Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being not even wrong. Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.
Religion invents a problem where none exists by describing the wicked as also made in the image of god and the sexually nonconformist as existing in a state of incurable mortal sin that can incidental...
Moreover, the context is oppressively confined and local. None of these provincials, or their deity, seems to have any idea of a world beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the imperatives of n...
Like so many of life's varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to...
If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device...
I was abruptly recognized as nonthreatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked.
I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do.
A consciousness of rectitude can be a terrible thing, and in those days I didn’t just think that I was right: I thought that we (our group of International Socialists in particular) were being damn we...
For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way...
It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.
This is what I have been telling writing classes for years. You must feel not that you want to but that you have to.
Only while under the dominion of fear do men fall a prey to superstition; that all the portents ever invested with the reverence of misguided religion are mere phantoms of dejected and fearful minds;...
You've heard it all right. People don't have cancer: They are reported to be battling cancer.
The tone of the prayers replicates the silliness of the mandate, in that god is enjoined or thanked to do what he was going to do anyway. Thus the Jewish male begins each day by thanking god for not m...
The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself o...
Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.
Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of the praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be of the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regres...
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what w...
Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell.
I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you...