“The essence of Christianity is told to us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the Tree of Knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on.”
-Frank Zappa, musician, May 2, 1993
“…as fire lays hold of what falls into it, by which a small light would have been extinguished: but when the fire is strong, it soon appropriates to itself the matter which is heaped on it, and consumes it, and rises higher by means of this very material.” -Marcus Aurelius
“fight for what you believe in,
for if you don’t you will be forever fighting against yourself.”
― Keisha Keenleyside
“Truth is an acquired taste.”
― Orrin Woodward
“Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch
“I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.”
―Harry S. Truman
This just about sums it up for me…
“ . . . I decided (after listening to a ‘talk radio’ commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life that) I was both a Humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a Humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perceptual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a Humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation.”
—James Michener, Interview, Parade Magazine (Nov. 24, 1991), cited in Who’s Who in Hell edited by Warren Allen Smith. (A similar passage is found in The World Is My Home by Robert Michener, 1991.)
“My feelings on religion are starting to morph. I’m still very much an atheist, except that I don’t necessarily see religion as being a bad thing. . . . I’m almost saying certain people do better with religion, the way that certain rock stars do better if they’re shooting heroin.”
—Patton Oswalt, comedian, writer, freethinker
“The merits and services of Christianity have been industriously extolled by its hired advocates. Every Sunday its praises are sounded from myriads of pulpits. It enjoys the prestige of an ancient establishment and the comprehensive support of the State. It has the ear of rulers and the control of education. Every generation is suborned in its favor. Those who dissent from it are losers, those who oppose it are ostracised; while in the past, for century after century, it has replied to criticism with imprisonment, and to scepticism with the dungeon and the stake. By such means it has induced a general tendency to allow its pretensions without inquiry and its beneficence without proof.”
—Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, author, editor, and freethinker in his “Crimes of Christianity,” (1895) with G.W. Foote.
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons…All they do is show you’ve been to college.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
Where does religion come from? If not from God, as most religions seem to think of other religions as wrong and not from God, then it is from the people. Or, unless you deem yourself fortunate enough to be born in the right place and to the right people to have the right religion that God designed just for you. Wow! What unbelievable luck to be born to the right people and the right religion at the right time and in the right country. Can you believe it? Seems a bit far-fetched don’t you agree?
A quote from “Let the Great World Spin” a novel by Colum McCann…
“Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.”
So many Gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
When just the art of being kind
Is all this sad world needs.
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox, poet
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Thoughts on Thoughts 