The Atheist's Bible: An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0061349151
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Atheist's Bible is the first book of the Sound Bite Library, which also includes You Don't Have to be Buddhist to Know Nothing and The Book of I.
"All thinking men are atheists," Ernest Hemingway famously wrote. True? Here are quips, quotes, and questions from a distinguished assortment of geniuses and jokers, giving readers a chance to decide for themselves....
When I think of all the harm [the bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
Oscar Wilde
SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
Ambrose Bierce
There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
Gertrude Stein
Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are skeptical.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz
God is love, but get it in writing.
Gypsy Rose Lee
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
George Bernard Shaw
My God is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. —Andrew Carnegie This is my simple religion. No need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy. Your own mind, your own heart, is the temple; your philosophy is simple kindness. —The Dalai Lama 86 t h e a t h e i s t ’ s b i b l e Science . . . has been accused of undermining morals— but wrongly. The ethical behavior of man is better based on sympathy, education and social relationships,
thinks he believes, and wishes he was certain. r 125 But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most? r In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a
absolutely certain . . .” From The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: Last Philosophical Testament 1943–68, Russell, Bertrand, copyright 191 © 1997, Routledge, p. 91. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK and The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. Page 131: “No man treats a motorcar . . .” and “One is often told . . .”; p. 133: “I believe that when I die I shall rot . . .” Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, Taylor & Francis Books UK and
—Laurens van der Post The number, the industry, and the morality of the Priest-hood, & the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the Church from the State. —James Madison And of all Plagues with which Mankind are Curst, Ecclesiastick Tyranny’s the worse. —Daniel Defoe Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Chris tian ity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Chris tians,
ity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime—the invention of Hell. Measured by our Chris tian ity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Chris tian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. —Mark Twain 72 t h e a t h e i s t ’ s b i b l e 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