Rational Hub

“I don’t believe in a moral command economy where you are told everything to do and everything is centred around the Church.

It’s not healthy for ju-ju men to hop around the altar and tell you what’s bad or good.” - Dermot Morgan

“It’s frightening that skepticism has to be a movement, because you’re just arguing that reality is reality. What a waste of energy, in a way.” - Graham Linehan

“The atheist is free to concentrate on the fate of this world — whether that means visiting a friend in a hospital or advocating for tougher gun control laws — without trying to square things with an unseen overlord in the next.

Atheists do not want to deny religious believers the comfort of their faith. We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.” - Susan Jacoby

Happy New Year everyone from RationalHub! Be awesome.

“The greatest gift revelatory religions have to offer is the promise of heaven. Were they to practice the brotherhood that they preach this would be offered to all, irrespective of belief. The fact that it isn’t underlines the essentially coercive nature of the appeal of religion: join our group or we deny you the possibility of eternal life!

The shame that this deal is offered to children too young to reason through its premises is another piece of evidence of the essential bad faith of the arguments for revelatory religion. ” - Lee Smolin

“It isn’t necessary to be anti-national to be deeply suspicious of all nationalism, to be anti-nationalism. Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocides of the twentieth century.

Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

When independent, thinking people begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgement and blindly yoke their art to the service of the nation, it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry. ” - Arundhati Roy

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design. - Barbara W. Tuchman

“The unbeliever is not obliged to fit his morality and his facts into the four corners of any religion or tradition or inherited dogma.

He is always in a position to review and to revise his teaching and his experiences; to absorb new knowledge and to remould his ideas according to the new light he receives. He has no Church dogmas to hinder him from searching what he knows not by what he knows, and ‘closing up truth to truth.’

He also knows that, at the least, his new thoughts mean growth, and not stagnation; and he is always possessed with the inspiring hope that the glowing thought which he plucks to-day from the darkness of the unknown may tomorrow be the light showing the way to greater and more important truths.” - Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

“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