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Historically, the most dangerous men on earth were men of God … especially when their gods became threatened.
Therefore, any religious shifts occur over generations, and not without great angst, and often bloodshed.”
“We consider ourselves modern rational individuals, and yet our species’ most widespread religion includes a whole host of magical claims—humans inexplicably rising from the dead, miraculous virgin births, vengeful gods that send plagues and floods, mystical promises of an afterlife in cloud-swept heavens or fiery hells.”
“For the human brain,” Edmond explained, “any answer is better than no answer. We feel enormous discomfort when faced with ‘insufficient data,’ and so our brains invent the data—offering us, at the very least, the illusion of order—creating myriad philosophies, mythologies, and religions to reassure us that there is indeed an order and structure to the unseen world.”
“Since the beginning of religious history, our species has been caught in a never-ending cross fire—atheists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, the faithful of all religions—and the only thing that unites us all is our deep longing for peace.”
“Science, by definition, is the attempt to find physical proof for that which is unknown or not yet defined, and to reject superstition and misperception in favor of observable facts. When science offers an answer, that answer is universal. Humans do not go to war over it; they rally around it.”
Nothing is invented, for it’s written in nature first. Originality consists of returning to the origin.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
“How is it that intelligent human beings cannot discuss their origins without invoking the name of God and fucking aliens!”
“The term ‘atheist,’” Kirsch continued, “should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a ‘nonastrologer’ or a ‘nonalchemist.’ We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive, or for people who doubt that aliens traverse the galaxy only to molest cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.”
“My friends, I am not saying I know for a fact that there is no God. All I am saying is that if there is a divine force behind the universe, it is laughing hysterically at the religions we’ve created in an attempt to define it.”
If we admit a First Cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came and how it arose.
“Where do we come from?” he asked. “The truth is—we come from nowhere … and from everywhere. We come from the same laws of physics that create life across the cosmos. We are not special. We exist with or without God. We are the inevitable result of entropy. Life is not the point of the universe. Life is simply what the universe creates and reproduces in order to dissipate energy.”
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’”
“And history has proven repeatedly that lunatics will rise to power again and again on tidal waves of aggressive nationalism and intolerance, even in places where it seems utterly incomprehensible.”
