Favorite Quotes about Atheism, Agnosticism, And Religion

[Mark]

Got to say @EvieTheAvocado, I wish you'd convey an idea at a time.  It just overwhelms any kind of back and forth for me at least.  Rather than communicate everything you have on a given subject why not single out the bit which best links to and builds from whatever the other person has said.  No need to speculate everywhere the conversation might go from there.  Let it play out.

I don't understand because quoting someone's points and responding to them point by point is exactly how debating is done on a forum, right?

I don't really know, I don't do debate.  No interest.  But I do sometimes address a post point by point.  It is just that so many of your responses were just so extensive.  Any one of them would have been interesting to pursue in a back and forth way.  But I can't possibly take in so many points and still recall whatever response I maybe had after so many pile up on it.  That may just be me though, I don't know.

[EvieTheAvocado]

 But I do sometimes address a post point by point.  It is just that so many of your responses were just so extensive.

I'm sorry.

It is something I've struggled with for my whole life for perhaps, neurological reasons.

I would like to point out that I used to be far worse.

And it is something I am trying to work on fixing.

 Any one of them would have been interesting to pursue in a back and forth way.  But I can't possibly take in so many points and still recall whatever response I maybe had after so many pile up on it.  That may just be me though, I don't know.

That's okay. Hang on a min ... are you responding to some response I gave you earlier in the thread? Or do you mean my extremely long response to SteveII?

I'm working on trying to be more concise whilst still remaining thorough.

People sometimes criticize me by saying that they think I'm trying to set people up only to knock them down.

But really all I'm doing is asking questions while obviously having my own views on the topic ... and then telling them what I think after they respond. It just so happens that the topics I most enjoy discussing are topics where I myself have controversial or unusual views.

I mean, look at it this way: If I have a very controversial or unusual or even seemingly crazy viewpoint then I'm going to want to try and falsify it to make sure that I'm not wrong to hold the view I have. I'm very against confirmation bias. So that's why I'm very much interested in any arguments against my controversial, unusual or seemingly crazy viewpoints. Obviously I am most likely going to keep finding myself thinking that I am successfuly defeating the other opponent's attempts to defeat my views ... because if I didn't I would have already changed my mind by now. But if I AM wrong and AM going to change my mind someday ... then challenging my own views is the best way to go about it. And I don't see much point in trying to confirm my own views rather than falsify them! Nor do I see much point in trying to falsify widely held views that I share with everyone else that is already obviously correct! (Although I still like to think them through a lot and when I end up thinking I've falsified a widely held view then it becomes another one of my controversial views).

So, people say I try to knock people down ... so I'm trying to avoid being incorrectly perceived THAT way ... but then if I instead just hold most of my views back and follow up with them later ... then that's just going to look EVEN MORE like that's what I'm doing. When I'm not. So that's the difficult part. Putting everything all in my post at once is going to avoid more of those misperceptions about me. I hope.

But I guess I could try it. The problem is though ... I'll forget what I was going to say, often times, if I hold back 90% of what I want to say and just say the first 10%.

Sorry if this post is too long! I just wanted to explain myself to you properly!

EDIT: Oh another problem is that if I only respond to 10% of what the person says then it would be like I ignored 90% of their post.

Perhaps I should try quoting them paragraph by paragraph instead of sentence by sentence, do you think that that might work?

[Mark]

Yep, #45. #38 was a humdinger too but rolling through #45 again might just have blown out my scroller.

[EvieTheAvocado]

Yep, #45.  #38 was a humdinger too but rolling through #45 again might just have blown out my scroller.

So do you think it might help for me to quote individual paragraphs instead of individual points?

[Mark]

Yep, #45.  #38 was a humdinger too but rolling through #45 again might just have blown out my scroller.

So do you think it might help for me to quote individual paragraphs instead of individual points?

That seems like a good idea, especially if you pick the paragraph you most want to get into with that poster.  But then it would be good to hear back from that poster before launching into paragraph number two.  Again though, that is just what would work best for me.  Maybe no one else cares about that.

[EvieTheAvocado]

That seems like a good idea, especially if you pick the paragraph you most want to get into with that poster.  

Well, the idea would be to address every paragraph in their post in one post otherwise when I get to the other paragraphs in another post they will have already responded with something new but they may feel like I ignored all their other paragraphs.

But then it would be good to hear back from that poster before launching into paragraph number two.  Again though, that is just what would work best for me.  Maybe no one else cares about that.

The idea is ... well... let's imagine it like this:

Imagine someone writes a post with three large paragraphs ... and I quote each one and give 3 equally large responses.

That's better than breaking each of the three paragraphs into 10 parts and giving equally large responses for every individual part thereby ending up with a post 10 times the size of theirs when their post is already sizable enough. Right?

[Mark]

Yeah you got to do what works for you. That makes sense.

[EvieTheAvocado]

Yeah you got to do what works for you.  That makes sense.

I'm looking forward to trying it.

Also, on the rare occasion when the other person does a double, triple or quadruple post or quotes me point by point ... I can copypaste their responses together and rearrange them into larger paragraphs before I quote and respond to them.

[Gwaithmir]

"When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as 'Mother' Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope, during his tenure, had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of 'Devil’s Advocate,' in order to fast‐track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono." (Christopher Hitchens)

[Cheerful Charlie]

“A typical modern Puritan, she was able to believe in sin without believing in God. In fact, she felt there was something soft and sinful about believing in God. She rejected such indulgence like an indecent proposal.”
― William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

[M.Linoge]

[Gwaithmir]

“The book of Job is one of the most powerful arguments against God in the atheist arsenal. It proves once and for all that YHWH is not a good god. Even if such a god exists, we surely cannot rely on him to define our morals, to tell us what is good or bad. If holiness is what gods do, then holiness is a terrible thing.” (Victor J. Stenger)

[Phaedrus]

[Gwaithmir]

How true that turned out to be.

[M.Linoge]

"Please notice the double standard that people like Dr. Craig use to exonerate god from all this evil. 
We’re told that God is loving and kind and just and intrinsically good. But when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we are told that god is mysterious. 
Who can understand god’s will? 
Yet this merely human understanding of God's will is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. If something good happens to a Christian—he feels some bliss while praying, or he sees some positive change his life—we're told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents’ arms and drowned, we are told god is mysterious."

 - Sam Harris

[Cheerful Charlie]

1 Peter 4;15
But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men's matters.

My favorite NT quote

[M.Linoge]

[Cheerful Charlie]

“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson

[Gwaithmir]

“The Bible has not civilized mankind. A book that establishes and defends slavery and wanton war is not calculated to soften the hearts of those who believe implicitly that it is the work of God. A book that not only permits, but commands, religious persecution, has not, in my judgment, developed the affectional nature of man. Its influence has been bad and bad only. It has filled the world with bitterness, revenge and crime, and retarded in countless ways the progress of our race.” (Robert G. Ingersoll)

[Minimalist]

“We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want a this year's fact. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years.”

― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods and Other Lectures

[Minimalist]

[M.Linoge]

[M.Linoge]

[Gwaithmir]

“The universe did not have to be created this way. It might have had a special moment in time, a position in space, or a direction in space. A creator could have done it any way he wanted, and in the process provided us with some evidence for his existence. The fact that none of these special quantities exists is exactly what you would expect if the universe was not created, that it came from nothing.” (Victor J. Stenger)

[M.Linoge]