Sir...you are an uneducated (or unprincipled) BUFFOON.
Atheism
George Bernard Shaw, Irish-born English playwright (1856-1950).
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
Joseph Conrad, Polish-born English author (1857-1924).
"Christianity has lent itself with amazing facility to cruel distortion . . . and has brought an infinity of anguish to innumerable souls on this earth."
"Scepticism . . . is the agent of truth."
Clarence Seward Darrow, American lawyer (1857-1938).
"I believe that religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't believe in either. I don't believe in God as I don't believe in Mother Goose."
quoted in Manual of a Perfect Atheist.
William Howard Taft, American President and Chief Justice (1857-1930).
Probably not an atheist, but I thought it was interesting that an American president in this century said:
"I do not believe in the divinity of Christ and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."
Pierre Curie, French chemist and physicist (1859-1906).
Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, Spanish educator (1859-1909).
Read a short biography of Ferrer at www.punkerslut.com.
Jose P. Rizal, Philippine national leader (1861-1896).
Rizal, the greatest son and hero of the Philippines and pride of the Malay race, whose writings attacking the Catholic church and the friars inspired the religious and political revolution against Spanish colonial theocracy. He is considered the first modern Asian rational humanist whose role in the liberation of the Philippines from the grip of priesthood paralled that of Tom Paine whose writings inspired the 1776 revolution in the US.
Rizal was condemned to death for treason and sedition in 1896 by the Spanish colonial government and executed on December 30 of that year. The Spanish friars then libeled Rizal's good name by circulating a forged document entitled "Retraction of Errors" where Rizal supposedly retracted his affiliation with the Masons and admitted his errors in all writings where he revealed the abuses of the Spanish friars.
On the eve of his execution, Rizal finished and succeeded in smuggling out prison a poem he wrote popularly known as his "Ultimo Adios" or "Last Farewall" which is considered even by Spanish literary critics as one of the most poignant poems ever written in the Spanish language. [ poems]
Voltairine de Cleyre, American feminist and activist (1866-1912).
"I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly."
Herbert George "H.G." Wells, English author (1866-1946).
"It runs through the entire Christian story, and our case against the Catholic Church is that, albeit it originated in a passionate assertion of the conception of brotherly equality, it relapsed steadily from the broad nobility of its beginnings and passed over at last almost completely to the side of persecution and the pleasures of cruelty." [From Wells' book Crux Ansata - An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church 1944, reprinted in 1981 by American Atheist Press.]
Marie Curie, Polish-born French chemist and physicist (1867-1934).
Joseph McCabe, English anti-religion campaigner (1867-1955).
One of the giants of not only English Atheism, but world Atheism, Joseph McCabe left a legacy of aggressive Atheist and antireligious literature that remains fresh and insightful today. His many works -- he wrote nearly 250 books -- could constitute a library of Atheism by themselves.
Born in 1867, Joseph McCabe became a Franciscan monk at the age of nineteen. But disgusted with his fellow monks and the Christian doctrine, he left the priesthood for good on February 19, 1896.
Not long afterwards, he began to write -- first against the priesthood itself and then for the position of Atheism. He was one of the founding members of Britain's Rationalist Press Association, and was a prolific writer for Haldeman-Julius Publications. He was also a much-respected speaker, giving, by his own estimate, three or four thousand lectures in the United States, Australia, and Great Britain by the age of eighty. Still fighting against the injustices and dishonesties of religion, he died on January 10, 1955, at the age of eighty-seven. The epitaph he requested was "He was a rebel to his last day." [The Secular Web]
You can find more information about McCabe at www.punkerslut.com.
Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect (1869-1959).
"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."
Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Russian revolutionary leader (1870-1924).
Alfred Adler, Austrian psychiatrist (1870-1937).
Allowed that God was a psychological projection but believed that it had been helpful to humanity; it had been a brilliant and effective symbol of excellence. [A History of God]
I have had a report that Adler converted to Christianity in his old age. (Maybe he lost his mental faculties!)
Marcel Proust, French author (1871-1922).
Proust was once asked by his maid, Celeste Albaret, whether or not he thought there was a God. He replied that he did not know. Monsieur Proust: A Memoir by Celeste Albaret.
Evidently an agnostic, Proust had this to say about atheism: "The atheist forgets that what he is affirming is, precisely, a negation." (In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust)
Ralph Vaughn Williams, English composer (1872-1958).
The Internet Movie Database has a short biography, which includes, "His professional career spanned more than six decades, with nine Symphonies, several concertos, a ballet, a few operas and countless choral works. The latter are often performed in church services, not bad for an agnostic composer."
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, educator, mathematician, and social critic (1872-1970).
"I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."
"I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out."
"Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race." [quoted in Holy Horrors]
Robert Frost, American poet (1874-1963).
Culbert Olson, American politician (1876-1962).
The most openly Atheistic elected official was Culbert Olson, former Governor of California. He became President of the United Secularists of America (USA) in 1957, and remained in that position until his death in 1962.
Edward Morgan "E.M." Forster, English author (1879-1970).
"I do not believe in Belief (...but...) Tolerance, good temper and sympathy."
Leon Trotsky, Russian revolutionary and Soviet statesman (1879-1940).
Albert Einstein, German born American threoretical physicist (1879-1955).
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." [From a letter Einstein wrote in English, dated 24 March 1954. It is included in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, published by Princeton University Press.
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
Periyar, Indian social campaigner (1879-1973).
Periyar campaigned throughout Tamil-Nadu for social reform, especially empowerment for women and and end to the social oppression of religion.
"He who created the god was a fool; he who spreads his name is a scoundrel and he who worships him is a barbarian."
Joseph Stalin, Soviet politician (1879-1953).
I believe Stalin called himself an atheist, but some would argue that he believed in the Hegelian doctrine of progress as a god.
Lord John Boyd-Orr, Scottish nutritionist (1880-1971).
Nobel peace prize winner, 1949.
W. C. Fields, American entertainer (1880-1946).
An acquaintance of Field's recounts the story of Fields, an atheist, having once been found reading the Bible. When asked what he was doing reading the Bible, Fields responded, "I'm looking for loopholes." [Movie W. C. Fields: Striaght Up]
Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken, American editor and critic (1880-1956).
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the same extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility." ["Treatise on the Gods"]
"Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings."
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. . . . A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill."
"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters." [from the alt.quotations archive, found from starlingtech.com]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration--courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth." [1925]
"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
"For centuries, theologians have attempted to explain the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."
"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."
Irving Langmuir, American chemist, nobel prize winner 1932 (1881-1957).
When asked about his inattention to religion, he would likely respond with, "Never believe anything that can't be proved." From his biography, The Quintessence of Irving Langmuir, by Albert Rosenfeld.
Kemal Ataturk, Turkish soldier and statesman (1881-1938).
James Joyce, Irish author (1882-1941).
Joyce rejected Catholicism and indeed all religion when he was a young man (as portrayed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). He considered Catholicism to be "black magic", and deplored its anti-individuality. "For me there is ony one alternative to scholasticism, scepticism." He also rejected the church's moralizing, etc. etc.
"He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?"
"I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul."
Virginia Woolf, English author (1882-1941).
Margaret Sanger, American birth control activist, founder of Planned Parenthood (1883-1966).
"No Gods, No Masters."
You can find more information about Margaret Sanger at www.punkerslut.com.
DH Lawrence, British writer (1885-1930).
"God is only a great imaginative experience."
"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup." -Etruscan Places
Diego Rivera, Mexican muralist painter (1886-1982).
From his autobiography, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography by Diego Rivera Gladys March narrating an encounter with bigots at a church: "Stupid people! You reek of dirt and stupidity! You are so crazy that you believe that if I were to ask the portrait of my father, hanging in my house, for one peso, the portrait would actually give me one peso. You are utter idiots. In order to get pesos, I have to ask someone who has pesos to spare and is willing to give some to me. You talk of heaven, pointing with your fingers over your head. What heaven is there? There is only air, clouds which give rain, lightening which makes a loud sound and breaks the tree branches, and birds flying. There are no boys with wings nor any ladies or gentlemen sitting on clouds. Clouds are water vapor which goes up when the heat of the sun's rays strikes the rivers and lakes. You can see this vapor from the Guanajuato mountains. It turns to water which falls in drops, and so we have rain. At the entrance of this place, I saw boxes to collect money, and a man asking for more money. I also know the priest who comes often to our house to drink my aunt's good chocolate and glasses of liquor. With the money he collects for the church, he pays the painters and sculptors to paint all these lies and puppets. He does this to get more money to make stupid people like you believe that these are truths and to make you fear the Virgin Mary and God. In order to have the priest appease these idols to spare you because you are cruel, dirty, and bad people, you give this money to the priest. Does that fear stop the beggars, the poor people, and the jobless miners from sneaking into the houses of the rich people, the grocery stores, the clothing stores of the gabachos, and the haciendas of the gringos, and taking from them a little of what they need? What about you, you old fool? If there really is a Holy Virgin or anyone up in the air, tell them to send lightening to strike me down or let the stones of the vault fall on my head. If you are unable to do that Mr. Priest, you're nothing but a puppet taking money from stupid old women. You're no better than the clown |
