Rational Hub

“It is clear that before anything else, God’s commandments are about shoring up God’s position. Do people really, in this day and age, want to obey a God who, like a Third World dictator, insists above all on unconditional, absolute reverence to Himself?” - Pamela Bone

“All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciliatory mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.” - Angela Carter

“When a man projects into an ideal heaven that impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself that is called God, it is because he wishes the regard of this existing Being to change his existence into being.

But if he agrees not to be in order to exist genuinely, he will abandon the dream of an inhuman objectivity. He will understand that it is not a matter of being right in the eyes of a God, but of being right in his own eyes.” - Simone de Beauvoir

It might make some people feel good to talk about ‘‘a higher level of existence’’ or a ‘‘guiding force,’’ but there is no evidence for anything of the sort. I couldn’t and still can’t even figure out what such quasi-religious humbug means.

These liberal reconstructions also struck me as too far from what most people
in churches believe. The kind of religious beliefs that control people’s lives and
lead them to take stands on political and moral issues cannot be the watery spirituality that is vague enough to avoid conflicting with anything.

There is no point in going to Church or praying to something so indeterminate. No ‘higher level of existence’ could save believers or help them get to heaven or perform miracles or create the world. - Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

“Let’s teach our children about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is so much more glorious and awesome and even comforting than anything offered by any scripture or God-concept that I know of.” -Carolyn Porco

“God must harden the hearts of his saints in heaven as of old he hardened Pharaoh’s heart, if they are to rejoice over the anguished multitude below, and to bear to live amid the lurid smoke ascending from the burning bodies of the lost.

To me the idea is so unutterably loathsome that I marvel how Christians endure to retain such language in their sacred books.

If this heaven is true I do not hesitate to say that it is the duty of every human being to reject it utterly and to refuse to enter it.” - Annie Besant

“Most Christian theologians have retreated from all the things that their religion supposedly asserts; they take a much more ‘modern’ view than the average believer. But by the time you’ve ‘modernised’ something like Christianity - starting off with ‘Genesis was all just poetry’ and ending up with ‘Well, of course there’s no such thing as a personal God’ - there’s not much point pretending that there’s anything religious left.

You might as well come clean and admit that you’re an atheist with certain values, which are historical, cultural, biological, and personal in origin, and have nothing to do with anything called God.” - Greg Egan

“Perhaps, there’s only one hell and if there is justice all good friends can meet there. I rely on that. After all, the devil is a nice guy.

When you think of how few people have killed and destroyed in the name of the devil; and how many have done so in the name of God; it makes you think.” - Janet Asimov