Huberman - The quotable atheist: ammunition for nonbelievers, political junkies, gadflies and those generally hell-bound

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

The supernatural does not exist.

CAMILLE FLAMMARION

The figures are shocking. Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and thatits astonishing. These numbers arent duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. Youd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.

NOAM CHOMSKY.

There is more religion in mans science than there is science in his religion.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

I am so far beyond atheism, there isnt a word in the English language dictionary to describe me.

HARLAN ELLISON

Who says I am not under the special protection of God?

ADOLF HITLER

THE WORLD (NOT JUST AMERICA) is deeply divided. The main fault line is where the tectonic plates of religion and of reason/secularism /modernity/science/Enlightenment meet and grind against each other, making an absolutely unbearable noise. Its sort of like... forget it, I cant describe it.

My aim in compiling The Quotable Atheist was to heal our broken planet, essentially by eliminating the religious part. Not with nuclear weapons or lesser acts of mass murder, nothats the religious style, nowadays, in certain quartersbut through argument, persuasion, and most of all (since I know perfectly well that argument is utterly useless against dumb, blind faith, and just wanted to pay it lip service), the steady application of powerfully abrasive ridicule which will slowly but surely erode away the offending continent.

Im serious. Do I really believe this book will convert believers and turn them from the path of self-righteousness to the path of righteousness? Yes. A few. Three, I estimate. Two for sure. But the point is this:

For years, millions of fine, upstanding American atheists and agnostics have watched and stewed as the religious right expanded its influence throughout public life, and as America closed its mind and opened its heart to angels, aliens, ghosts, psychics, Jesus, astrology, Kabbalah, Genesis, Revelation.... As SAM HARRIS wrote in The End of Faith: Unreason is now ascendant in the United Statesin our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

Meanwhile, religion continues to be granted far too much respect and too little critical examination in our culture and mainstream media. We need to change the cultural climate so as to make supernatural, occult, and faith-based claptrap feel unwelcome and to make adults ashamed of the blithe surrender of their otherwise sound minds to idiocy. We need climate change. Bullshit levels are rising globally, threatening to submerge intellectually low-lying areas. Much of the United States is already inundated. Temperatures are rising; IQs are dropping. Four of the five stupidest years on record have occurred since 2000.

I would of course have preferred a declaration by the president of the United Statespurportedly Gods messenger on earthstating that neither God nor WMDs ever existed and that most religious beliefs are untrue and harmful, and urging citizens to bring their minds back up at least to an eighteenth-century stage of development. (I have proposed this plan in a letter to George W. Bush, but havent heard back yet. They must be hashing out the details.)

Failing that, it is up to atheist/secularist groups and individuals to do what we can to stop global worming (people groveling like worms before nonexistent deities). Thats where this book comes in.

As a number of these collected quotes say (far more wittily): Religion in general is based on falsehoodscomforting beliefs in a heavenly parent or big brother; hopes of surviving deathand on utility or expedience: socially cohesive tribal myths; politically useful codes of law and behavior; divine ordination of rulers (including certain presidents); attempts to explain, influence, or placate nature and the elements; the wish to raise ourselves above (i.e., deny our place among) the animals. Religion may help people feel their lives have a loftier purpose than the mere satisfaction of material wants and sensual desires, but it does it with smoke and mirrors, at the cost of our respect for truth and of our integrity and dignity.

Truth has never needed to win converts forcibly. (Say itI believe in the second law of thermodynamicssay it, infidel, or die!) Religion can only demonstrate a miracle; threaten eternal damnation; offer delightful, virginful visions of heaven; promise health, wealth, social or political benefits, or relief from guilt, loneliness, and emptiness; or offer as the other alternative a swift beheading or slow burning.

Persecution and violence have been the rule throughout religious history. Religious tolerance has grown just to the extent that we have become less religious. Religious authority has always sought to obstruct scientific research and education; to control and censor art and literature; to impose rules of behavior that may have made sense centuries or millennia earlier, and probably not even then; and to support rulers and governments, however cruel and oppressive, in exchange for the preservation of its own privileges and wealth. In short, religion has been doing more harm than good for the last, oh, 2,007 years or so. Definitely the last 1,427. Possibly the last 5,767. It has far outlived any beneficial purpose it ever had. (For achieving oneness with the universe, for example, we now have pills.)

Yet religion not only persists; after retreating nicely for a few hundred years, its back literally with a vengeanceSeptember 11, 2001 being the outstanding recent example. (See quote by Monsignor LORENZO ALBACETE.) In American politics, religion has been rearing its ugly head more rearingly in the past decade or twoand particularly since January 20, 2001than in the entire history of the United States. And our culture? My God. Make Jesus the center of your movie or novel, make angels, ghosts, witches, vampires, psychics or UFOs the theme of your TV series, and your pecuniary prayers are answered.

If a thinking person of a century ago were told that the next hundred years would see a war in which millions of Jews were murdered out of an originally religious hatred; another war, basically over religion, on European soil (the former Yugoslavia); Middle-Eastern countries still under theocratic rule; enormously popular Islamist groups waging a worldwide jihad; millions of Chinese Falun Gong devotees following a self-anointed savior who also claims the abilities to levitate and to become invisible; arena-sized churches springing up all over the United States; as few as 28 percent of Americans believing evolution is a fact, and 13 percent or fewer believing it occurred through natural selection, unguided by God; the U.S. government dominated by professed evangelical or born-again Christians; Christian fundamentalists holding effective veto power over Supreme Court nominations; and the Oval Office occupied by a man who has affirmed the impossibility of a non-Christian entering heaventhat thinking person might well feel that all the intellectual progress of the previous three or four centuries had been for nought.

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