email: tachyon@flashmail.com

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"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
[Carl Sagan]

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"Experiment is the sole judge of the validity of any idea."
[Richard Feynman]

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"I do what I want, I can't do anything else."
[calvin klein comercial, probably from somewhere else, though.]

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"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe."
[Carl Sagan]

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"In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?"
[Carl Sagan, "Cosmos", page 257]

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God was invented to explain mystery.
Richard Feynman

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"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him."
[Arthur C. Clarke]

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"A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets."
[Arthur C. Clarke]

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"I would defend the liberty of concenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent."
[Arthur C. Clarke]

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"The Bible is the authoritative Word of God and contains all truth."
[Pres. Bill Clinton, at a prayer breakfast]

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"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
[Richard Dawkins]

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"Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?"
[Richard Dawkins]

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"A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different."
[Richard Dawkins]

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"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."
[Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden"]

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"The only difference between God and Adolf Hitler is that God is more proficient at genocide."

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"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator."
[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp. 46]

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"I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work."
[Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]

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"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis."
[Sigmund Freud, "Future of an Illusion". 1927 "The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief."
[Sigmund Freud]

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"[My] deep religiosity... found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books."
[Albert Einstein, as quoted in Einstein, History, and Other Passions, p. 172]

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"The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it."
[Albert Einstein]

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"If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?"
[Albert Einstein, "Out of My Later Years"]

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"Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view."
[Ben Kenobi]

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"Would you sing 'Krishna bless America' or pledge allegience to 'One nation under Allah'? If not, would that make you unpatriotic?"
[Chris Lee]

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"The divorce between church and state ought to be absolute. It ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no church property anywhere, in any state, or in any nation, should be exempt from taxation, for if you exempt the church property of any church organization, to that extent you impose tax upon the whole community."
[US Pres. James A. Garfield, speech to Congress, June 22, 1874]

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"Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, Above us, only sky..."
[John Lennon, "Imagine"]

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"Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurences it cannot understand."
[Karl Marx]

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"It is impossible to devise a scientific experiment to describe the creation process, or even to ascertain whether such a process can take place. The Creator does not create at the whim of a scientist."
[Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism, (General edition, second edition, El Cajon, CA: Master, 1985), p. 5.]

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"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -- whether through design or stupidity, I do not know -- as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. The punctuations occur at the level of species; directional trends (on the staircase model) are rife at the higher level of transitions within major groups."
[Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory" Science and Creationism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 124.]

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"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits."
[Dan Barker]

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"Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender."
[Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (Madison, WI: FFRF, 1992), p. 103.]

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"If the evidence supports the historical accuracy of the gospels, where is the need for faith? And if the historical reliability of the gospels is so obvious, why have so many scholars failed to appreciate the incontestable nature of the evidence?"
[Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 50.]

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"But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something -- it doesn't matter what -- in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. It is this that makes the often-parroted claim that 'evolution itself is a matter of faith' so silly. People believe in evolution not because they arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence."
[Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 198.]