Christopher

“So, too, I and countless others have chosen to give God a fair hearing—if only he would speak. I would listen to him even now, at this very moment. Yet he remains silent.”
― Richard Carrier, Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

“However, though belief on faith alone may be comforting, it is wholly arbitrary and thus does nothing to ensure that you are more correct than anyone else. So it cannot properly be described as knowledge, but rather as a mere wish, a desire that something be true or false, or else it is a naive trust in guesswork or hearsay.”
― Richard Carrier, Sense and Goodness Without God

“...the naive forms of Christian moral motivation - bare threats of hell and the bribery of heaven - stunt moral growth by ensuring believers remain emotional children, never achieving the cognitive moral development of adults. Psychologists have established that mature adults are moral not because of bare threats and bribes (that stage of moral development typifies children, not adults), but because they care about the effects their behavior has on themselves and others.”
― Richard C. Carrier

“The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars