The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">About the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for the factors preventing knowledge are many; the obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of human life.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Some books against Deism fell into my hands … It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a Deist.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It is only in the creation that all our ideas and conceptions of the word of God can unite.&nbsp; The creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they be.&nbsp; It is an ever existing original, which every man can read.&nbsp; It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed.&nbsp; It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other.&nbsp; It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Here we are.&nbsp; The existence of an Almighty power is sufficiently demonstrated to us [through the observable creation], though we cannot conceive, as it is impossible we should, the nature and manner of its [the Almighty power’s] existence.&nbsp; We cannot conceive how we came here ourselves, and yet we know for a fact we are here.&nbsp; We must know also that the power which called us into being, can, if he please, and when he please, call us to account for the manner in which we have lived here; and therefore, without seeking any other motive for the belief, it is rational to believe that he will, for we know before hand that he can.&nbsp; The probability or even possibility of the thing, is all that we ought to know; for if we knew it as a fact, we should be mere slaves of terror.&nbsp; Our belief would have no merit, and our best actions no virtue.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea.&nbsp; He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap.&nbsp; My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates to truth, and the teachings of science … Superstition must go.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I am an atheist, out and out.&nbsp; It took me a long time to say it … Emotionally, I am an atheist.&nbsp; I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I am a secular humanist.&nbsp; I think existence is what we make of it as individuals.&nbsp; There is no guarantee of life after death, and heaven and hell are what we create for ourselves, on this planet. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The life of an atheist seems especially tragic … The atheist cannot even look forward to being vindicated.&nbsp; Even if he is right, religionists will die never finding out that they had worshiped a God that didn’t exist, had prayed to the wind, had tithed to support priestly parasites … No, atheists know they will never get even this satisfaction. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Two explorers come upon a clearing in the jungle in which are growing many flowers and many weeds.&nbsp; The first explorer asserts that the plot is cared for by a gardener, but the second disagrees.&nbsp; To settle their dispute, they place the clearing under 24-hour surveillance.&nbsp; But no gardener is ever seen.&nbsp; The first explorer suggests that perhaps the gardener is invisible.&nbsp; So they install an electric fence and patrol with bloodhounds.&nbsp; Still no gardener is detected.&nbsp; But the first explorer remains convinced that there is one—a gardener who is not only invisible, but also intangible, insensitive to electric shocks, has no scent, and makes no sound as he secretly cares for the garden he loves.&nbsp; Finally, in exasperation, the second explorer asks, “But what remains of your original assertion?&nbsp; Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, and eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even no gardener at all?”&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science … That doesn’t prove there is no God only that God is not necessary</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Sir, I have no need for that hypothesis.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.&nbsp; But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be.&nbsp; What place, then, for a creator?</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If a certain entity is very complex and it’s deemed extraordinarily unlikely that such a complexity would have arisen by itself, then what is explained by attributing the entity’s unlikely complexity to an even more complex and even more unlikely source?&nbsp; This creationist Ponzi scheme quickly leads to metaphysical bankruptcy. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen.&nbsp; I don’t know if there’s a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Spinoza was to offer something new under the seventeenth century’s European skies: a religion of reason.&nbsp; His religion asks us to do something that is far more difficult for us than the most severe practices of asceticism.&nbsp; It asks us to be reasonable.&nbsp; It asks us to look at ourselves with unblinking objectivity.&nbsp; It asks us to subdue our natural inclinations toward self-aggrandizement, our attempts to shore up our dreadful fragility by fictions of a God who favors us because we were born—thank God!—into the right group, or have gone through the nuisance of converting to it.&nbsp; And it asks us, as well, to face squarely the terror of our own mortality [fear of death].</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge … No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic or an unbeliever.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong … I don’t feel frightened by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose.&nbsp; Which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I turned to speak to God</em></p><p><em>About the world’s despair;</em></p><p><em>But to make bad matters worse,</em></p><p><em>I found God wasn’t there.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I don’t see any god up here.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If God has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">God is dead.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.</em></p>