so many people have been willing to accept them as divinely inspired is a remarkable commentary on human gullibility, but the strength of the propensity to believe suggests that there is a deep-seated temptation at work.

8. The accounts of prophecies and revelations in the Bible are clearly uncorroborated. In the Old Testament, divine commandments often appear in the form of dreams. These are allegedly conveyed to the prophets by God. In the case of Moses, the voice from Jehovah, the burning bush, and the Ten Commandments were delivered to him alone on Mount Sinai. No one was able to check the authenticity of the revelations. New Testament revelations are likewise questionable, for they were transcribed 30 to 70 years after the death of Jesus, according to biblical scholars, and none of the Gospels were written by disciples who knew Jesus directly. Based on an oral tradition, the so-alled testimonials are often contraditory, espeially the accounts of Jesus' ministry, his virgin birth, and his resurrection. These so-called sacred books more likely are fictionalised stories penned by propagandists for a faith, rather than objective historical documents.

9. The Koran is supposed to record the pronouncements of Mohammed, which wer llegedly delivered to him by Gabriel, messenger of Allah. But the first set of revelations were received by Mohammed while he was alone in the hills and caves of Hirja, outside of Mecca, and later his revelations were rendered to meet practical moral and political problems; and thus they did not have the benefit of inter-subjective corroboration.

10. The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can.

11. Religions are among the oldest human institutions on the planet. They developed in agricultural and nomadic societies. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" expresses the metaphors of pre-modern and pre-scientific cultures. Many of them would later oppose modern secular trends and fight against democratic reforms. Indeed, the achievements of human progress in the past have often been in spite of opposition from devout religious believers. Today is another day, and religious liberals now support many of the ideals and values of modern secularism and humanism; they may support science and even not be unsympathetic to biblical criticism. Yet in spite of this, they often cling to earlier mythological creeds spun out in the infancy of the race.

12. One charge often hurled at disbelievers is that we have nothing positive to offer. On the contrary, we…have always maintained that it is possible for an individual to lead a good life and be morally concerned about others without belief in God. We have pointed out that the traditional creeds often condoned heinous crimes: censorship, repression, slavery, war, torture, genocide, the domination of women, the denial of human freedom, and opposition to new frontiers of scientific research.

13. Surely, there must be other sources of morality besides religion. From the fatherhood of God, one can deduce all sorts of contrary moral prescriptions, as one can justify bloodshed, torture, punishment, and death in the name of Allah. This is an old story in human history that has been repeated time and time again. When religion becomes dogmatic, when it becomes thoroughly entrenched in human civilization and institutions, the only way to overcome differences of creed seems to be violence. The best antidote for such devastating nonsense, in my judgment, is the cultivation of critical thinking and the administration of a dose of scientific skepticism to unmask the claims of faith.

14. What is secular humanism? It is a scientific method of inquiry, and it is skeptical about religious claims. But most important, secular humanism is positive and affirmative. It is committed above all to an ethical outlook. People who say that secular humanists are wicked have apparently not heard what secular humanists say. In fact, secular humanism is the oldest ethical doctrine in the West. It goes back to Socrates and Aristotle who pondered ethical questions and talked about leading a noble life of excellence, about the importance of the virtues. It can be found in the writings of Epicurus and the Epicureans, of Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics. It comes to fruition again with Spinoza and with Immanuel Kant, the greatest German philosopher. Should we remove Kant from the universities? Or the English philosopher John Stuart Mill? Humanism derives from this great tradition of philosophical efforts to base ethics upon reason. Ethical philosophy attempts to work out a rational interpretation of the moral life as best we can.

15. On the contrary, religious ethics has often had negative and destructive consequences. For the fatherhood of God, people have marched off to wars and killed each other. Look at the German army in the First World War, declaring "Gott mit uns" as the French army proclaimed, "Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!" both slaughtering each other on the Western front. Look at the battles between Muslims and Jews, or Hindus and Muslims, or Protestants and Catholics.

16. Simply believing in God does not make one virtuous. Many evils have been defended in the name of God: slavery in the South before abolition (slavery was based on the inferiority of the black people as being the descendants of Ham -- you should read John C. Calhoun, the influential Southern thinker, who so argued), the patriarchal society (demeaning women and insisting that only the man is the lord and master -- as is the case with the Promise Keepers today). I was reading USA Today this morning, and see that the head of the Promise Keepers has violated the seventh commandment. Remember what the seventh commandment is? You shall not commit adultery. He confesses today and in an upcoming book that he committed adultery and that his daughter had two children born out of wedlock.

17. So belief in God is no guarantee of virtue. Furthermore, people who believe in God often disagree. Liberal Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Jews, and liberal Catholics favour abortion rights. Conservative Catholics and fundamentalists do not. Muslims believe that God favors polygamy, that a man can have four wives. Christians and Jews do not. Many people draw on religion to condemn homosexuals. Others do not. It is interesting that the Catholic bishops have come out against capital punishment -- Catholic bishops agree with secular humanists on this point, or we agree with them. But many fundamentalists here in the South and elsewhere favour capital punishment. So to say that those who believe in God are virtuous is not true, and to claim that all the saints are within the churches and the temples, and all the sinners outside, is simply false.

18. The Bible expressed the point of view of a nomadic and agricultural tribe living on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. It expressed the best wisdom of that day -- it was pre-scientific. The King James translation, at least, has some great literary qualities. There were surely some moral excellences expressed in that document. But the Bible was limited by its times. For example, I would like to read the Tenth Commandment: "You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, his slave, his slave girl, his ox, his ass, or anything that belongs to him" (Exodus 12:17). Why the talk about slavery? The Bible is limited by the times. We need to go beyond the pre-industrial, pre-information age and develop a morality appropriate to the developing world today.

19. The same is true of the New Testament. I look upon it as a powerful literary and moral work, but it should be read with the best tools of science and linguistic analysis. We need to recognize that it too was limited by the epoch in which it was written.

20. The horrendous slaughter between two factions of Islam (Sunnis and Shias), claiming thousands not only killed but tortured each month in Iraq, proceeds from doctrinal differences about the origins of Islam and the proper successors of Muhammad...One can only imagine why, thirteen centuries later, men and women are so concerned about these differences that they will destroy each others' mosques and slaughter one another over them. This, of course, is reminiscent of the battles between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Europe, such as the Hundred Years War in the early modern period, when there were disputes about the hegemony and authority of the Bishop of Rome...But this happened centuries ago, and Christians by and large have learned to tame their animosities and have abandoned the Inquisition and Holy Crusades. Apparently, the disputes in the Muslim world are as great as ever, and the world watches in horror as violent jihad is unleashed.

21. The key lesson to learn is that it's not so much the existence of God (or Allah) that is in dispute, for both factions claim to believe in the deity, but the authenticity and legitimacy of divine Revelation, delivered, in this case, to Muhammad, who transmitted it to humanity. The key issue is whether these ancient revelations (those of Muhammad, Jesus, Paul, Moses, Abraham, etc.) have been corroborated by reliable eyewitnesses or rather have been corrupted by an oral tradition and insufficient eyewitnesses. But that is another matter.

22. Judge Moore has the Ten Commandments posted inside the courtroom, and he doesn't believe in the separation of church and state. This raises the question of whether the Ten Commandments should be in the courtroom? Now, I don't think that they should, under the principle of the separation of church and state. But I also have a second reason: I think some of the Commandments are wicked, and I think they have a bad influence...You know the Second Commandment?...It says, "You shall not make a carved image for yourself or the likeness of anything in the heaven above. I am the Lord your God, a jealous God." The Bible then goes on to say, "I punish the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me." Is this not collective guilt against the unborn? If you commit a sin, your children's children's children will be punished? Is that moral? It seems to me that that Commandment is very wicked indeed, and we have the right to criticize it.

23. There are actually two versions of the Ten Commandments, one in Exodus and the other in Deuteronomy. There are numerous other commandments in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Exodus. The one that I like to quote is in Exodus 21: "Whoever strikes his father or mother shall be put to death." Or another one, "No descendant of an irregular union (that is, a bastard) even down to the tenth generation, shall become a member of the assembly of the Lord" (Deuteronomy 23:32). Or another one: "No man whose testicles have been crushed..." Or, "A man may not have intercourse with his wife during menstruation." And so on.

24. The number of non-religious secularists (in the US) has virtually doubled in the past decade, going from 8 to 16 per cent of the population. This is far less than other western democracies, but it is now the third largest grouping in the US, after Roman Catholics and Baptists.

25. Secularists need to point out that the blue states where the religious right predominate have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, divorce and murder, and the lowest rates are in Democratic red states such as New England and the coastal areas - so much for the superiority of religious moral values!

26. What disturbs us is the preposterous outcry that atheists are "evangelical" and that they have gone too far in their criticism of religion. Really? The public has been bombarded by pro-religious propaganda from time immemorial—today it comes from pulpits across the land, TV ministries, political hucksters, and best-selling books.

27. Let's be fair: Until now, it has been virtually impossible to get a fair hearing for critical comment upon uncontested religious claims. It was considered impolite, in bad taste, and it threatened to raise doubts about God's existence or hegemony. I have often said that it is as if an "iron curtain" had descended within America, for skeptics have discovered that the critical examination of religion has been virtually verboten. We have experienced firsthand how journalists and producers have killed stories about secular humanism for fear of offending the little old ladies and gentlemen in the suburbs, conservative advertisers, the Catholic hierarchy, or right-wing fundamentalists. It is difficult to find any politicians who are not intimidated and will admit that they are disbelievers or agnostics, let alone atheists. Today, there are very few, if any, clearly identified atheist personalities in the media—Bill Maher is a notable exception. The war against secularism by the Religious Right is unremitting. Even New York Times columnists are running scared. We note the column by Nicolas Kristof (December 3, 2006) calling for a "truce on religion." He deplores the "often obnoxious atheist offensive" of "secular fundamentalism."

28. Now, the fact that mainline publishers, largely owned as they are by conglomerates, have published books by scientists critical of belief in God—because they see that they can make a buck by doing it—has shocked the guardians of the entrenched faiths. But why should the nonreligious, non-affiliated, secular minority in the country remain silent? We dissenters now comprise some 14 to 16 percent of the population. Why religion should be held immune from criticism, and why should the admission that one is a disbeliever be considered so disturbing?...How can we remain mute while Islam and the West are poised for a possible protracted world conflagration in the name of God? Given all these facts, why should the criticism of religion provoke such an outcry?

29. What is the positive ethics of humanism? The focus is upon happiness and the good life, here and now, in this life, for ourselves and for our fellow human beings. On the other hand, many salvational philosophies believe that we should suffer the pains of this life so that we will have eternal blessings in the afterlife. Humanists want to build a just society, in which all human beings can share in the goods of life and achieve their potentials. Humanists want to distribute happiness as far as possible.

30. This humanist point of view that began to develop in the 17th and 18th centuries maintained: "No deity will save us, we must save ourselves." In other words, we are responsible for our own destinies. Every human being and every society must meet the challenges and develop life in his or her or its own terms. Humanism focuses on the freedom and autonomy of each individual to realize the full life here and now, and that is why the courage to become is so crucial. The good life is a life of creative joy, of actualization, of creativity in every field, of cooperation and service to others, of shared experience. We ought to do whatever we can, individually and socially, to achieve that.

31. In my book, Forbidden Fruit, I argue that there are a set of common moral decencies shared by both believers and nonbelievers: "Honour your father and your mother," "you shall not commit murder," "you shall not commit adultery," "you shall not steal," "you shall not bear false witness against your neighbors," etc. These commandments predated the Bible; they were part of the Hammurabi Code before they were written down in the Old Testament. There are other virtues: "to tell the truth," "to be sincere," "to keep promises," "to be dependable," "to be honest," and so on. These are the common heritage of humankind; they cut across cultures. We recognize them and live by them.

32. Life is meaningful without the illusion of immortality. There is also the recognition that the cultivation of the common moral decencies—caring, empathy, and altruism—is an essential part of our relating to other human beings in our communities of interaction. Humanists have always been concerned with achieving justice in society. Many of the heroes and heroines in human history were freethinkers who contributed significantly to democratic progress and a defence of human rights. Indeed, the agenda of secular humanism is twofold: first is the quest for truth, a critical examination of the assumptions of supernatural religion in the light of science; second is the development of affirmative ethical alternatives for the individual, the society in which he or she lives, and also the planetary community at large. To label us "evangelical atheists" without recognizing our affirmative commitment to secular humanist morality is an egregious error.

33. May I suggest that the term neo-humanism best describes a new posture, which aims to be inclusive and respond to the critics of unbelief. Neo-humanists are skeptical of traditional theism. They may be atheists, agnostics, or even dissenting members of a church or temple. They think the traditional concept of God is an illusion. They reject such writings as the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Book of Mormon as divine revelations. Their skepticism of the ancient creeds reflects the light of scientific or philosophical critiques of the arguments for God—or, more recently, the scientific examination of the sources of the “sacred texts.” They also criticize the moral absolutes derived from these ancient texts, viewing them as the expressions of premodern civilizations—though they may believe that some of their moral principles deserve to be appreciated in order to understand their cultural heritages. Nevertheless, they consider traditional religion’s focus on salvation in the next life an abandonment of efforts to improve this life, here and now. They firmly defend the separation of religion and the state and consider freedom of conscience and the right of dissent vital. They deplore the view of the subservience of women to men, the repression of sexuality, the defense of theocracy, and the denial of democratic human rights.

34. Distinctively, neo-humanists look to science and reason as the most reliable guide to knowledge, and they wish to extend the methods of science to all areas of human endeavor. They believe that critical thinking and the methods of reflective intelligence should guide our behavior. Neo-humanists appreciate the arts as well as the sciences, and they draw upon the literature of human experience for inspiration. Neo-humanists, however, seek objective methods of corroborating truth claims, not poetic metaphor or intuition.

35. Neo-humanists are uniquely committed to a set of humanist values and principles, including the civic virtues of democracy and the toleration of diverse lifestyles. They cherish individual freedom and celebrate human creativity and fulfillment, happiness and well-being, the values of the open pluralistic society, the right of privacy, and the autonomy, dignity, and value of each person. Neo-humanists are no less concerned with social justice and the common good, environmentalism, and planetary ethics. They insist that human beings are responsible for their own destinies and that they need to use intelligence and goodwill to solve problems. They attempt, wherever possible, to negotiate differences rationally and to work out compromises using science, reason, and humanist values.

36. Building a world community is crucial. I'm talking about a moral community, a community beyond national differences that divide people, beyond ethnic differences, beyond racial or sexual differences, but also beyond religious differences. I fear that often those who speak in the name of God mean "my God." We have to transcend these differences. Part of the secular humanist agenda is to build common ground, a new humanist ethics, an appreciation for human rights, and a quest for values that we can all share. That's my definition of the ethics of secular humanism. It seems to me an appropriate point of view for the present age.

37. But today, right-wing religious forces have targeted the public schools and attempted to whittle down or reduce what they call the "secular humanist influence." They have subjected school boards and curriculum committees to inquisitorial attacks. They have sought to impose traditional Bible principles in the schools, private and public alike. They have attempted to mandate the teaching of creationism or Intelligent Design in science classrooms and to castrate the teaching of evolution. They have attacked sex education courses. They have attempted to redefine history so as to present America as a "Christian" or "Judeo-Christian nation," not a product of the Enlightenment. In their own parochial or religious schools, they have sought to substitute indoctrination for inquiry...to substitute rote learning in the three (sometimes four) Rs for the questioning mind. We can no longer assume that our students are receiving the best education that our advancing secular, scientific, democratic world has to offer. For example, religion should not invade the schools, given the multiplicity of denominations in our society; instead it should be a private matter, best left to the parents in their diverse churches, temples, synagogues, or mosques. On this and many other contentious issues, education has become a battleground today. We secular humanists have no choice; we, too, must battle to give our children the best possible education.

38. There are various forms of unbelief in America and the world today. At one end of the spectrum stand the “evangelical atheists” (so maligned by their critics), who focus primarily on the case against God, noting the lack of evidence, the disregarded contradictions, and the atrocities committed in his name. But we need to point out, if for the umpteenth time, that the community of religious dissenters in America includes not only atheists but also agnostics, skeptics, and even a significant number of religiously affiliated individuals. The last may be only nominal members of their congregations and may attend church or temple primarily for social reasons or out of ethnic loyalty to the faiths of their forebears. This ethnic-cultural fixation can be very difficult to overcome, and it may linger long after belief in a given body of doctrine has faded—sometimes for many generations. Yet such individuals, though still members of their religious denominations, are skeptical about claims.

Richard Dawkins

2010-04-26T23:48:00.002+05:30

1941 - , famous British evolutionary biologist, popular science author, TV and Radio personality, who was tilll recently Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His first book 'The Selfish Gene' (1976) is a classic, and popularised the gene-centred view of evolution. He also coined the term 'meme' as the cultural equivalent of a gene. 'The Extended Phenotype', 'The Blind Watchmaker', 'River out of Eden', 'Climbing Mount Improbable', 'Unweaving the Rainbow', 'A Devil's Chaplain', 'The Ancestor's Tale', and 'The Greatest Show on Earth' are some of his best known books on Evolution. Dawkins is a staunch critic of Creationism and the Intelligent Design movement. He is also a strong critic of organised religions, and his best-selling book 'The God Delusion' contends that a supernatural creator doesn't exist and is a delusion. Dawkins has won numerous awards, and was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2007.

1. Modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

2. How does the god meme replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art…The survival value of the god meme results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. It holds out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of god is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains.

3. If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

4. Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.

5. I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.

6. If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it’s no solution to raise the theologian’s plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation…You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.

7. If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!

8. If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports?...Is He manoeuvring to maximise David Attenborough's television ratings?

9. 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.

10. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.

11. A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he thought God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's.

12. Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.

13. The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.

14. Perhaps the best of the available euphemisms for atheist is nontheist. It lacks the connotation of positive conviction that there is definitely no god, and it could therefore easily be embraced by Teapot or Tooth Fairy Agnostics. It is less familiar than atheist and lacks its phobic connotations. Yet, unlike a completely new coining, its meaning is clear. If we want a euphemism at all, nontheist is probably the best.

15. Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous – indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

16. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

17. It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

18. Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.

19. I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

20. My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all. Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labeling device in history.

21. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.

22. Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists. But if I say something insulting about Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouchability is something religions have been allowed to get away with for too long.

23. Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper?...The afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a smart missile…Yet it is very very cheap…To fill a world with religion, or religions on the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns, Do not be surprised if they are used.

24. My last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.

25. Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. "Mindless" may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion.

26. Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!

27. Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

28. If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that naïve and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions?

29. Over the centuries, we've moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal and moral philosophy. We've evolved a liberal consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea that we don't approve of slavery or discrimination on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All of these things that have become second nature to our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the teeth of religion.

30. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

31. Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

32. In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our...nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science.

33. When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.

34. Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.

35. I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so (see Ibn Warraq's excellent book, Why I am not a Muslim). Moonies and scientologists get a bad press, but they just haven't been around as long as the accepted religions. Theology is a respectable discipline when it studies such subjects as moral philosophy, the psychology of religious belief and, above all, biblical history and literature. Like Bertie Wooster, my knowledge of the Bible is above average. I seem to know Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon almost by heart. I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum - you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns.

36. Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.

37. The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.

38. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

39. I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.

40. Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.

41. Are science and religion converging? No...To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.

42. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading.

43. More generally it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Stephen Jay Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

44. There is something dishonestly self-serving in the tactic of claiming that all religious beliefs are outside the domain of science. On the one hand, miracle stories and the promise of life after death are used to impress simple people, win converts, and swell congregations. It is precisely their scientific power that gives these stories their popular appeal. But at the same time it is considered below the belt to subject the same stories to the ordinary rigours of scientific criticism: these are religious matters and therefore outside the domain of science. But you cannot have it both ways. At least, religious theorists and apologists should not be allowed to get away with having it both ways. Unfortunately all too many of us, including nonreligious people, are unaccountably ready to let them.

45. Religions do make claims about the universe — the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they’re usually false.

46. Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

47. What has ‘theology’ ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has ‘theology’ ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?

48. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

49. It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.

50. Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it.

51. A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

52. The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion.

53. Gerin Oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of symptoms, often of an anti-social or self-damaging nature. It can permanently modify the child brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which are hard to treat. The four doomed flights of September 11th 2001 were Gerin Oil trips: all nineteen of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniolism was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem Witch Hunts and the massacres of Native South Americans by Conquistadores. Gerin Oil fuelled most of the wars of the European Middle Ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and of Ireland.

54. You might think that such a potentially dangerous and addictive drug would head the list of proscribed intoxicants, with exemplary sentences handed out for pushing it. But no, it is readily obtainable anywhere in the world and you don't even need a prescription. Professional traffickers are numerous, and organized in hierarchical cartels, openly trading on street corners and in purpose-made buildings. Some of these cartels are adept at fleecing poor people desperate to feed their habit. 'Godfathers' occupy influential positions in high places, and they have the ear of Royalty, of Presidents and Prime Ministers. Governments don't just turn a blind eye to the trade, they grant it tax-exempt status. Worse, they subsidize schools founded with the specific intention of getting children hooked.

55. The human mind is a wanton storyteller and even more, a profligate seeker after pattern. We see faces in clouds and tortillas, fortunes in tea leaves and planetary movements. It is quite difficult to prove a real pattern as distinct from a superficial illusion.

56. Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.

57. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

58. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

59. We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

60. The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike.

61. What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information. It's digital information. It's precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte, into any other kind of information and then translated back again. This is a major revolution. I suppose it's probably "the" major revolution in the whole history of our understanding of ourselves.

62. There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes or digital information.

63. Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing. Bad genes may pass through the sieve for a generation or two, perhaps because they had the luck to share a body with good genes. But you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.

64. The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes. The lifetimes of DNA messages (give or take a few mutations) are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of years; or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes. Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle, in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifetimes.

65. It seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye…It’s no wonder ‘the’ eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom… It is a geological blink.

66. The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded... I fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.

67. I suspect the reason is that most people...have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

68. It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and all the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch. Only God would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a single bound.

69. We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

70. After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, 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?

71. On a moonless night when the only clouds to be seen are the Magellanic Clouds of the Milky Way, go out to a place far from street light pollution, lie on the grass and gaze out at the stars.1 What are you seeing? Superficially you notice constellations, but a constellation is of no more significance than a patch of curiously shaped damp on the bathroom ceiling. Note, accordingly, how little it means to say something like "Uranus moves into Aquarius". Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here). A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to "move into".

72. Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles. By existing law neither Beethoven nor nature can sue, but perhaps existing law could be changed. If the methods of Astrologers were really shown to be valid it would be a fact of signal importance for science. Under such circumstances astrology should be taken seriously indeed. But if - as all indications agree - there is not a smidgen of validity in any of the things that astrologers so profitably do, this, too, should be taken seriously and not indulgently trivialised. We should learn to see the debauching of science for profit as a crime.

73. Amusingly, astrology falls foul of our modern taboo against lazy stereotyping. How would we react if a newspaper published a daily column that read something like this: "Germans: It is in your nature to be hard-working and methodical, which should serve you well at work today. In your personal relationships, especially this evening, you will need to curb your natural tendency to obey orders. Chinese: Inscrutability has many advantages, but it may be your undoing today. British: Your stiff upper lip may serve you well in business dealings, but try to relax and let yourself go in your social life.

74. Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the [one million dollars] reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe.

75. It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science.

76. Each week The X-Files poses a mystery and offers two rival kinds of explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week after week, the rational explanation loses. But it is only fiction, a bit of fun, why get so hot under the collar?Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: "But it's only fiction, only entertainment".

77. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests.

78. Either it is true that a medicine works or it isn't. It cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some "alternative" sense. If a therapy or treatment is anything more than a placebo, properly conducted double-blind trials, statistically analyzed, will eventually bring it through with flying colours. Many candidates for recognition as "orthodox" medicines fail the test and are summarily dropped. The "alternative" label should not (though, alas, it does) provide immunity from the same fate.

79. It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine. Telepathy and possession by the spirits of the dead are not ruled out as a matter of principle. There is certainly nothing impossible about abduction by aliens in UFOs. One day it may be happen. But on grounds of probability it should be kept as an explanation of last resort. It is unparsimonious, demanding more than routinely weak evidence before we should believe it. If you hear hooves clip-clopping down a London street, it could be a zebra or even a unicorn, but, before we assume that it's anything other than a horse, we should demand a certain minimal standard of evidence.

80. The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity. Of course, excellent organizations already exist for raising funds and deploying them in service of reason, science and enlightenment values.But the money that these organizations can raise is dwarfed by the huge resources of religious foundations such as the Templeton Foundation, not to mention the tithe-bloated, tax-exempt churches.

81. A letter to a U.K. newspaper says ‘science provides an explanation of the mechanism of the [December 2004 Asian] tsunami but it cannot say why this occurred any more than religion can.’ There, in one sentence, we have the religious mind displayed before us in all its absurdity. In what sense of the word ‘why’, does plate tectonics not provide the answer? Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety. Let’s get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.

82. Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don’t.

A.C.Grayling

2010-04-11T17:04:00.004+05:30

1949 - , Professor of Philosophy at Birckbeck College, University of London, and Britain's leading philosopher. A champion of science, humanism, secularism, human rights and civil liberties, he is the author of a number of books including 'The Meaning of Things'; 'The Form of Things'; 'The Mystery of Things'; 'The Choice of Hercules'; 'What is Good?'; 'Against All Gods'; 'Liberty in the Age of Terror', among others. He is a frequent contributor to the Literary Review, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement, Index on Censorship and New Statesman; an equally frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios; is the Editor of Online Review London and a Contributing Editor of Prospect magazine; a Trustee of the London Library, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

1. Religion and science have a common ancestor – ignorance.

2. By definition a religion is something centred upon belief in the existence of supernatural agencies or entities in the universe; and not merely in their existence, but in their interest in human beings on this planet; and not merely their interest, but their particularly detailed interest in what humans wear, what they eat, when they eat it, etc.

3. It is the business of all religious doctrines to keep their votaries in a state of intellectual infancy (how else do they keep absurdities seemingly credible?).

4. To believe in the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent deity in the face of childhood cancers and mass deaths in tsunamis and earthquakes is an example of serious irrationality.

5. Four kinds of answer are standardly given to the question why religion exists. One is that it provides explanations - of the origin of the universe, of the way it works, of the apparently inexplicable things that happen in it, and of why it includes evil and suffering. Another is that religion provides comfort, giving hope of life after death, providing reassurance in a hostile world, and a means (by supplication, propitiation, and the practice of one or another form of prescribed behaviour) to get a better deal in it. A third is that it makes for social order, in promoting morality and social cohesion. And a fourth is that it rests on the natural ignorance, stupidity, superstitiousness and gullibility of mankind.

6. The world's major religions - especially Christianity, Islam and Judaism - are not merely incompatible with one another, but mutually antithetical. All religions are such that, if they are pushed to their logical conclusions, or if their founding literatures and early traditions are accepted literally, they will take the form of their respective fundamentalisms. Jehovah's Witnesses and the Taliban are thus not aberrations, but unadulterated and unconstrained expressions of their respective faiths, as practised by people who are not interested in refined temporisings or theological niceties, but who literally accept the world view of the writings they regard as sacred, and insist on the morality and way of life prescribed by them.

7. All non-Christians blaspheme Christianity by their refusal to accept the divinity of Christ, because in so doing they reject the Holy Ghost, doing which is described as the most serious of all blasphemies...All non-Muslims blaspheme Islam because they insult Mohammed by not accepting him as the true prophet, and by ignoring the teachings of the Koran...Orthodox Jews regard themselves as religiously superior to all who fail in the proper observances, for example by not respecting kosher constraints. And in general, all the religions blaspheme each other by regarding the others' teachings, metaphysics and much of their ethics as false and even pernicious, and their own religion as the only true one.

8. It is a liberal hope that all religions might be viewed as worshipping the same deity, only in different ways; but this woolly-minded expedient is untenable, as shown by the most cursory comparison of teachings, interpretations, moral requirements, creation myths and eschatologies, in all of which the major religions differ and frequently contradict each other. History shows how clearly the religions themselves grasped this; the motivation for Christianity's hundreds of years of crusades against Islam, pogroms against Jews, and inquisitions against heretics, was the desire to expunge heterodoxy and 'infidelity', or at least to effect forcible compliance with prevailing orthodoxy. Islam's various jihads and fatwas had and have the same aim, and it has spread halfway around the world by conquest and the sword.

9. Where they can get away with it - as the Taliban did in Afghanistan - fundamentalists continue the same practices. The religious right in America would doubtless do so too, but it has to use television advertising and political lobbying to urge its version of the truth on America. It is only where religion is on the back foot, reduced to a minority practice, with an insecure tenure in society, that it presents itself as essentially peaceful and charitable.

10. Apologists for faith are an evasive community, who seek to avoid or deflect criticism by slipping behind the abstractions of higher theology, a mist-shrouded domain of long words, superfine distinctions and vague subtleties, in some of which God is nothing…and does not even exist…But religion is not theology; it is the practice and outlook of ordinary people into most of whom supernaturalistic beliefs and superstitions were inculcated as children when they could not assess the value of what they were being sold as a world view; and it is the falsity of this, and its consequences for a suffering world, that critics attack.

11. Does Religion deserve respect? I argue that it deserves no more respect than any other viewpoint, and not as much as most.

12. It is time to refuse to tiptoe around people who claim respect…on the grounds that they have a religious faith…as if it were noble to believe in unsupported claims and ancient superstitions. It is neither. Faith is a commitment to belief contrary to evidence and reason…to believe something in the face of evidence and against reason–to believe something by faith–is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect.

13. It is time to reverse the prevailing notion that religious commitment is intrinsically deserving of respect, and that it should be handled with kid gloves and protected by custom and in some cases by law against criticism and ridicule.

14. Ask a Christian why the ancient story of a deity impregnating a mortal woman…is false as applied to Zeus and his many paramours…but true as applied to God, Mary and Jesus…Do not expect a rational reply; an appeal to faith will be enough, because with faith anything goes.

15. It is time to demand of believers that they take their personal choices and preferences in these non-rational and too often dangerous matters into the private sphere, like their sexual proclivities. Everyone is free to believe what they want, providing they do not bother (or coerce, or kill) others…it is time to demand and apply a right for the rest of us to non-interference by religious persons and organizations – a right to be free of proselytisation and the efforts of self-selected minority groups to impose their own choice of morality and practice on those who do not share their outlook.

16. Science is as much a mindset as a body of knowledge; its premise is that thought is to be guided by publicly testable and rationally consistent evidence. The discipline of this approach makes short work of the foundation of today's religions, which lie in the ignorance of people living several millennia ago. This critical, evidence-based, enquiring mindset also thinks afresh about the good for human lives and societies; it is this responsible motivation which most naturally accords with science at its best.

17. Professor Fuller is woken by his alarm clock; switches on the electric light; rises; has a hot shower while the kettle boils; checks the emails on his computer while he drinks his coffee; gets in a motor cab for the airport; flies to New York; takes some aspirin for the headache he acquired through dehydration on the flight; repeats the taxi-email-hot-shower routine after traveling upstairs by elevator in his hotel. At every step he uses, trusts, relies on, profits from, the appliances of science and technology. But he is not biased in favour of science! It would be mere bias to think that all this success and brilliant technology somehow privileges science over - say - prayer! Surely prayer would be as effective in transporting one in a few hours from London to New York? Why not heat the water for one's coffee and shower by dancing in a circle or sacrificing a virgin? It is only bias, says Fuller, that makes science seem more wildly successful and efficacious than - what? Rain-dances and incantations?

18. [It is a mistake] to accept the false claim that Western man is unhappy, empty and lost because material values have displaced spiritual ones. The opposite is the truth: more people are happier now than has ever been the case. It is a mistake to think that peasants were happier in days of yore - scratching their lice in church on Sundays, which they attended despite the hectoring sermons and boredom...It is a mistake to think that they were more fulfilled and content with their laborious days slogging about in muddy fields, and their illiterate candle-lit nights drinking home-made beer and chewing bread with grit in it, than their descendants who have television, football, bingo, cinema, shopping mall, theme parks, zoos, holidays in Majorca, sliced bread, and vastly more money and more things to spend it on than their forebears could even dream of. People are now, accordingly and as a rule, neither unhappy nor empty; to have the satisfaction of a good grumble they are obliged to complain about the weather or our national sports teams - barrel-scrapings by comparison to the harsh realities of life in the Good Old Days mourned by nostalgists.

19. Responsible intellectual endeavour consists in maintaining a balance between two virtues: an open mind and critical scepticism. Scientists are the least dogmatic of inquirers; it is a premise of their work that their best current theories might have to be revised or abandoned in the light of new evidence. They therefore accept the obligation to make the strongest possible case for their theories, knowing that the scrutiny of their peers is relentless.

20. Science is a minority sport. it requires skills that are neither within everyone's reach nor to everyone's taste. It requires a facility in mathematics, and an imaginative ability to see the world in unexpected and often counter-intuitve ways. It also requires endless patience, and lack of dogmatism. The scientific mentality is almost exactly the opposite of the religious mentality. Science is open, sceptical, and eager to submit its tentative claims to test. Religion is dogmatic, final, closed, knows all the answers, and damns as a heretic anyone who asserts otherwise. If the two mentalities resemble each other in any respect, it is in their wonderment in the face of the universe.

21. Among the vast differences between science and religion is the fact that the former is progressive and cumulative, the latter static and backward-looking. Perhaps mankind's hope lies in this fact, for it suggests that open-minded curiosity might eventually defeat the superstitions that still oppress many. Voltaire once remarked that he loved the man who seeks truth, but hated the man who claims to have found it. There are no prizes for guessing which was the scientist, which was the priest.

22. No atheist should call himself or herself one…A more appropriate term is ’naturalist’, denoting one who takes it that the universe is a natural realm, governed by nature’s laws. This properly implies that there is nothing supernatural in the universe. People with theistic beliefs should be called supernaturalists, and it can be left to them to attempt to refute the findings of physics, chemistry and the biological sciences in an effort to justify their alternative claim that the universe was created, and is run, by supernatural beings.

23. Secularism is the view that religious outlooks, though perfectly entitled to exist and have their say, are not entitled to a bigger slice of the public pie than any other self-constituted, self-appointed, self-selected and self-serving civil society organisation. Yet the religious persistently ask for special treatment: public money for their "faith-based" schools, seats in the House of Lords, exemption from laws inconvenient to their prejudices, and so endlessly on. They even have the cheek to ask for "respect" for their silly and antiquated beliefs; and in Geneva at the Human Rights Council the Islamic countries are trying to subvert the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because it is inconvenient to their medieval, sexist, intolerant outlook.

24. In the last few years secular liberals have been uncompromising in what they say about religion, and the targets of their criticism have squealed and complained as loudly as if they felt real flames licking round their feet. The churches answered criticism in the past with murder; if they still had the upper hand would they now restrict themselves to their critics' choice of weapon – words?

25. In Afghanistan the Taliban stop girls going to school, beat up women who show a millimeter of skin, ban music, kill gays, and in general force their choice of life and belief on everyone, thus illustrating the less charming aspects of enforced observance of religious orthodoxy under which most of humanity has suffered for most of history. By comparison, secular liberals of Europe and North America say that they think religion is a load of nonsense and that religious folk should keep their fantasies to themselves. Some comparison, eh? Some jihad! Its effectiveness, though, is a sign of insecurity among the faithful. Mark Twain defined faith as "believing what you know ain't so", and the level of insecurity among the faithful when criticised suggests that almost all of them really agree.

26. Secularists in the west say to the apologists of the religions: your beliefs are your choice, so take your place in the queue. They also say: you've had it your own way for a very long time - and committed a lot of crimes in the process - and you still fancy yourself entitled, but you aren't. You don't smell too good at times, so don't try to tell me what I can read, see on TV, do in my private time, think or say. In fact, keep your sticky fingers off my life. Believe what you like but don't expect me to admire or excuse you because of it: rather the contrary, given the fairy-stories in question. And when you are a danger to the lives and liberties of others, which alas is too frequently the wont of your ilk, we will speak out against you as loudly, persistently, and uncompromisingly as we can.

27. Supernaturalists are fond of claiming that some irreligious people turn to prayer when in mortal danger, but naturalists can reply that supernaturalists typically repose great faith in science when they find themselves in (say) a hospital or an aeroplane – and with far greater frequency.

28. Religious apologists charge the non-religious with being “fundamentalists” if they attack religion too robustly, without seeming to notice the irony of employing, as a term of abuse, a word which principally applies to the too-common tendencies of their own outlook. Can a view which is not a belief but a rejection of a certain kind of belief really be “fundamentalist”? Of course not.

29. Humanism in the modern sense of the term is the view that whatever your ethical system, it derives from your best understanding of human nature and the human condition in the real world.

30. In contrast to the utter certainties of faith, a humanist has a humbler conception of the nature and current extent of knowledge. All the enquiries that human intelligence conducts into enlarging knowledge makes progress always at the expense of generating new questions.

31. Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.

32. Your average engineer, tasked with building a human being, would not separate the entrances to the trachea and oesophagus with a movable flap tagged with an instruction not to breathe while you eat, or the organs of generation not just next to but partially carrying the organs of excretion, or redundant bits of anatomy than can become infected and kill their owners, or permanent vulnerability to large numbers of invasive life-threatening organisms, or cells that constantly mutate in potentially life-threatening ways, or the origin of the optic nerve slap in the middle of the retina, or...and so endlessly on...Intelligent design? Look in a mirror for the horse-laugh answer to that one. Look at nature - in all its beauty, ugliness, sweetness, brutality, charm, indifference and immense variety - and the idea that it manifests conscious design or purpose, still less intelligent design, is seen for what it is: a little driblet of childish ignorance; a mark of mankind's infancy.

33. Today's major religions are relatively young, and they share features - such as belief in a single supernatural agent that is actively interested in the affairs of human individuals - which are novelties compared to most of history's religions. What a Roman or Greek of the classical period believed was quite different. For the Romans, religion was a matter of public social cohesion rather than personal spirituality, and the attitude of individuals to their household gods and guardian deities was equivalent to a form of knocking-on-wood superstition, useful chiefly for protection and luck.

34. Moreover it is not clear that "primitive" religions were religions at all, as we have come to understand the concept; they were more like rudimentary forms of science and technology. It seems likely that their espousers did not regard gods and spirits as supernatural, but as straightforward parts of nature, operating in fairly systematic ways as instigators of wind, thunder and other natural phenomena, and amenable to manipulation through sacrifice and observance of taboo. There is a marked difference between someone who holds contemporary Christian evangelical views and an ancient Egyptian who literally felt his god on his back - Ra, the sun - every day of the week.

35. It is plausible that a generalised propensity to credulity in childhood is a successful evolutionary adaptation, and that this might have been culturally annexed by religion as social complexity increased.

36. Religious belief of all kinds shares the same intellectual respectability, evidential base, and rationality as belief in the existence of fairies. This remark outrages the sensibilities of those who have deep religious convictions and attachments, and they regard it as insulting. But the truth is that everyone takes this attitude about all but one (or a very few) of the gods that have ever been claimed to exist. No reasonably orthodox Christian believes in Aphrodite or the rest of the Olympian deities, or in Ganesh the Elephant God or the rest of the Hindu pantheon, or in the Japanese emperor, and so endlessly on - and officially (as a matter of Christian orthodoxy) he or she must say that anyone who sincerely believes in such deities is deluded and blasphemously in pursuit of "false gods". The atheist adds just one more deity to the list of those not believed in; namely, the one remaining on the Christian's or Jew's or Muslim's list.

37. Beale-Polkinghorne milk the tendentious version of the Anthropic Principle which has it that the constants of nature are fine-tuned in order that we can exist…The argument that the universe exists for the express purpose of making the existence of humans possible has long since been debunked, and it is discreditable of Beale-Polkinghorne to try to pass it off on the unsuspecting. In case you need reminding, the point can be illustrated as follows: I would not be writing this on a laptop if computers had not been invented, but this does not prove that computers were invented so that I could write this.

38. I found the Beale-Polkinghorne explanation of natural evil (tsunamis and earthquakes that drown or crush tens of thousands, childhood cancers, and other marks of benign providence) as disgusting, though it is novel, as any that other apologists trot out. They say that the deity allows natural evils to happen because "he" has given creation "freedom to be and to make itself" - thus imputing free will to "creation" to explain natural evil in the same way as moral evil is imputed to the free will of humans. Heroic stuff.

39. You have to cherry-pick which bits of scripture and dogma are to be taken as symbolic and which as literally true - so: Genesis is symbolic, the resurrection of Jesus literally true - the chief criterion being convenience, with the resurrection as a bit of necessary dogma whose violations of biological laws you just have to shrug your shoulders over. But you only do the cherry-picking and reinterpreting to the religious sources; science is not so easy to treat in this way. The rule appears to be that where science and religion directly conflict - about the origin of the universe, let us say - the religious tale (Genesis) gets turned into symbol, thus sidestepping the possibility of direct and testable confrontation. And indeed there is no possible test of religious claims; again conveniently, "God will not be tested."

40. Thus in short, on the religious side of things you make up truth as you go along, by interpreting and reinterpreting scripture to suit your needs and to avoid refutation by confrontation with plain fact; and thus it is that Beale-Polkinghorne can claim that both science and religion seek truth. I would call this dishonest if I did not think it is in fact delusion, which - since a kind of lunatic sincerity is involved - it rather palpably shows itself to be. And it happens that "lunatic" is appropriate here, for the painful experience of wading through this book gave me an epiphany: that religious faith is extremely similar to the kind of conspiracy theory that sufferers from paranoid delusions can hold: the faithful see a purposive hand in everything, plotting and controlling and guiding - and interpret all their experience accordingly.

41. I leave to you the not very congenial task of totting up the ways in which more enthusiastic forms of religion in general, not just Islam but Roman Catholicism, puritanical forms of Protestantism, and orthodox Judaism, have treated women: all the way from closeting them, covering them up, and silencing them, to sewing up their vaginas: it is a ghastly litany of repression, all the less excusable because discrimination against women which began in these ways persists in our society in modified forms: the fact that a woman earns about 70% of what an equally qualified and experienced man does is a residue in our own society of the attitude which in today's sharia law states that a woman is worth half a man.

42. And it's a very notable fact that whereas most religions can be explained and the message of salvation for example associated with Christianity can be explained very briefly, probably doesn't take as much as half an hour, it takes some years to get to grips with the basics of physics or the biological sciences. And this is one reason why of course the religions are very attractive and take so much thought, and also they convey those certainties that we're all very anxious to have. So there is no consistency between what is characteristic of the scientific mindset and what's characteristic of the religious mindset. Remember that in the nature of religions of Christianity and Islam unquestioning faith and obedience to the tenets of the faith and to the ministers of the faith is regarded as a major virtue.

43. Defenders of religion believe that without it humanity would lose a grip on two treasures: morality and spirituality. This belief is a measure of the extraordinary success the Church has had in making us forget that traditions of thought far richer than its own exist to teach us about both: two and a half thousand years of philosophy, the arts and literature, overflowing with insight and instruction into the deepest and most beautiful possibilities for human life, little of it depending on belief in Zeus or Osiris, Brahman or Baal.

44. The crucial question is: what is natural? And if something is unnatural, does that automatically make it wrong?...'Natural' is not a synonym of 'good', because plenty of natural things are not invariably good, such as diseases, earthquakes and untimely death. And many things once thought unnatural - vaccination, blood transfusion, organ transplants - are now regarded as good although unnatural, and perhaps some have even come to regard them as natural. But the fact is that nothing is truly unnatural, because everything that exists, including human intelligence, is a product of nature. Human intelligence is as much a feature of this world as rain or grass, and the effects of its activity - dammed rivers, concrete cities, plastics, genetic modification of crops and animals (wheat and pet dogs are GM products of our earliest civilisation), destruction of species like the polio virus and the Bengal tiger - are natural in the same way as the effects of exploding volcanoes and biting mosquitos.

45. For what is wrong with cloning humans? It is nothing other than to produce a twin. Is there anything unnatural or evil about twins? Think of a couple denied children by the husband's sterility. Is it better that his wife should be impregnated by a male stranger via a glass tube than that they should produce a child wholly hers - technically her twin but in all other social and emotional respects their child to love and nourish? Might not a child who is a product of donor insemination wonder who her 'real' father is, and be troubled by ignorance of her origins? In the cloning case, she would have no such anxieties.

46. The nonsense people talk about cloning stems from the prison-cell of religious belief. Pious exclamations about the sanctity of life, and about not interfering with God's purposes, conceal a farrago of confusion. Life's sanctity resides in its quality, not its mere quantity, for there is nothing sacred in suffering. And if we were to 'avoid interfering with God's purposes' we would not use penicillin, nor raise money for the Third World's starving, nor build a roof over our children's heads (which, as it happens, Jesus instructed us not to - 'consider the lilies of the field'- but not even Christians are foolish enough to obey).

47. Thomas Thompson's thesis [in his book "The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past"] is that the Old Testament is not a record of Israel's origin and early days, but a later attempt to provide Israel with a heritage. To construct a heritage is to construct an identity; such writing of 'history' is in large part an attempt to explain and justify not the past but the present. By examining all the evidence - literary and philosophical as well as historical and archaeological - Thomspson shows how deliberately the Bible texts were aimed at fulfilling that task. The implications are dramatically controversial. One is that there was no United Kingdom of David and Solomon. Another is that the story of the early wanderings in exile of God's chosen is the record of a spiritual and not an actual journey...And Thompson demonstrates how the biblical texts are woven out of metaphors, as when the waters of the Red Sea part for Moses, of the Jordan for Joshua, of the Jabbok for Jacob; and as when David goes up to pray on the Mount of Olives in desperation of heart, which the New Testament writers represent Jesus as doing also.

48. A major reason for scientific illiteracy...is...science's inaccessibility. Non-scientists find it difficult to understand, and the consequent ignorance is the source of mistrust and even fear. Once science posed only a theological threat, by piously breaching the divine monopoly on knowledge. But now it seems to promise genetic distortions of man and nature, pollutions of various kinds, and...unnumbered and unforeseeable difficulties and threats. An extraordinary anti-scientific league results, consisting of those who are ignorant of science, those who understand too well the bad uses that bad people can turn it to, and those (the religious) whose beliefs are inherited from the Stone Age.

James Randi

2010-04-03T12:13:00.003+05:30

1928 - , famous Canadian-American stage magician, TV personality, and challenger of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Nicknamed 'The Amazing Randi', he is best known for his expose of a host of psychics and faith healers including Uri Geller and Reverend Peter Popoff. He is the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), which offers a prize of US $1,000,000 to anyone who can demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural or occult power or event, under test conditions agreed to by both parties. He won the "MacArthur Foundation Genius Award" in 1986. He has written several books including 'The Truth About Uri Geller', 'The Faith Healers', 'Flim-Flam - Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and other Delusions', 'The Mask of Nostradamus' and 'The Supernatural A - Z - the Truth and the Lies'.

1. No amount of belief makes something a fact.

2. Though it is not widely accepted or even well known to the public, it is a fact that no occult, paranormal, psychic or supernatural claim has ever been substantiated by proper testing. In 1988, a very comprehensive survey of the best evidence for these claims conducted by the National Reasearch Council concluded that "despite a 130-year record of scientific research on parapsychology, our committee could find no scientific justification for the existence of phenomena such as extra-sensory perception, mental telepathy, or 'mind over matter' exercises".

3. To properly evaluate these claims, it is not enough merely to gather huge amounts of anecdotal material in support of these avowed powers and events, and correct testing methods are not always obvious to the inexperienced observer. For these reasons, some amateurs have come up with results that they believe, erroneously, are sufficient to establish the existence of psychic or magical powers.

4. The onus of proof is on the paranormalists and other believers to establish their case, without resorting to special pleading and exceptions to standard expectations of scientific rigour...Psychics, cult members and fringe science folk often say that their claims and ideas cannot be examined by regular rules and means that would be considered applicable in any other discipline...More importantly, these folk insist that their tenets can only be properly examined by persons who believe them - in advance of any examination - and who do not hold any scepticism concerning the subject. That is not a condition under which truth is apt to reveal itself.

5. In the light of my considerable experience in examining such matters, I will say that my assigned probablity for the reality of paranormal powers approaches zero very closely. I cannot prove that these powers do not exist; I can only show that the evidence for them does not hold up under examination. Furthermore, I insist that the burden of proof be placed not on me but on those who assert that such phenomena exists. Unusual claims require unusual proof.

6. The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) is committed to providing reliable information about paranormal claims. It both supports and conducts original research into such claims. At JREF, we offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. The JREF does not involve itself in the testing procedure, other than helping to design the protocol and approving the conditions under which a test will take place. All tests are designed with the participation and approval of the applicant. In most cases, the applicant will be asked to perform a relatively simple preliminary test of the claim, which if successful, will be followed by the formal test. Preliminary tests are usually conducted by associates of the JREF at the site where the applicant lives. Upon success in the preliminary testing process, the "applicant" becomes a "claimant." To date, no one has passed the preliminary tests.

7. I don't expect that the million will ever be won, simply because there is no confirming evidence for any paranormal claims to date.

8. Uri Geller may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way.

9. I have never claimed...that my duplication of "psychic" feats shows that "psychics" use similar trickery. What it does show that it is more rational to suspect trickery than to adopt the preposterous alternative.

10. Many "men of science" stupidly assume that because they have been trained in the physical sciences or medical arts, they are capable of flawless judgment in the investigation of alleged psychics. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the more scientifically trained a person's mind, the more he or she is apt to be duped by an enterprising performer. A scientist's test tube will not lie; another human being will.

11. There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimised.

12. In ashrams all over the world, hopping devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will never abandon their goal of blissful levitation of their bodies by mind power, despite bruises and sprains aplenty suffered as they bounce about on gym mats like demented (though smiling) frogs, trying to get airborne. Absolutely nothing will discourage them.

13. The Maharishi, seeing his enrollment figures dropping, unleashed upon the world the outrageous claim that he was offering a special course - to experienced meditators only - that would enable them to perform miracles...Believers were told...that it was within their reach to soar about the skies by power of mind alone, to become invisible at will, and to walk through solid walls! For a mere pittance of about $3,000 they were offered lessons in these arts, and the guru himself announced that he had enrolled some forty thousand students in this course...But this great throng of soaring lotus eaters is yet to be seen by mere mortals such as myself.

14. I have now attained a state of Complete Understanding of Transcendental Meditation. It is a pleasant state, not unlike pure bliss, in which one smiles knowingly, now fully aware that the Maharishi is a total put-on and his followers are deluded...No levitation, no walking through walls, no invisibility. Now, that's a comfort indeed. I need not fear that some nut will drift into my bathroom through the tiling, invisible and seated in a lotus position five feet off the ground.

15. Erich von Daniken is a Swiss author who has become one of the most widely read authors of all time. He earned this distinction by selling some 36 million books, and he sold them because they pandered shamelessly to the public taste for nonsense. The only facts in his four books - 'Chariots of the Gods?', 'Gods from Outer Space', 'The Gold of the Gods', and 'In Search of Ancient Gods' - that I depend on are the page numbers.

16. There is one important failing evident in all of von Daniken's writings that should be made clear. He is simply unable to admit or conceive of the fact that early man was capable of soaring visions and the technical and aristic ability to create the fortress of Sacsahuaman, the Great Pyramid of Egypt, and other wonders without assistance from outer space...He invents some sort of divine/extraterrestrial/supernatural intervention that he maintains was necesary to enable the inferior races to put stone upon stone or place paint upon a cave wall...Try as he may, von Daniken cannot diminish the works created by greater men than he. For every giant, there is a little man to kick at his ankles. But the great accomplishments of long ago remain.

17. There is certainly no aspect of the whole parapsychology-occult-pseudoscience-spiritualism matter that more deserves condemnation than the widely publicised racket of Psychic Surgery. In Brazil, the Philippines, and now all over the world, sleight-of-hand artists have used the simplest of deceptions and the flimsiest of rationales to manufacture the notion that they can actually place their hands within the human body without making an incision and remove from it offending "tumours" and other materials that they claim cause various malfunctions. All this is done in the name of religion and psychic powers.

18. Most patients seek unorthodox help when it appears that regular care is not serving them properly or it has not met their expectations. The quack operator benefits greatly from this situation...There are four different courses that can then follow. The condition can improve...If so, the quack method seems to have been effective. (The faith healers would say that God has intervened and has cured the ailment, Hallelujah!). If the disease stays the same...quack opinion holds that the method was applied just in time and needs to be continued because it has stabilised the ailment. (Faith healers declare that God has applied divine intercession, pending further proof of faith from the afflicted). Should the disease worsen... the quack complains that his help was sought too late, but the treatment should be redoubled in order to save the patient. (The faith healer says that God works in mysterious ways and that God's will must be done). Finally, if death is the next phase of the disease, the quack again says that help was sought too late. (The faith healer again invokes the mysterious nature of God). In any case, the quack method is never proved wrong!

19. As with fortune tellers, healers often begin to believe in their own powers because their subjects tend to give them only positive feedback. Thus they can excuse and forget their many failures, and their legends grow.

20. [On a witness' account of a faith healing session in 1665] If the reader has actually witnessed a modern faith healer in action with crowds of worshippers around and about, that scenario will be familiar. Four major observations made by that witness more than three centuries ago apply to today's situation:
(a) The healer made his audience wait for him, thus enhancing his importance and increasing anticipation.
(b) Sceptics were unable, because of the choreography of the event, to question the healer before the show.
(c) Illnesses were attribute to evil spirits (demons, devils) rather than to living habits, infections, or other real causes.
(d) The sick imagined that they were cured when actually they were not.

21. In 1962, the U.S. United Lutheran Church Committee, consisting of physicians, ministers, and theologians, looked at what they called the "religious quackery" of some faith healers. They summarised their findings:
(a)The faith healers blame any failure of the healing ceremony on the subject's lack of faith.
(b) They ignore any attempt at the use of scientific methodology in their work.
(c) The motive is simply a desire for money and the personal power to exploit.
I believe this is an excellent summary of my own findings.

22. It is evident that in religion, there is, unfortunately, no "truth in advertising" rule. Outrageous claims can be made without fear of censure.

23. The greatest dread for the faith healers is straightforward, rational, scientific evaluation of their claims. The Chrisian Science church is the prime example of a head-on attempt to reconcile religion with science. The church's claims have been looked into extensively, and the conclusions have not been favourable. Other religions have attempted, ineffectually (except to the faithful), to meld scientific thought and dogma, utilising fuzzy analogies and leaky logic that does not survive close examination.

24. Obviously, when the alleged (faith healing) phenomena have not yet been established, it is doubly illogical to offer "supernatural" or "extranatural" explanations for them. Until we taste the cake, we cannot discuss the flavour. But the faithful do not require that the cake be produced...They have loose criteria for accepting a simple physical sensation or an inspiration as a miracle, and will gladly approximate Descartes by declaring, "I felt it, therefore it is."

25. Religion is based upon blind faith supported by no evidence. Science is based upon confidence that results from evidence -- and that confidence can be modified and/or reversed by further observations and experimentation. Science approaches truth, closer and closer, by hard dedicated work. Religion already has it all decided, and it's "in the book. It is dogma, unchangeable, and unaffected by reality and whatever facts we come upon in the real world.

26. To make sure that my blasphemy is thoroughly expressed, I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition, that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s), that devils, demons, angels and saints are myths, that there is no life after death, heaven nor hell, that the Pope is a dangerous, bigotted, medieval dinosaur, and that the Holy Ghost is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision. I accuse the Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place -- not to mention the "ethnic cleansing" presently being performed by Christians in our world -- and I condemn and vilify this mythical deity for encouraging racial prejudice and commanding the degradation of women.

27. I suggest that we might want to depose this incumbent God and start dealing with The Real World. He's proven — time and again — to be cruel, capricious, and vindictive. He drowns, crushes, burns, and starves millions of us every day. He created cancer, viruses, and germs to invade and destroy our bodies as He sees fit, and uses them very effectively...We amuse Him as we flail about vainly trying to appease Him. I vote that we dump Him.

28. Sir, there is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.

29. Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work.

30. Homeopathy claims to be a form of medical practice that's based on the "like cures like" notion. Given any set of symptoms, a homeopath will decide upon an herb or chemical that causes similar symptoms when ingested by a well person, or will look it up in a homeopathic pharmacopeia. A predefined ritual will follow, the homeopath performing a series of dilutions of that substance that continue well beyond the point where there should be even a molecule of it left. The final solution that is administered to the unfortunate patient is supposed to have “remembered” what was once present, though it’s nothing more than well-shaken water.

31. One of the most common concentrations of remedy that homeopaths use [is 30X]. A 30X dilution means that the original substance has been diluted 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. No, that’s not an exaggeration at all, it’s a simple fact, and homeopaths are not at all embarrassed to use the term “dilution” when explaining their firm delusion that their “art” – it’s certainly not a science – is a legitimate branch of the healing arts. The concept is simply ridiculous. I won’t trouble you with writing out the other dilution, which would require 60 zeros.

32. Homeopathy is a fraud, it does not work, and – surprisingly – no homeopath has ever stepped forward to take the million-dollar prize that our Foundation offers. This fact, alone, should raise alarms about this farcical industry that takes lives by swindling.

33. I do not expect that homeopathy will ever be established as a legitimate form of treatment, but I do expect that it will continue to be popular.

34. I must declare frankly that I have no belief in the popularly held notion that Nostradamus or anyone else ever had or now has any supernatural prophetic powers. My rather considerable professional experience and my common sense dictate against such a belief, but I will always yield to facts and probabilities...That, to a limited extent is a tenet of the scientific method.

35. We need not go further than Nostradamus' early local activities at home in Salon to see just how bad a prognosticator he was. Unfortunately for his reputation, we have a detailed account of a horoscope he drew up for a High Justice in Salon de Provence, and the statement of that man's son that shows not one correct astrological prediction by Nostradamus. He was strikingly wrong in every respect, especially in missing the subject's death date by twenty-one years.

36. In the prose section of the Centuries, Nostradamus wrote very clearly and in excellent French, unlike the crabbed, mystical words and construction of the quatrains. Not one of the many predictions contained in the prose was correct, and they were all made for dates that are now past, except the end of the world, which is happily placed in the year 3797, according to some, and in 1999 by others.

37. It follows...that if no date is given, as with the vast majority of Nostradamus prophecies, not coming true is no impediment to the acceptance of the man's writings as true prophecies, since they might come true sometime in the furture.

38. The legend of Nostradamus, faulty as it is, will survive us all. Not because of its worth, but because of its seductive attraction, the idea that the Prophet of Salon could see into the future will persist. An ever abundant number of reviewers will pop up to renew the shabby exterior of his image, and that gloss will serve to entice more unwary fans into acceptance of the false predictions that have enthralled millions in the centuries since his death. Shameless rationalisations will be made, ugly facts will be ignored and common sense will continue to be submerged in enthusiasm.

Michael Shermer

2010-03-21T12:50:00.002+05:30

1954 - , prominent American science writer, orator and TV personality who is currently the most energetic warrior against pseudoscience and superstition. He is the founder of The Skeptics Society and Editor-in-Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating and debunking pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. For the past several years, he has been a monthly columnist for the Scientific American magazine with his Skeptic column. A Christian fundamentalist-turned-skeptic, he is the author of a number of books such as How We Believe, Why People Believe Weird Things, The Borderlands of Science, The Science of Good and Evil, Science Friction, The Mind of the Market and Why Darwin Matters.

1. There is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There is only the natural, the normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain.

2. I don't think there is a God, or any sort of anthropomorphic being who needs to be worshipped, who listens to prayers, who keeps a moral scoreboard that will be settled in the end, or who cares one iota about who wins the Super Bowl. There is no afterlife. We just die, and that's it. Which is why what we do in this life matters so much.

3. It's not why there is no God, it's why there's no compelling evidence to believe in God. That's a better way to put it. And from my perspective, it's just not there for me. With training in science, I have high standards of evidence. If you said God is real, and you sent your evidence to the journals Science or Nature for publication, you'd be laughed out of the room; you wouldn't get past the first reviewer. On the other side, the best evidence that there probably isn't a God is that belief in God is so deeply culturally embedded. When you study world religions, it's obvious that, throughout time, all of these different people are making up their own stories about God. If you lived in America 1,000 years ago, hardly anybody would be a Christian. If you were born in India, you'd likely be a Hindu. What does that tell you? From a Christian perspective, it means we need to get more missionaries over there to tell them the truth! From an anthropological perspective, it's another case. Christians today might say, I don't believe in Zeus, that was a silly superstition. Yet for many people that was a real god. So it turns out there are 10,000 gods and yet only one right one. That means we're all atheists on 9,999 gods. The only difference between me and the believers is I'm an atheist on one more god.

4. I am an agnostic who has no axe to grind with believers, and I hold no grudge against religion. My only beef with believers is when they claim they can use science and reason to prove God's existence, or that theirs is the One True belief; my only gripe with religion is when it becomes intolerant of other peoples' beliefs, or when it becomes a tool of political oppression, ideological extremism, or the cultural suppression of diversity.

5. Not only are humans storytelling animals, we are also pattern seeking animals, and there is a tendency to find patterns even where none exists. To most of us the patterns of the universe indicate design. For countless millennia, we have taken these patterns and constructed stories about how our cosmos was designed specifically for us. For the past few centuries, however, science has presented us with a viable alternative in which we are but one among tens of millions of species, housed on but one planet among many orbiting in an ordinary solar system, itself one among possibly billions of solar systems in an ordinary galaxy, located in a cluster of galaxies not so different from billions of other galaxy clusters, themselves whirling away from one another in an expanding cosmic bubble that very possibly is one among a near-infinite number of bubble universes. Is it really possible that this entire cosmological multiverse exists for one tiny subgroup of a single species on one planet in a lone galaxy in that solitary bubble universe?

6. About four centuries ago...something big happened that profoundly changed the process of pattern-seeking and storytelling. That something was science. For the first time in human history there arose a set of methods by which it could be determined if a pattern is real and if a story is true. Instead of retelling stories over and over, it was now possible to refine the story to more closely match reality.

7. People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer--a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer--a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer.

8. People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking primates. We connect A to B to C, and often A really is connected to B, and B really is connected to C. This is called association learning. But we do not have a false-pattern-detection device in our brains to help us discriminate between true and false patterns, and so we make errors in our thinking: a Type I error is believing a pattern is real when it is not (a false positive) and a Type II error is not believing a pattern is real when it is (a false negative).

9. Imagine that you are a hominid on the planes of Africa and you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator or just the wind? If you assume it is a dangerous predator and it is just the wind, you have made a Type I error, but to no harm. But if you believe the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator, there’s a good chance you’ll be lunch and thereby removed from your species’ gene pool. Thus, there would have been a natural selection for those hominids who tended to believe that all patterns are real and potentially dangerous.

10. The natural inclination in all humans is to posit a force, a spirit, outside of us. That tendency toward superstitious magical thinking is just built into our nature. What's more, it doesn't cost anything to have a false positive, to assume there's a force behind the lightning or a spirit in the rock. In the ancestral environment, when we evolved, we might think spinning around three times is going to bring rain. Well, once in a while it works and makes everybody happy. And it doesn't cost much to keep doing it. It doesn't take you out of the gene pool.

11. I call this process patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents who may mean us harm). This, I believe, is the basis for the belief in souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspiracists, and all manner of invisible agents intending to harm us or help us.

12. Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one's place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond ourselves. There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades.

13. Naked faith is what religious enterprise was always about, until science became the preeminent system of natural verisimilitude, tempting the faithful to employ its wares in the practice of preternatural belief.

14. Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.

15. Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.

16. Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology.

17. Why is there such an eternal return of certain mythic themes in religion, such as messiah myths, flood myths, creation myths, destruction myths, redemption myths, and end of the world myths? What do these recurring themes tell us about the workings of the human mind and culture? What can we learn from these myths beyond the moral homilies offered in their narratives? What can we learn about ourselves as we gaze into these mythic mirrors of our souls?

18. Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.

19. We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

20. We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.

21. Evolution is not a religious tenet, to which one swears allegiance or belief as a matter of faith.. It is a factual reality of the empirical world. Just as one would not say 'I believe in gravity," one should not proclaim 'I believe in evolution.'

22. Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.

23. It is sad that while science moves ahead in exciting new areas of research, fine-tuning our knowledge of how life originated and evolved, creationists remain mired in medieval debates about angels on the head of a pin and animals in the belly of an Ark.

24. Creationists have also changed their name...to intelligent design theorists who study 'irreducible complexity' and the 'abrupt appearance' of life—yet more jargon for 'God did it.' ... Notice that they have no interest in replacing evolution with native American creation myths or including the Code of Hammarabi alongside the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

25. As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: 'the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

26. If you believe God created the world, it's reasonable to ask, How did he do it? What were the forces and mechanisms he used? Why not look to science and see that he started with the big bang, the force of gravity, inflationary cosmology, quarks and natural selection. Those were his tools. To that extent, science is not a threat, it's your best friend. It's the best tool you have for illuminating the grandeur of creation. A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral. I mean, come on, that photo is an actual representation of the reality that God created, if that's what you believe. So why not embrace science rather than fear it?

27. Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

28. I am optimistic that science is winning out over magic and superstition. That may seem irrational, given the data from pollsters on what people believe. For example, a 2005 Pew Research Center poll found that 42 percent of Americans believe that "living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time." The situation is even worse when we examine other superstitions, such as these percentages of belief published in a 2002 National Science Foundation study:ESP 60%; UFOs 30%; Astrology 40%; Lucky numbers 32%; Magnetic therapy 70%; Alternative medicine 88%. Nevertheless, I take the historian's long view, and compared to what people believed before the Scientific Revolution, there is much cause for optimism. Consider what people believed a mere four centuries ago, just as science began lighting candles in the dark. In 16th- and 17th-century England, for example, almost everyone believed in sorcery, werewolves, hobgoblins, witchcraft, astrology, black magic, demons, prayer, and providence.

29. Just as alcohol and tobacco were essential anesthetics for the easing of pain and discomfort, superstition and magic were the basis for the mitigation of misfortune.

30. Nevertheless, the rise of science ineluctably attenuated this near universality of magical thinking by proffering natural explanations where before there were only supernatural ones. Before Darwin, design theory (in the form of William Paley's natural theology, which gave us the "watchmaker" argument) was the only game in town so everyone believed that life was designed by God. Today less than half believe that in America, the most religious nation of the developed democracies, and in most other parts of the world virtually everyone accepts evolution without qualification. That's progress.

31. The rise of science even led to a struggle to find evidence for superstitious beliefs that previously needed no propping up with facts. Consider the following comment from an early 17th-century book that shows how even then savvy observers grasped the full implications of denying the supernatural altogether: "Atheists abound in these days and witchcraft is called into question. If neither possession nor witchcraft (contrary to what has been so long generally and confidently affirmed), why should we think that there are devils? If no devils, no God."

32. So we are left with the legacy of two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth...Believers in UFOs, alien abductions, ESP, and psychic phenomena have committed a Type 1 Error in thinking: they are believing a falsehood...It's not that these folks are ignorant or uninformed; they are intelligent but misinformed. Their thinking has gone wrong.

33. Scientific and critical thinking does not come naturally. It takes training, experience, and effort, as Alfred Mander explained in his Logic for the Millions: "Thinking is skilled work. It is not true that we are naturally endowed with the ability to think clearly and logically -- without learning how, or without practicing. People with untrained minds should no more expect to think clearly and logically than people who have never learned and never practiced can expect to find themselves good carpenters, golfers, bridge players, or pianists". We must always work to suppress our need to be absolutely certain and in total control and our tendency to seek the simple and effortless solution to a problem. Now and then the solutions may be simple, but usually they are not.

34. We tend to rely heavily on authorities in our culture, especially if the authority is considered to be highly intelligent...I have noticed that belief in the paranormal is not uncommon among Mensa members (the high-IQ club for those in the top 2 percent of the population); some even argue that their "Psi-Q" is also superior. Magician James Randi is fond of lampooning authorities with Ph.D.s -- once they are granted the degree, he says, they find it almost impossible to say two things: "I don't know" and "I was wrong." Authorities, by virtue of their expertise in a field, may have a better chance of being right in that field, but correctness is certainly not guaranteed, and their expertise does not necessarily qualify them to draw conclusions in other areas...While expertise is useful for separating the wheat from the chaff, it is dangerous in that we might either (1) accept a wrong idea just because it was supported by someone we respect (false positive) or (2) reject a right idea just because it was supported by someone we disrespect (false negative). How do you avoid such errors? Examine the evidence.

35. I am sick and tired of politicians, and just about everyone else, kowtowing to the religious right's hypersensitivities and politically correct "tolerance" for diversity of belief-as long as one believes in God. Any God will do - except, of course, the God who promises virgins in the next life to pilots who fly planes into buildings. Those of us who do not believe in God have had enough of this rhetoric.

36. It doesn't matter what God you believe in, which religion you adhere to, or even if you don't believe in any God and are nonreligious. If you want to live in the United States, there are rules about how you must treat other people. Religion and politics should be treated as Non-Overlapping Magisteria, or NOMA, in paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould's apt model for religion and science. "Non-Overlapping" means that religion is private and politics is public. If you want more religion, go to church. If you want more politics, go to the Capitol. Don't go to church to politick, and don't go to the Capitol to preach.

37. It may surprise you to learn that I was once a born-again evangelical Christian who attended Pepperdine University...with the intention of becoming a theologian...But somewhere along the way, I found science, and that changed everything. The switch to science, however, was only one factor in my deconversion. There was also the intolerance generated by absolute morality, the logical outcome of knowing without doubt that you are right and everyone else is wrong. There were the inevitable hypocrisies that arose from preaching the "ought" but practising the "is." There was the awareness that other religious beliefs and their adherents existed, and that all of them were equally adamant that theirs was the One True Religion. And there was the knowledge of the temporal, geographical, and cultural determiners of religious beliefs that made it obvious to me that God was made in our likeness, and not the reverse.

38. What would you do if there were no God? Would you commit robbery, rape, and murder, or would you continue being a good and moral person? Either way the question is a debate stopper. If the answer is that you would soon turn to robbery, rape, or murder, then this is a moral indictment of your character, indicating you are not to be trusted because if, for any reason, you were to turn away from your belief in God, your true immoral nature would emerge. If the answer is that you would continue being good and moral, then apparently you can be good without God. QED.

39. The Bible has written all over it, the fact that it was a human-edited, socially constructed collection of books put together by people over many, many centuries.

40. Consider, for example, the many Old Testament moral rules that make one blanch with embarrassment. For emancipated modern women thinking of adorning themselves in business attire that may resemble men’s business ware (or for guys who dig cross-dressing), Deuteronomy 22:5 does not look kindly on such behaviors: “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”

41. An even worse abomination is a rebellious child. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 offers this parental moral guideline: “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son...(he shall) bring him out to the elders of his city (and say), ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.” Death penalty for disobedient children. All in favor raise your hands!

42. Here is the Bible’s recommendation on how to deal with women who may or may not have had sex before marriage. According to Deuteronomy 22:13-21, “If any man takes a wife, and goes in to her, and then spurns her, and charges her with shameful conduct, and brings an evil name upon her, saying, ‘I took this woman, and when I came near her, I did not find in her the tokens of virginity,’ then the father of the young woman and her mother shall take and bring out the tokens of her virginity to the elders of the city in the gate.” (For those not accustomed to reading between the biblical lines, the phrase “goes in to her” should be taken literally, and “the tokens of virginity” means the hymen and the blood on the sheet from a virgin’s first sexual experience.) “But if the thing is true, that the tokens of virginity were not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has wrought folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house; so you shall purge the evil from the midst of you.”

43. When slavery was the social norm, it was simple for pro-slavery defenders to point to passages such as those in Exodus 21, which outlines the rules for the proper handling of slaves, for example, “when you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing.”... (According to the Bible)slave families should be kept together, unless the master gave the slave a wife, who then bore him children, in which case the master gets to keep the woman and children when the slave is sold.

44. To be fair, not all Biblical ethics are this antiquated and extreme. There is much to choose from that is useful for our thinking about moral issues. The problem here is consistency...If you are going to claim the Bible as your primary (or only) code of ethics, and proclaim, say, that homosexuality is sinful and wrong because the Bible says so, then to be consistent you should kill rebellious youth, non-virginal pre-married women, and treat your slaves properly. Since most people today would not endorse that level of moral consistency, why pick on gays and lesbians but cut some slack for disobedient children and promiscuous women? And why aren’t promiscuous men subject to the same punishment as women? Those women are having sex with someone, right?

45. We need a new set of morals, and an ethical system designed for our time and place, not one scripted for a pastoral/agricultural people who lived 4,000 years ago. The Bible and other sacred texts have wonderfullu edifying and sometimes transcendent passages, but we can do better.

46. Many people are overconfident enough to think that if they cannot explain something, it must be inexplicable and therefore a true mystery of the paranormal. An amateur archeologist declares that because he cannot figure out how the pyramids were built, they must have been constructed by space aliens. Even those who are more reasonable at least think that if the experts cannot explain something, it must be inexplicable. Feats such as the bending of spoons, firewalking, or mental telepathy are often thought to be of a paranormal or mystical nature because most people cannot explain them. When they are explained, most people respond, "Yes, of course" or "That's obvious once you see it."...This is why magicians do not tell their secrets. Most of their tricks are extremely simple and knowing the secret takes the magic out of the trick.

47. There are many genuine unsolved mysteries in the universe and it is okay to say, "We do not yet know but someday perhaps we will." The problem is that most of us find it more comforting to have certainty, even if it is premature, than to live with unsolved or unexplained mysteries.

48. Most people have a very poor understanding of the laws of probability. A gambler will win six in a row and then think he is either "on a hot streak" or "due to lose." Two people in a room of thirty people discover that they have the same birthday and conclude that something mysterious is at work. You go to the phone to call your friend Bob. The phone rings and it is Bob. You think, "Wow, what are the chances; This could not have been a mere coincidence. Maybe Bob and I are communicating telepathically." In fact, none of these coincidences are coincidences under the rules of probability. The gambler has predicted both possible outcomes, a fairly safe bet! The probability that two people in a room of thirty people will have the same birthday is 71 percent. And you have forgotten how many times Bob did not call under such circumstances, or someone else called, or Bob called but you were not thinking of him, and so on.

49. Anecdotes -- stories recounted in support of a claim -- do not make a science...Anecdotes are told by fallible human storytellers... Stories about how your Aunt Mary's cancer was cured by watching Marx Brothers movies or taking a liver extract from castrated chickens are meaningless. The cancer might have gone into remission on its own, which some cancers do; or it might have been misdiagnosed; or, or, or.… What we need are controlled experiments, not anecdotes. We need 100 subjects with cancer, all properly diagnosed and matched. Then we need 25 of the subjects to watch Marx Brothers movies, 25 to watch Alfred Hitchcock movies, 25 to watch the news, and 25 to watch nothing. Then we need to deduct the average rate of remission for this type of cancer and then analyze the data for statistically significant differences between the groups. If there are statistically significant differences, we better get confirmation from other scientists who have conducted their own experiments separate from ours before we hold a press conference to announce the cure for cancer.

50. History is replete with tales of the lone scientist working in spite of his peers and flying in the face of the doctrines of his or her own field of study. Most of them turned out to be wrong and we do not remember their names. For every Galileo shown the instruments of torture for advocating a scientific truth, there are a thousand (or ten thousand) unknowns whose "truths" never pass muster with other scientists. The scientific community cannot be expected to test every fantastic claim that comes along, especially when so many are logically inconsistent. If you want to do science, you have to learn to play the game of science. This involves getting to know the scientists in your field, exchanging data and ideas with colleagues informally, and formally presenting results in conference papers, peer-reviewed journals, books, and the like.

Martin Gardner

2010-03-16T22:29:00.002+05:30

1914 - , prolific American writer on popular science, recreational mathematics, philosophy and religion. He wrote the "Mathematical Games" column in the Scientific American magazine for nearly 25 years. He has been a crusader against every kind of pseudoscience and crank science and his first book "Fads and Fallacies in the name of Science" is considered a classic. He has written over 70 books including "Science: Good, Bad and Bogus", "Order and Surprise", "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener" and his latest book (written at the age of 94) "The Jinn from Hyperspace".

1. We all know there have been occasions when top scientists ridiculed ideas that later proved to be sound. We all know that great scientists have held opinions, both in and out of their specialised fields, that turned out to be hopelessly wrong. Let us not waste time belabouring the obvious. Nor must we forget that for every example of a crank who later became a hero there were thousands of cranks who forever remained cranks. We must not forget that for every outcast theory raised to respectability by a scientific revolution there were thousands of crazy theories that permanently bit the dust.

2. I hope no one will imagine that I believe cranks should be silenced by any kind of legislation. In a free society every crank has a right to be heard, and no one can say that in our society they are not heard. Thanks to the freedom of our press and of the electronic media, the voices of cranks are often louder and clearer than the voices of genuine scientists. Crank books...far outsell most books by reputable scientists.

3. When a person is mystified by a good magic trick it is because he can't figure out how the magician did it. When a physician is mystified by an unexpected observation it is because he can't figure out how the universe did it. The big difference, of course, is that the universe plays fair. Its tricks may operate by principles of incredible sublety, and we may never discover all of them, but it keeps performing its illusions over and over again, always by the same methods...The magician, by contrast, is a consummate liar. His principles, borrowed partly from physics and psychology (but mostly sui generis) are soaked through and through with deliberate falsification of the most reprehensible sort.

4. Any magician will tell you that scientists are the easiest persons in the world to fool. It is not hard to understand why...The thinking of a scientist is rational, based on a lifetime of experience with a rational world. But the methods of magic are irrational and totally outside a scientist's experience. The general public has never understood this. Most people assume that if a man has a brilliant mind he is qualified to detect fraud. This is untrue. Unless he has been thoroughly trained in the underground art of magic, and knows its peculiar principles, he is easier to deceive than a child.

5. A self-proclaimed psychic goes about performing miracles exactly like the feats of magicians who specialise in what the trade calls "mentalism". You suspect the psychic of cheating. Whom would you call upon as expert witness? A physicist? One of the saddest, most persistent aspects of the history of alleged psychic phenomena is that there always has been a small, noisy group of scientists who, combining enormous egotism with even greater gullibility, actually imagine that they are competent to detect psychic fraud.

6. It all began in 1973, when John Taylor, then forty-two, appeared on a BBC television show with Uri Geller. Taylor, a respected mathematical physicist at King's College, London, had expected to be unimpressed. Instead he became bug-eyed with astonishment. Uri performed his now familiar, increasingly tiresome, little bag of tricks. He made a fork bend. He started a stopped watch. He duplicated a drawing inside a sealed envelope. Magicians watching the show were singularly unimpressed. But Dr.Taylor and his friends, who sometimes call themselves "counter-culture physicists" (CCPs) suffer from a peculiar syndrome which I call PPE or "pre-mature psi ejaculation". Instead of waiting for a psychic to be tested by skeptical psychologists, aided by competent magicians, whenever a CCP sees a self-dubbed psychic do a few magic tricks he instantly pronounces the feats genuine and fires off a press release, article or book.

7. Since I reviewed (Professor John Taylor's book on Uri Geller) Superminds, Taylor has turned one of the fastest and funniest flipflops in the history of psi research. Not only does he now consider Uri a fake, but he has decided that ESP and PK do not even exist! [Taylor makes the retractions in an article in Nature in 1979], though with a notable absence of apologies or credits to those skeptics who did their best to prevent him fom making an ass of himself.

8. Science cannot absolutely rule out the possibility of anything, but it can assign low degrees of probability to unusual claims. In my view, which is the view of most psychologists, the classic psi experiments are more simply and pausibly explained in terms of unconscious experimenter bias, unconscious sensory cuing, fraud on the part of subjects eager to prove their psychic powers, and on rare occasions...deliberate fraud on the part of respected investigators.

9. I am perpetually accused by parapsychologists of stubbornly denying the very possibility that psi forces such as ESP (telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition) and PK (psychokinesis) exist. It is a foolish accusation. No skeptic of psi known to me rules out the possibility of psi...I cannot say that the psi forces do not exist. I do say that the evidence for them is feeble. Extraordinary claims demand much more extraordinary evidence than parapsychologists have been able to muster. When experiments can be reliably replicated by skeptics, when it is evident that controls are comensurate with the wildness of the claims, and when knowledgeable magicians participate in the designing and witnessing of such experiments, I will not hesitate to change my mind.

10. I am constantly amused by letters from well-meaning souls who assume that my skepticism about psi is a product of my atheism...I am not only a theist but also, in a sense, a Platonic mystic. But what do God or the gods have to do with the question of whether PK can bend a spoon? Most of those I know who strongly believe in psi are atheists. Sigmund Freud and Mark Twain come to mind. Both believed in telepathy and both were atheists. And there have been and are a multitude of theists who are as skeptical as I of the claims of parapsychology. The question of whether psi forces exist is a scientific question.

11. I am convinced that today's skeptics would not have the slightest difficulty...accepting ESP and PK the instant evidence accumulates that can be reliably replicated. Unfortunately, for 50 years parapsychology has rolled along the same murky road of statistical tests that can be repeated with positive results only by true believers. Psi forces have a curious habit of fading away when controls are tightened or when the experimenter is a skeptic - sometimes even when a skeptic just there to observe!

12. The Nazi movement flourished at a time of enormous interest among the German people in the paranormal. Astrology boomed as never before. The public became obsessed with strange diets and health fads and bizarre pseudoscientific cults. A good case can be made for the view that this sprouting of crazy science in germany made it easier for the populace to buy the crackpot anthropology that supported Hitler's "final solution".

13. Producers of shows, like publishers of books and magazines, are correct in saying that they respond to public demand rather than initiate it. But just as mild porn stimulates a demand for pornier porn, and mild violence a demand for more violent violence, so does crazy science create a demand for crazier science.

14. If God spoke to us audibly, as Jehovah does so often in Old Testament tales, we might (unless we thought ourselves mad) believe in God's existence for much the same reasons we believe in the existence of other persons. If God demonstrated his power by stupendous miracles, such as turning someone into a pillar of salt, there would be other good reasons for believing. If we could perform experiments that supported, even indirectly, the hypothesis "God exists", we would believe in God for the same reasons we believe in gravity. I do not think God reveals himself, or has ever done so, in such crude ways.

15. To my way of thinking, the hope for a logical justification of God's existence is as futile as the hope for a logical justification of induction. With respect to both questions, I believe only pragmatic answers can be given. Is it not the height of human pride and folly to suppose that our finite little brains can construct a proof that the world must be built just the way it is, or a proof that there must be a God who built it?

16. Perhaps there is built into human nature a natural tendency toward faith, something comparable to a natural thirst for water. This is, of course, an ancient notion. In modern terms, is there a genetic basis for faith? Some sociobiologists have raised this possibility. May be it is balanced by a genetic predisposition towards atheism, like conflicting genetic impulses toward egoism and altruism. May be the relative strengths of the two tendencies vary with individuals, and vary statistically with cultures. I do not know the answers to these questions.

17. Not only are there no compelling proofs of God or an afterlife, but our experience strongly tells us that Nature does not care a fig about the fate of the entire human race, that death plunges each of us into the nothingness that preceded our birth...I agree with Pierre Bayle and Miguel de Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing there is no God at all.

18. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd...To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son.

19. A god whose creation is so imperfect that he must be continually adjusting it to make it work properly seems to me a god of relatively low order, hardly worthy of any worship.

20. Although I do not think the New Testament is a forgery from beginning to end, I do think it is a forgery in the sense that it gives wildly inaccurate accounts of events in the life of Jesus...There is no reason to suppose Jesus ever heard the biblical doctrine of the virgin birth, or the unbiblical doctrines of the immaculate concetion and the perpetual virginity of his mother. Paul's silence on all three counts suggests strongly that he hadn't heard of them either.

21. I cannot believe that Jesus rose bodily from the tomb, or that after his death "the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many (Matthew 27:52-53). I do not believe the story (told only by John) about how Jesus brought his dear friend Lazarus...back to life after he had been dead for so many days. I cannot believe that Jesus raised the daughter of Jairus from the dead, or that he brought back to life te only son of the widow of Nain.

22. Even less can I believe that God in human flesh would have lowered himself to such droll magical shenanigans as turning water into wine, multiplying loaves and fishes, walking on the water, or causing a fig tree to wither because it bore no fruit even though he knew...it was not the time of the year for figs. I cannot believe that Jesus commanded a legion of devils to leave a possessed man (or two men if you trust Matthew) and enter a herd of two thousand pigs that rushed into the sea and were drowned. As Bertrand Russell once observed, this certainly was not very kind to the pigs. These are typical miracle tales of the sort no intelligent Christians would believe for a moment if they came upon them in the Koran.

23. Jesus once spoke of seeing the mote in a neighbour's eye while overlooking the beam in one's own. It is easy to see motes in the sacred writing s of other cultures because alien myths are so unfamiliar that their crudities are readily apparent. It is not so easy to recognise beams in the sacred books one has known from childhood. Exotic doctrines and legends always seem funny, just as everybodyelse's big toe always looks funny. To a devout Muslim...the very notion that God can have a son is too outrageous to be entertained...Muslims find the Atonement, the notion that God required a blood sacrifice of his son to forgive the sin of Adam, an abominable doctrine.

24. A second reason I cannot believe Jesus was God is that he clearly was mistaken about the time of his Second Coming. I am aware of all the ways that theologians of the past, and adventist cults today, cleverly evade the plain intent of Jesus' words as the gospels record them. He said explicitly that he would return during his own generation (Matthew 24:34, Mark 13:30, LUke 21:32), and that "There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom"(Matthew 16:28, Mark 9:1, Luke 9:27).

25. I believe that one can drop out of a traditional religion such as Christianity without at the same time abandoning faith in a personal God or in life after death. Indeed, I believe that such a faith, unburdened by strange dogmas, is truer to the heart of what Jesus probably taught than the New Testament records indicate. Many of the doctrines of Paul would have astonished Jesus...And Jesus and Paul alike would have been bewildered...by most of the doctrines fabricated later by th Holy Roman Church.

26. One can be a theist, with all that faith in a personal God entails, and at the same time combine theism with the utmost respect for reason and science, or, to say the same thing negatively, with utmost freedom from superstition.

27. I am quite content to confess with Unamuno that I have no basis whatever for my belief in God other than a passionate longing that God exist and that I and others will not cease to exist. Because I believe that my leap of faith, in a way beyond my comprehension, is God outside of me wanting me to believe, and God within me responding...The leap of faith, in its inner nature, remains opaque. I understand it as little as I understand the essence of a photon.

28. It is easier for me to believe that any fact or law of science is no more than a momentary illusion, produced by the Great Magician and subject to change whenever the Great Magician decides to modify his Act, than to believe that the Great Magician doesn't exist. But this certainty is not knowledge of the kind we have in mathematics or science. It is trivially true that we believe what we know, or think we know. To believe what we do not know, what we hope for but cannot see - this is the very essence of faith.

29. Just as knowing how a magic trick is done spoils all its wonder, so let us be grateful that wherever science and reason turn they plunge finally into stygian darkness. I am not in the least annoyed because I do not understand time and space, or consciousness, or free will, or evil, or why the universe is made the way it is. I am relieved beyond meausre that I do not need to comprehend more than dimly the nature of God or an afterlife. I do not want to be blinded by truths beyond the capacity of my eyes and brain and heart. I am...contented with the absence of rational methods for penetrating ultimate mysteries.

30.Until a few decades ago, most people took it for granted that in science and technology ancient and medieval China had lagged far behind Europe. Then one man, Joseph Needham, slowly, tirelessly, and systematically demolished this myth...Long before other cultures, Needham shows, the Chinese were printing books, using magnetic compasses, controling insect pests with other insects, making mechanical clocks, casting iron for ploughshares and bridges, recording stronomical phenomena, using a decimal system, measuring earthquakes with seismographs, and doing a thousand similar things...They used explosive powder in guns, bombs, grenades, landmines, flamethrowers, rockets - even for cannon on ships.

31. Theoretical physicists are in a state of high excitement these days - and for good reason. New discoveries in particle physics, combined with brilliant theoretical onvention, suggest that they are on the verge of nothing less than explaining everything. Well, not exactly Everything - but everything possible for physics to explain. More precisely, they believe they are cose to constructing a unified field theorythat will describe exactly how te universe, almost instantly after the Big bang, acquired all the particles ad forces that allowed it, some fifteen billion years later, to grow into the universe we know. A few adventuresome theorists think they may soon be able to explain how the primeval explosion itself was caused by a random quantum fluctuation of Nothing.

32. Only in pure logic and mathematics can statements be deemed absolutely certain, but for this kind of truth a stupendous price is paid. The price is that such statements say nothing about the world...Two elephants plus two elehants make four elephants...But two drops of water plus two more drops make one big drop. Applied mathematics is never absolutely certain because there is always the possibility, however remote, that a mathematical model is not absolutely accurate.

33. ...the continual proposals of unorthodox theories, most of which turn out to be flawed, are essential to the progress of science. Establishment journals, contrary to what some people think, are crammed with just such off-beat speculations, and the surest road to fame is to advnce a crazy theory that is eventually confirmed, often after intense resistance by skeptcis. Such resistance is both understandable and necessary. Science would be total chaos if experts quickly embraced or even tried to disconfirm every eccentric theory that came along.

34. There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.

35. Politicians, real-estate agents, used-car salesmen, and advertising copy-writers are expected to stretch facts in self-serving directions, but scientists who falsify their results are regarded by their peers as committing an inexcusable crime. Yet the sad fact is that the history of science swarms with cases of outright fakery and instances of scientists who unconsciously distorted their work by seeing it through lenses of passionately held beliefs.

Ludwig Feuerbach

2010-03-07T11:40:00.003+05:30

1804 - 72, prominent German materialist philosopher who was a disciple of Hegel and who influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. His book The Essence of Christianity is a classic of atheist literature. He wrote that love of man to man rather than to God should be the highest ideal.

1. Faith is essentially intolerant...because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one's cause is also God's cause.

2. Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

3. It is as clear as the sun and as evident as the day that there is no God and that there can be none.

4. God has not created man, but man created God.

5. God is man writ large.

6. My only wish is...to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own admission, are "half animal, half angel" into persons, into whole persons.

7. If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism -- at least in the sense of this work -- is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

8. Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from the reason but also from the life of mankind, and it is nothing more than a fixed idea.

9. Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.

10. The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

11. To think is to be God.

12. What yesterday was still religion is no longer such today; and what today is atheism tomorrow will be religion.

13. In practice all men are atheists; they deny their faith by their actions.

14. Only he is a truly ethical, a truly human being, who has the courage to see through his own religious feelings and needs.

15. The decline of culture was identical with the victory of Christianity...religious man feels no need of culture.

16. Atheism is the secret of religion...Religion is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness...Divine revelation is simply the self-determination of man, only...between himself the determined, and himself the determining, he interposes an object, God....God is the medium by which man brings about the reconciliation of himself with his own nature...And so in revelation man goes out of himself, in order, by a circuitous path, to return to himself.

17. Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.

18. God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man’s imagination.

19. What is truly negative is theism, the belief in God; it negates nature, the world and mankind: in the face of God, the world and man are nothing, God was before world and man were; He can exist without them; He is the nothingness of the world and of man; at least according to strict orthodox belief, God can make the world into nothingness at any moment. For the true theist the power and beauty of nature, the virtue of man, do not exist; a believer in God takes everything away from man and from nature in order to adorn and glorify his God. “Only God alone is to be loved,” says St. Augustine, for example, “this whole world [i. e. all sensuous things] is to be despised.” “God,” says Luther in a Latin letter, “wishes either to be the only friend or no friend at all.” “Faith, hope, and love,” he says in another letter, “are due to God alone, and that is why they are called the theological virtues.” Thus theism is “negative and destructive”; it builds its faith solely on the nullity of world and man, that is, of the real man.

20. But God is nothing other than the abstracted, phantasmagoric essence of man and nature, hypostatised by the imagination; hence theism sacrifices the real life and nature of things and of men to a being who is a mere product of thought and imagination. Thus atheism is positive and affirmative; it gives back to nature and mankind the dignity of which theism has despoiled them; it restores life to nature and mankind, which theism had drained of their best powers. God, as we have seen, is jealous of nature and man; He wants man to honour, love, and serve Him alone; He wants everything else to be nothing and Himself alone to be something; in other words, theism is jealous of man and the world and begrudges them any good. Envy, ill will, and jealousy are destructive, negative passions. Atheism, on the other hand, is liberal, open-handed, open-minded; an atheist acknowledges every being’s will and talent; his heart delights in the beauty of nature and the virtue of man: joy and love do not destroy, they are life-giving, affirmative.

21. Let us then follow the example of the pagans and let the dead rest in peace! “The pagans,” I wrote in The Question of Immortality, “cried out to their dead loved ones: May thy bones rest gently! or: Rest in peace! – whereas the Christians shout a cheery vivas et crescas in infinitum into the ears of the dying, or else their pietistic healers of souls à la Dr. Eisenbart take advantage of their fear of death to bellow at them that only the fear of God can guarantee their eternal beatitude.” Let us then leave the dead in peace and concern ourselves with the living. If we no longer believe in a better life but decide to achieve one, not each man by himself but with our united powers, we will create a better life, we will at least do away with the most glaring, outrageous, heartbreaking injustices and evils from which man has hitherto suffered. But in order to make such a decision and carry it through, we must replace the love of God by the love of man as the only true religion, the belief in God by the belief in man and his powers – by the belief that the fate of mankind depends not on a being outside it and above it, but on mankind itself, that man’s only Devil is man, the barbarous, superstitious, self-seeking, evil man, but that man’s only God is also man himself.

22. Accordingly, we not only find individuals stopping once they have achieved a certain stage of education or perfection, but whole nations marking time for thousands of years. The Chinese, the Indians, are today at the same stage of development as thousands of years ago. How do such phenomena fit in with the rationalist’s myth of an unlimited human striving for perfection, for which he can only find room in an infinite hereafter? Man has not only an impulse to progress, but also an impulse to rest once he has arrived at a stage of development corresponding to his finite nature. It is these opposing impulses that give rise to the conflict that runs through all history, including the present period. The progressives, the so-called revolutionaries, want to go forward; the conservatives want to leave everything as it is, except that their love of stability does not extend to their attitude toward death – for most of them are believers – and in order to prolong their interesting existences they are willing, in this respect, to put up with the most radical changes, the most revolutionary transformations, of their being. But even revolutionaries do not wish to progress ad infinitum, they have specific aims; once these are achieved, they halt and seek stability. Thus in each generation new young men take up the thread of history where the old progressives, having attained the goal of their desires and with it the limits of their being and thinking, leave off.

23. Theology is Anthropology...The distinction which is made, or rather supposed to be made, between the theological and anthropological predicates resolves itself into an absurdity.

24. While reducing theology to anthropology, I exalt anthropology into theology, very much as Christianity, while lowering God into man, made man into God.

25. The first and highest law must be the love of man to man. Homo homini Deus est - this is the supreme practical maxim, this the turning point of the world's History.

26. The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve a nation? Give it, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats.

Joseph Campbell

2010-03-01T23:57:00.021+05:30

1904 - 87, famous American mythologist, lecturer and orator who is best remembered for his work on Comparative Mythology and Comparative Religion. 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces', 'Myths to Live By', and 'Historical Atlas of World Mythology' are some of his well known books.

1. What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?

2. It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported.

3. God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

4. Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

5. Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

6. Religion can be defined as misinterpreted mythology...It attributes historical references to symbols which properly are spiritual in their reference.

7. A one sentence definition of mythology: Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.

8. The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.

9. Too many of our best scholars, themselves indoctrinated from infancy in a religion of one kind or another based upon the Bible, are so locked into the idea of their own god as a supernatural fact -- something final, not symbolic of transcendence, but a personage with a character and will of his own - that they are unable to grasp the idea of a worship that is not of the symbol but of its reference, which is of a mystery of much greater age and of more immediate inward reality than the name-and-form of any historical ethnic idea of a deity, whatsoever...and is of a sophistication that makes the sentimentalism of our popular Bible-story theology seem undeveloped.

10. The two greatest works of war mythology in the west...are the Iliad and the Old Testament.... When we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament we find a single-minded single deity with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled...pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a "Thou" but an "It."

11. Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

12. I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

13. We just don't know very much about Jesus. All we know are four contradictory texts that purport to tell us what he said and did.”

14. The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian saviour Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the winter solstice.

15. Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. Myth tells you what the experience is.

16. The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

17. All religions are true but none are literal.

18. Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

19. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.

20. Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives becomes dissolved.

21. Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There's a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it. "All life is sorrowful" is the first Buddhist saying, and it is. It wouldn't be life if there were not temporality involved which is sorrow.

22. Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

23. The image of the cosmos must change with the development of the mind and knowledge; otherwise, the mythic statement is lost, and man becomes dissociated from the very basis of his own religious experience. Doubt comes in, and so forth. You must remember: all of the great traditions, and little traditions, in their own time were scientifically correct. That is to say, they were correct in terms of the scientific image of that age.

24. Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.

Immanuel Kant

2010-02-06T10:38:00.003+05:30

1724-1804, famous German philosopher who made substantial contributions to metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. 'Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone','The Critique of Pure Reason', 'The Critique of Practical Reason', 'Refutation of Material Idealism', 'The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals' are some of his influential works.

1. All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

2. Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

3. Reason can never prove the existence of God.

4. Reason does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another.

5. Reason must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he has himself formulated.

6. Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.

7. Eternity is not sufficient to embrace the manifestations of the Supreme Being, if it is not combined with the infinitude of space.

8. The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.

9. The ideal of the Supreme Being is nothing but a regulative principle of reason which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all-sufficient necessary cause.

10. Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.

11. It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

12. Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

13. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind...The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.

14. The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience.

15. Science is organised knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

16. The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

17. I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

18. Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!

19. All that is required for this enlightenment is freedom; and particularly the...freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters. But I hear people clamour on all sides: Don't argue! The officer says: Don't argue, drill! The tax collector: Don't argue, pay! The pastor: Don't argue, believe!

20. It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him. He has even become fond of it and for the time being is incapable of employing his own intelligence, because he has never been allowed to make the attempt. Statutes and formulas, these mechanical tools of a serviceable use, or rather misuse, of his natural faculties, are the ankle-chains of a continuous immaturity. Whoever threw it off would make an uncertain jump over the smallest trench because he is not accustomed to such free movement. Therefore there are only a few who have pursued a firm path and have succeeded in escaping from immaturity by their own cultivation of the mind.

21. Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!

22. After having made their domestic animals dumb and having carefully prevented these quiet creatures from daring to take any step beyond the lead-strings to which they have fastened them, these guardians then show them the danger which threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone.

23. The guardians who have kindly undertaken the supervision will see to it that by far the largest part of mankind, including the entire "beautiful sex," should consider the step into maturity, not only as difficult but as very dangerous.

24. There will always be some people who think for themselves, even among the self-appointed guardians of the great mass who, after having thrown off the yoke of immaturity themselves, will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable estimate of their own value and of the need for every man to think for himself.

25. A public can only arrive at enlightenment slowly. Through revolution, the abandonment of personal despotism may be engendered and the end of profit-seeking and domineering oppression may occur, but never a true reform of the state of mind. Instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones, will serve as the guiding reins of the great, unthinking mass.

26. The public use of a man's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment among men.

27. Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

28. I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.

29. He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

30. Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

31. Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity.

32. Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!

33. God put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system.

34. If it were possible for us to have so deep an insight into a man's character as shown both in inner and in outer actions, that every, even the least, incentive to these actions and all external occasions which affect them were so known to us that his future conduct could be predicted with as great a certainty as the occurrence of a solar or lunar eclipse, we could nevertheless still assert that the man is free.

35. In scientific matters ... the greatest discoverer differs from the most arduous imitator and apprentice only in degree, whereas he differs in kind from someone whom nature has endowed for fine art. But saying this does not disparage those great men to whom the human race owes so much in contrast to those whom nature has endowed for fine art. For the scientists' talent lies in continuing to increase the perfection of our cognitions and on all the dependent benefits, as well as in imparting that same knowledge to others; and in these respects they are far superior to those who merit the honour of being called geniuses. For the latter's art stops at some point, because a boundary is set for it beyond which it cannot go and which has probably long since been reached and cannot be extended further.

36. It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.

37. Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.

38. Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.

39. When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane; when Torricelli made the air carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equal to that of a definite volume of water; or in more recent times, when Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime back into metal, by withdrawing something and then restoring it, a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgement based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. Accidental observations, made in obedience to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law, which alone reason is concerned to discover.

40. Beneficence is a duty. He who frequently practises it, and sees his benevolent intentions realised, at length comes really to love him to whom he has done good. When, therefore, it is said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," it is not meant, thou shalt love him first and do him good in consequence of that love, but thou shalt do good, to thy neighbour; and this thy beneficence will engender in thee that love to mankind which is the fullness and consummation of the inclination to do, good.

Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach

2010-01-30T15:40:00.002+05:30

1723 - 89, French philosopher and encyclopaedist who wrote Christianity Unveiled and The System of Nature in which he probably made the first blunt denial of any divine purpose or master plan in nature. All his books were banned by the Vatican.

1. If we go back to the beginning of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture or deception embellished or distorted them; that weakness worships them; that credulity nourishes them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favours them in order to profit from the blindness of men.

2. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

3. All religions are ancient monuments to superstitions, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies rejuvenated.

4. All children are atheists -- they have no idea of God.

5. Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system.

6. The atheist is a man who destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

7. Ignorance of natural causes created the gods, and priestly impostures made them terrible.

8. What has been said of [God] is either unintelligible or perfectly contradictory; and for this reason must appear impossible to every man of common sense.

9. The Jehovah of the Jews is a suspicious tyrant, who breathes nothing but blood, murder, and carnage, and who demands that they should nourish him with the vapours of animals. The Jupiter of the Pagans is a lascivious monster. The Moloch of the Phoenicians is a cannibal. The pure mind of the Christians resolved, in order to appease his fury, to crucify his own son. The savage god of the Mexicans cannot be satisfied without thousands of mortals which are immolated to his sanguinary appetite.

10. It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

11. Can theology give to the mind the ineffable boon of conceiving that which no man is in a capacity to comprehend? Can it procure to its agents the marvellous faculty of having precise ideas of a god composed of so many contradictory qualities?

12. Many men without morals have attacked religion because it was contrary to their inclinations. Many wise men have despised it because it seemed to them ridiculous. Many persons have regarded it with indifference, because they have never felt its true disadvantages. But it is as a citizen that I attack it, because it seems to me harmful to the happiness of the state, hostile to the march of the mind of man, and contrary to sound morality, from which the interests of state policy can never be separated.

13. If the ministers of the Church have often permitted nations to revolt for Heaven's cause, they never allowed them to revolt against real evils or known violences. It is from Heaven that the chains have come to fetter the minds of mortals.

14. Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.

15. The vulgar, it is repeatedly said, must have a Religion. If enlightened persons have no need of the restraint of opinions, it is at least necessary to rule men, whose reason is uncultivated by education...

16. The vulgar, it is repeatedly said, must have a Religion. If enlightened persons have no need of the restraint of opinions, it is at least necessary to rule men, whose reason is uncultivated by education...

17. When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.

18. O Nature, sovereign of all beings, and your adorable daughters, virtue, reason, truth! be for ever our sole divinities; it is to you that the incense and homage of the earth are due. Show us, then, O Nature, what man must do to obtain the happiness which you have made him desire.... Inspire the intelligent being with courage; give him energy, that he can eventually love himself, esteem himself, feel his dignity; that he dares free himself, that he is happy and free, that he will never be a slave to your laws; that he perfects his fate; that he cherishes his fellow-beings; that he makes himself happy, that he makes others happy.

19. Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interest. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them. Let us observe with the celebrated Lord Bolingbroke, that 'theology is the box of Pandora; and if it is impossible to shut it, it is at least useful to inform men that this fatal box is open.'

20. Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty.

21. Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.

22. The Christian burns the Jew at what is called auto-da-fe because he clings to the faith of his fathers; the Roman Catholic condemns the Protestant to the flames, and makes a conscience of massacring him in cold blood…Sometimes the various sects of Christians league together against the incredulous Turk, and for a moment suspend their own bloody disputes that they may chastise the enemies of the True Faith.

Modern Islamic Sceptics

2010-01-15T11:40:00.105+05:30

Taslima Nasrin

1962 - , exiled Bangladeshi doctor, writer, secular humanist and feminist currently living in the USA due to death threats from Islamic fundamentalists. She is the author of a number of books including "Lajja" and "Dwikhandito".

1. Religion, society and state -- from none of these do women get their proper honour. It is religion, which has created an unparalleled disparity between men and women.

2. I don’t agree with those who think that the conflict is simply between two religions, namely Christianity and Islam...To me, the key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational, logical minds.

3. Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that?

4. Those religions that are oppressive to women are also against democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression.

5. The Sharia laws cannot be changed. They must be thrown out, abolished…Why do we need seventh century laws now?

6. I don't find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. I believe religion is the root, and from the root fundamentalism grows as a poisonous stem. If we remove fundamentalism and keep religion, then one day or the other, fundamentalism will grow again. I need to say this because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems.

7. Religion is now the first obstacle to women's advancement. Religion pulls human beings backwards; it goes against science and progressiveness. Religion engulfs people with a fear of the supernatural.

Shabnam Nadiya

Bangladeshi writer, poet and translator.

1. The Koran told me that no matter how much I read, how much I knew, no matter what love and compassion for people I held in my breast, no matter my intelligence, my talents, my love of laughter, I would never ever be as good as even the lowliest of men. Because I was a woman. I was a field for a man to sow his seed, I was part of the spoils of war for a warrior, I was impure at times because I had the power to breed children, my word was not to be trusted against that of a man, I was the gateway to hell because men would desire me. How could I live my life with that?... How could any system of belief compete with the dignity and the respect that non-belief had to offer to me?

2. Atheism treats human beings as adults – religion does not. Atheism believes that humans are capable of living a good life, and are capable of doing good because it is in our nature to do good. That humans need no stick of eternal and divine punishment or carrot of eternal and divine bliss to achieve goodness. Religion limits our capacity to be human. Religion believes that a man will not treat his wife, children, family or friends as he should, or that a woman will disgrace herself and betray her family if he or she is not afraid of burning in hellfire.

3. I would give a lot to be able to believe. But in the end I had to tread the rocky and non-comforting path of atheism. I gave up the shelter of a divine shadow – but I gained a life that could question and explore every nook and cranny of existence. I questioned and rejected religion and became an atheist because I could not answer the inconsistencies of religion to myself, and because religion limited me as a human being – I remain an atheist because I have discovered that I do not need religion to tell me who I am.

Maryam Namazie

Iran-born British author who campaigns for secularism and against the imposition of Sharia laws in Britain.

1. Rights are for individuals, not for religions or beliefs. ‘Every human is equal' does not mean that every belief is equal.

2. A child is swathed in cloth from head to toe every day. Everything but her face and hands are covered for fear that a man might find her attractive. At school she learns that she is worth less than a boy. She is not allowed to dance or swim or feel the sun on her skin or the wind in her hair. This is clearly unacceptable, yet it is accepted when it is done in the name of religion.

3. Islam4UK’s demand for the imposition of Sharia law in Britain is absurd. What is not absurd, however, is the fact that Sharia law is already being imposed on countless men, women and children for many years under the guise of multi-culturalism. If Sharia law isn’t good for Britain, then it isn’t good for Britain’s ‘Muslim minority’ either. I urge the organisations that have come to the fore against Islam4UK to join our efforts to get rid of existing Sharia councils and tribunals - that is the difficult but crucial task at hand.’

4. Islam is a religion not a race…Criticisms of a religion, an idea, a belief and even the practices that result from beliefs – even a phobia and hatred against beliefs have nothing to do with racism against real live human beings. Just as an attack on the belief and practice of Female Genital Mutilation is not an attack on girls who have been mutilated, just as a criticism of Judaism or the Israeli government is not an attack on Jews and just as Monty Python’s Life of Brian is not an attack on or racism against Christians. Saying it is racism is merely part of the effort to silence criticism of religion and the political movement that holds it up as its banner.

5. The repeated calls for an unreserved apology for publishing ‘offensive’ and ‘insulting’ caricatures of Mohammad reminds me of the apologies that should be made to me and many like me. I’d like the offended Islamists…to apologise; not for their backward and medieval superstitions and religious mumbo jumbo but for their imposition of these beliefs in the form of States, Islamic laws and the political Islamic movement. If any of them wants to apologise for the mass murder of countless human beings in Iran and the Middle East, and more recently in Europe, for veiling and sexual apartheid, for stoning, amputations, decapitations, Islamic terrorism and for the recent brutal attack on Teheran’s bus workers and so on and so forth, just email me direct.

Irshad Manji

1968- , Uganda-born, Canadian journalist and activist who is the author of the best-selling book "The Trouble With Islam Today".

1. In Islam's golden age, so much progress was made that it became the basis of the European Renaissance. We Muslims have to change ourselves, that's the main difference. We can't keep blaming America or Israel for our misery.

2. Every faith has its share of literalists...But only within Islam is literalism fast becoming the mainstream. We Muslims, including moderates living here in the West, are routinely raised to believe that the Koran is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God's will, untouched and immutable. This is a supremacy complex. It's dangerous because when abuse happens under the banner of faith..., most Muslims have no clue how to debate, dissent, revise or reform...because we have never been introduced to the possibility, let alone the virtue of asking questions.

3. Moderate Muslims denounce violence in the name of Islam but deny that Islam has anything to do with it. By their denial, moderates abandon the ground of theological interpretation to those with malignant intentions--effectively telling would-be terrorists that they can get away with abuses of power because mainstream Muslims won't challenge the fanatics with bold, competing interpretations. To do so would be admit that religion is a factor. Moderate Muslims can't go there.

4. Reform-minded Muslims say it's time to admit that Islam's scripture and history are being exploited. They argue for re-interpretation precisely to put the would-be terrorists on notice that their monopoly is over. Re-interpreting doesn't mean re-writing. It means re-thinking words and practices that already exist--removing them from a seventh-century tribal time warp and introducing them to a twenty first-century pluralistic context.

5. The Koran contains three times as many verses calling on Muslims to think, analyze, and reflect than passages that dictate what's absolutely right or wrong.

6. Islam has a teaching against 'excessive laughter'. I'm not joking. But does this mean that we should cry 'blasphemy' over less-than- flattering depictions of the prophet Muhammad?...When Muslims put the prophet on a pedestal, we're engaging in idolatry of our own...Humility requires people of faith to mock themselves - and each other - every once in a while.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

1969 - , Somalia-born, Dutch author and film maker, now living in the USA due to death threats from Islamic fanatics. She is the author of "Infidel" and "The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam". She was named one of the 100 most influential persons in the world by TIME magazine.

1. The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

2. Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.

3. Islam is not a race...Islam is simply a set of beliefs, and it is not 'Islamophobic' to say Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy.

4. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.

5. The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.

6. I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

7. It is always difficult to make the transition to a modern world. I moved from the world of faith to the world of reason - from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world of sexual emancipation. Having made that journey, I know that one of those worlds is simply better than the other. Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally, because of its values.

Tariq Ali

1943 - , Pakistan-born British writer, historian, novelist and film maker. He is the author of several books, including "Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State" (1991), "Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity" (2002), "Pirates Of The Caribbean: Axis Of Hope" (2006), "A Banker for All Seasons" (2007) and "Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and Other Essays" (2009).

1. We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

2. Religious beliefs have played no part in my own life. From the age of five or six I was an agnostic. At twelve I became a staunch atheist and, like many of the friends I grew up with, have remained one ever since. But I was brought up in that culture and it has enriched my life. It is perfectly possible to be part of a culture without being a believer.

3. The historian Isaac Deutscher used to refer to himself as a non-Jewish Jew, identifying himself with a long tradition of intellectual scepticism, symbolised by Spinoza, Freud and Marx. I have on occasion described myself as a non-Muslim Muslim.

4. The Enlightenment attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance. Why should we abandon either of these legacies today?

5. What do the Islamists offer? A route to a past which, mercifully for the people of the seventh century, never existed. If the "Emirate of Afghanistan" is the model for what they want to impose on the world then the bulk of Muslims would rise up in arms against them. Don't imagine that either Osama or Mullah Omar represent the future of Islam. It would be a major disaster for the culture we both share if that turned out to be the case. Would you want to live under those conditions? Would you tolerate your sister, your mother or the woman you love being hidden from public view and only allowed out shrouded like a corpse?

6. In all the Muslim countries, with few exceptions, the growth of Islamic fundamentalism was aided by the US either directly or indirectly. In no way did Islamic fundamentalism become a big force without US support. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat used the Islamic fundamentalists to unleash a reign of terror against secular and radical forces. In Pakistan, General Zia did exactly the same. In Saudi Arabia we have a Wahabbite monarchy supported by the US. Not to mention Afghanistan, where the US supported the religious jihad, leaving aside whether the Soviet intervention was right or wrong. The US helped in a big way to spread Islamic fundamentalism during the Cold War.

7. We are in desperate need of an Islamic Reformation that sweeps away the crazed conservatism and backwardness of the fundamentalists but, more than that, opens up the world of Islam to new ideas which are seen to be more advanced than what is currently on offer from the West.

Naguib Mahfouz

1911 - 2006, Egyptian civil servant, novelist and short story writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 - the only Arabic language writer to win the award. He strongly criticised Radical Islam in his works. As a result, he was at loggerheads with Islamic fundamentalists and was nearly assassinated in 1994.

1. I have condemned Khomeini's fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie as a breach of international relations and as an assault on Islam as we know it...I believe that the wrong done by Khomeini towards Islam and the Muslims is no less than that done by the author himself. As regards freedom of expression, I have said that it must be considered sacred and that thought can only be corrected by counter-thought.

2. No blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer.

3. According to Islamic principles, when a man is accused of heresy he is given the choice between repentance and punishment. Rushdie was not given that choice. I have always defended Rushdie’s right to write and say what he wants in terms of ideas. But he does not have the right to insult anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy.

4. Religion should be open; a closed-minded religion is a curse. Excessive concern with religion seems to me a last resort for people who have been exhausted by life. I consider religion very important but also potentially dangerous. Religion should speak of love and humanity. It is related to progress and civilization, not just emotions. Unfortunately today’s interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

5. It's clearly more important to treat one's fellow man well than to be always praying and fasting and touching one's head to a prayer mat.

6. You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

7. It's a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.

8. History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself. Nowadays it does so with its police and its courts. I defend both the freedom of expression and society’s right to counter it. I must pay the price for differing. It is the natural way of things.

Ibn Warraq

Pseudonym of Pakistan-born English Islamic scholar who is the author of "Why I Am Not A Muslim" and "leaving Islam:Apostates Speak Out".

1. Islamic law is a totalitarian theoretical construct, intended to control every aspect of an individual's life from birth to death. Happily, the law has not always been applied to the letter - Islamic civilisation would scarcely have emerged otherwise.

2. In some areas of human life the Islamic practice has been more severe than required by the sharia. Circumcision is not mentioned in the Koran, and most jurists at most only recommend it, but without exception all male Muslim children are circumcised. Female circumcision is also not discussed in the Koran but the practice persists in certain Islamic countries.

3. In the struggle for the liberation of the Muslim woman the veil has become a symbol of her servitude. In 1923 the president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, Ms Houda Cha'araoui, and her colleagues defiantly thre their veils into the sea. Similarly in 1927 there was a campaign of "dehijabisation"in communist Turkestan. Not less than 87,000 Uzbek women publicly repudiated their veils, though not less than 300 of their sisters had been killed by the male heads of the Muslim families for betraying Islam. In 1928, at the independence celebrations, the Shah of Afghanistan ordered his wife to "unveil" herself in public. Following the public scandal, the Shah was obliged to backtrack and cancel his projects for the emancipation of women. He himself was obliged to abdicate. IN 1936, Reza Shah of Iran forbade the veil by a special decree. Obviously the people were not ready to break with tradition and so after mass protests in 1941, he also had to retreat and abrogate the law.

4. In 1952, Egyptian feminists assembled their forces and claimed the right to vote and the right to become members of Parliament. The ulamas of the University of al-Azhar rallied their forces and in June 1952 promulagated a fatwa liberally sprinkled with quotes from the Koran and the hadiths that demonstrated that Islam condemned any attempt by women to aspire to any post as a member of Parliament...Happily, despite the efforts of the ulamas, Egyptian women got the vote in 1956. In Syria, women got the vote in 1949, again despite the ostacles put in their path by the ulamas. Islam specifically forbids certain professions to women: head of state, head of the armed forces, imam and judge.

5. The theory and practice of Jihad was not concocted in the Pentagon...It was taken from the Koran, the Hadith and Islamic tradition. Western liberals, especially humanists, find it hard to believe this...We must take seriously what the islamists say to understand their motivation, that it is the divinely ordained duty of all Muslims to fight in the literal sense until man-made law has been replaced by God's law, the Sharia, and Islamic law has conquered the entire world...For every text the liberal Muslims produce, the mullahs will use dozens of counter-examples that are exegetically, philosophically, historically far more legitimate.

6. Let us face the truth….Islam divides the world in two: Dar-ul Harb [land of war] and Dar-ul Islam [land of Islam]. Dar-ul Harb is the land of the infidels. Muslims are required to infiltrate those lands, proselytize, procreate until their numbers increase, and then start the war…impose Islam…and convert that land into Dar-ul Islam….It is not the extremists who have misunderstood Islam. They do literally what the Koran asks them to do. It is we [the moderates] who misunderstand Islam.

Ibn al-Rawandi

Pseudonym of Cyprus-born English Islamic scholar who is the author of "Islamic Mysticism - A Secular Perspective".

1. The situation confronting Islam in the modern world is the unparalleled power and dominance achieved by the West by ignorng all the precepts islam holds most dear. This is not how things should be, according to the Koran. By not believing, by doubting and questioning everything, including religion and revelation, the West has achieved the most glittering success the world has ever seen. The Muslim response of sneering at this material success by emphasising its price in social disintegration can only appear as sour graoes, especially when, in trying to boost pride in the islamic past, Muslims point to their own material success and scientific progress in the Islamic Middle Ages.

2. When not disparaging the deleterious effects of Western science, exoteric Muslims are intent on Islamising it, so that it can become something called "Islamic Science", the first postulate of which would be "Faith in revelaton", rather than "Faith in rationality", a notion that emasculates sicence as free enquiry from the outset. By "revelation", of course, Muslims mean the Koran, just as Christians pursuing the same line of argument would mean the Bible, Hindus the Vedas, and so on for every group that considers itself to be in possession of a divinely inspired text. This ghettoising of science is at once sinister and pathetic.

3. Islam never really encouraged science, if by science we mean ‘disinterested inquiry.’ What Islam always meant by ‘knowledge’ was religious knowledge, anything else was deemed dangerous to the faith. All the real science that occurred under Islam occurred despite the religion not because of it.

4. If Islam did not produce a Renaissance or a Reformation, much less an Industrial Revolution or a French Revolution, it is because of its holy finality, its role as witness to the adamantine Truth that bsaves until the end of time. The events that produced the modern world are not signs of life in contrast to the cadaverous rigidity of Islam but signs of a Promethean betrayal that refuses the demands of heaven. If certain sections of humanity have ceased to see the truth in scripture and have become blind to the metaphysical transparency of phenomena, it is not though any newly acquired objectivity or outgrowing of naivete but through an obscuring of vision that ceases to see anything beyond the material.

5. The myth of Islamic tolerance [was] largely invented by Jews and Western freethinkers as a stick with which to beat the Catholic Church. Islam was never a religion of tolerance…. Islam was spread by the sword…Religious minorities were always second-class citizens in this empire….For polytheists and unbelievers there was no tolerance at all, it was conversion or death….These repulsive characteristics are written into the Quran, the hadith and the sharia….There is no way that Islam can reform itself and remain Islam, no way it can ever be made compatible with pluralism, free speech, critical thought and democracy.

6. The mealy-mouthed and apologetic character of so much Western scholarship on Islam springs from the fact that many of these scholars, were, and are, believers in Christianity….They were not keen to press the non-historical and non-divine arguments too far, since they realized that such arguments could just as well be used against their own cherished beliefs.

Luther Burbank

2010-01-02T08:37:00.001+05:30

1849-1926, a self-taught, pioneering American agricultural scientist who developed over 800 new varieties of fruits, flowers, vegetables and grains - a kind of Thomas Edison of Botany. He was inducted into the U.S National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1986.

1. Less than fifteen per cent of the people do any original thinking on any subject. The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think.

2. The time has come for honest men to denounce false teachers and attack false gods.

3. Science, which is only another name for truth, now holds religious charlatans, self-deceivers and God-agents in a certain degree of check - agents and employees, I mean, of a mythical, man-made God, anthropomorphic in constitution.

4. This great country is in danger of being dominated by people ignorant enough to take a few ancient Babylonian legends as the canons of modern culture. Our scientific men are paying for their failure to speak out earlier. There is no use now talking Evolution to these people. Their ears are stuffed with Genesis.

5. Let us have one world at a time, and let us make the journey one of joy to our fellow passengers.

6. Let us read the Bible without the ill-fitting colored spectacles of theology, just as we read other books, using our own judgment and reason, listening to the voice within, not to the noisy babel without. Most of us possess discriminating reasoning powers. Can we use them or must we be fed by others like babes?

7. [On the Scopes Trial of 1925 in which William Jennings Bryan prosecuted John Scopes for teaching Evolution in violation of a ban].

Mr. Bryan was an honoured personal friend of mine, yet this need not prevent the observation that the skull with which Nature endowed him visibly approached the Neanderthal type...Those who would legislate against the teaching of evolution should also legislate against gravity, electricity and the unreasonable velocity of light, and also should introduce a clause to prevent the use of the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope or any other instrument of precision which may in the future be invented, constructed or used for the discovery of truth.

8. Science, unlike theology, never leads to insanity.

9. Religion refers to the sentiments and feelings; science refers to the demonstrated everyday laws of Nature.

10. Scientists gladly accept any new truth which can be demonstrated by experiment, that is, proved by the very law of the cosmos. Not so with any new conceptions of religion; these are fought by the use of persecution and venom...

11. As a scientist I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired. As for their prophets, there are as many today as ever before, only now science refuses to let them overstep the bounds of common sense.

12. The integrity of one's own mind is of infinitely more value than adherence to any creed or system. We must choose between a dead faith belonging to the past and a living, growing, ever-advancing science belonging to the future.

13. The clear light of Science teaches us that we must be our own saviours.

14. Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them Nature.

15. I have learned from Nature that dependence on unnatural beliefs weakens us in the struggle and shortens our breath for the race.

16. What is the use of assuring Fundamentalists that Science is compatible with Religion. They retort at once, "Certainly not with our religion."

17. Prayer may be elevating if combined with works, and they who labour with head, hands or feet have faith and are generally quite sure of an immediate and favourable reply.

18. Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of scientific truth as they would a cold bath plunge.

19. Most people's religion is what they would like to believe, not what they do believe. And very few of them stop to examine its foundations.

20. The idea that a good God would send people to a burning Hell is utterly damnable to me. I don't want to have anything to do with such a God. But while I cannot conceive of such a God, I do recognize the existence of a great Universal Power -- a Power which we cannot even begin to comprehend and might as well not attempt to. It may be a conscious mind, or it may not. I don't know. As a scientist I should like to know, but as a man, I am not so vitally concerned.

21. I am an infidel in the true sense of the word.

22. I do not believe what has been served to me to believe. I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. However, when it can be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond the gates of death, then will I believe. Until then, no.

23. The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead.

24. The Universe is not big enough to contain perpetually all the human souls and the other living beings that have been here for their short spans. A theory of personal resurrection or reincarnation of the individual is untenable when we but pause to consider the magnitude of the idea. On the contrary, I must believe that rather than the survival of all, we must look for survival only in the spirit of the good we have done in passing through. This is as feasible and credible as Henry Ford's own practice of discarding the old models of his automobile. When obsolete, an automobile is thrown in the scrap heap. Once here and gone, the human life has likewise served its purpose. If it has been a good life, it has been sufficient. There is no need for another.

24. Religion grows with the intelligence of man, but all religions of the past and probably all of the future will sooner or later become petrified forms instead of living helps to mankind. Until that time comes, however, if religion of any name or nature makes man more happy, comfortable, and able to live peaceably with his brothers, it is good.

25. As for Christ -- well, he has been most outrageously belied. His followers, like those of many scientists and literary men, have so garbled his words and conduct that many of them no longer apply to present life. Christ was a wonderful psychologist. He was an infidel of his day because he rebelled against the prevailing religions and government. I am a lover of Christ as a man, and his work and all things that help humanity, but nevertheless just as he was an infidel then, I am an infidel today.

26. Children are the greatest sufferers from outgrown theologies.

27.Ancient tribes and nations had many gods, often one for almost every phenomenon of nature. The Hebrews have the credit of inventing the conception of our monotheistic Jewish-Christian God, who however is represented as having most of the weaknesses and bad habits of primitive man; this was a step in the path of evolution toward man's present conception of God; the God within us is the only available God we know and the clear light of science teaches us that we must be our own saviors, if we are to be found worth saving; in other words, to depend upon the "kingdom within."

28. Even today man is far from free - slave yet to war, crime and ignorance...slave to unnumbered ancient "taboos," superstitions, prejudices and fallacies, which one by one are slowly but surely weakening under the clear light of the morning of science; the saviour of mankind.

29. Science which has opened our eyes to the vastness of the universe and given us light, truth and freedom from fear where once was darkness, ignorance and superstition. There is no personal salvation, there is no national salvation, except through science. There are too few who exploit the inexhaustible forces of nature and far too many who exploit their fellow beings. Useless waste and unnecessary parasitism take at least nine- tenths of the productive capacity of the United States.

30. Our lives as we live them are passed on to others whether in physical or mental forms tinging all future lives forever. This should be enough for one who lives for truth and service to his fellow passengers on the way. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic Devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to him.

31. I love humanity, which has been a constant delight to me during all my seventy-seven years of life; and I love flowers, trees, animals, and all the works of Nature as they pass before us in time and space. What a joy life is when you have made a close working partnership with Nature, helping her to produce for the benefit of mankind new forms, colours, and perfumes in flowers which were never known before; fruits in form, size, and flavour never before seen on this globe; and grains of enormously increased productiveness, whose fat kernels are filled with more and better nourishment, a veritable storehouse of perfect food--new food for all the world's untold millions for all time to come.

32. Nature is not personal. She is the compound of all these processes which move through the Universe to effect the results we know as Life and of all the ordinances which govern that Universe and that make Life continuous. She is no more the Hebrew's Jehovah than she is the Physicist's Force; she is as much Providence as she is Electricity; she is not the Great Pattern any more than she is the Blind Chance.