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Mark Twain,Karl Marx,Anatole France,Omar Khayyam,Thomas Hobbes,Joseph Conrad,Christopher Hitchens,Percy Bysshe Shelley,John Stuart Mill,Charles Darwin,David Hume,George Eliot,Leslie Stephen,James Boswell,Benedict De Spinoza,Lucretius,Thoma

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

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  • 302 Rizvi Khadijahas quoted2 months ago
    The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion
  • 302 Rizvi Khadijahas quoted2 months ago
    He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct—of acts and omissions; there being no feeling which may not lead, and does not frequently lead, either to good or to bad actions: conscience itself, the very desire to act right, often leading people to act wrong. Consistently carrying out the doctrine, that the object of praise and blame should be the discouragement of wrong conduct and the encouragement of right, he refused to let his praise or blame be influenced by the motive of the agent.
  • 302 Rizvi Khadijahas quoted2 months ago
    Though they may think the proof incomplete that the universe is a work of design, and though they assuredly disbelieve that it can have an Author and Governor who is absolute in power as well as perfect in goodness, they have that which constitutes the principal worth of all religions whatever, an ideal conception of a Perfect Being, to which they habitually refer as the guide of their conscience; and this ideal of Good is usually far nearer to perfection than the objective Deity of those, who think themselves obliged to find absolute goodness in the author of a world so crowded with suffering and so deformed by injustice as ours
  • 302 Rizvi Khadijahas quoted2 months ago
    Of unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, there are many species, including almost every variety of moral type. But the best among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will hesitate to affirm (believers rarely have that opportunity), are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title.
  • 302 Rizvi Khadijahas quoted2 months ago
    Think (he used to say) of a being who would make a Hell—who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority of them were to be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment.
  • 302 Rizvi Khadijahas quoted2 months ago
    it requires, indeed, a mind considerably tinctured with science, and enlarged by cultivation to contemplate itself, not as the centre and model of the Universe, but as one of the infinitely various multitude of beings of which it is actually composed.
  • 302 Rizvi Khadijahas quoted2 months ago
    It is manifest that we cannot reason with respect to the universal system from that which only exists in relation to our own perceptions.
  • 302 Rizvi Khadijahas quoted2 months ago
    . The criteria of order and disorder are as various as those beings from whose opinions and feelings they result.
  • 302 Rizvi Khadijahas quoted2 months ago
    To suppose some existence beyond, or above them, is to invent a second and superfluous hypothesis to account for what has already been accounted for by the laws of motion and the properties of matter. I admit that the nature of these laws is incomprehensible, but the hypothesis of a Deity adds a gratuitous difficulty, which so far from alleviating those that it is adduced to explain, requires new hypotheses for the elucidation of its own inherent contradictions
  • 302 Rizvi Khadijahas quoted2 months ago
    The belief of an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminently requiring an intelligent author of his being than the foregoing, is a direct consequence of the premises, which you have stated. The assumption that the Universe is a design, leads to a conclusion that there are infinity of creative and created Gods, which is absurd

    he's saying, God created the universe and it's so admirable and intelligently done, then some even more intelligent and creative maker must have created God

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