Religion

I'm an atheist. Totally a confirmed atheist. I was churched, I was baptised, confirmed, I went to Sunday school. Religion is something you have to believe, blindly. I don't know why I'm not religious. I'm not even sure why people are. It always surprises me that highly intelligent people are ardently religious. The Church has wonderful music and that sort of thing but it all developed in its early days, I think, out of fear. The Church was used to scare the crap out of people, to keep them in line. The Church is so screwed up itself, over homosexuality, and women preachers and all the rest of it, that I think if I were a religious person, things like that would drive me away from the Church - http://www.oxfordmuse.com/selfportrait/portrait94.html

I'm an atheist. Totally a confirmed atheist. I was churched, I was baptised, confirmed, I went to Sunday school. Religion is something you have to believe, blindly. I don't know why I'm not religious. I'm not even sure why people are. It always surprises me that highly intelligent people are ardently religious. The Church has wonderful music and that sort of thing but it all developed in its early days, I think, out of fear. The Church was used to scare the crap out of people, to keep them in line. The Church is so screwed up itself, over homosexuality, and women preachers and all the rest of it, that I think if I were a religious person, things like that would drive me away from the Church - http://www.oxfordmuse.com/selfportrait/portrait94.html

I?m a neuroscientist and also an atheist, but I?m not an anti-theist." "Nor do I believe that science...can somehow persuade people that religion is nonsense." "For the vast majority of people, religion is a way of life. It is about community and music, place and food, comfort and emotional support. It is, like all of human culture and experience, a function of our peculiar neurobiology, and we should try to appreciate it as such - Michael Graziano, http://bigthink.com/idea_feed_items/2852

I thank God for my handicaps, for through them, I have found myself, my work and my God - Helen Keller

I regard religion itself as a plague. At best a collection of barriers to objectivity. Although in its milder forms it is benign, much of it is mental disease personified. I can have great respect for anyone with dignity and pacific bearing, but I cannot support the sheer lunacy of religious empire. Under any circumstances. Obviously I can see that any group of founding fathers and mothers would tend to want to socialise their belief systems, if only so that they could all do it together, go through the ritual of being tied to earth forces in congregation; to help to bind the social being. Be good mannered and not stand on each other's toes...But haven't we grown up now? - Roy Harper diary

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.'' - Alfred North Whitehead, English philosopher and mathematician (1861-1947)

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use - Galileo Galilei

I decided to take my beliefs apart and look at them more closely and I decided that they wouldn't go back together again - Derren Brown, hypnotist

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature - Albert Einstein

I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is - Charles Lamb