Dan Barker Quotes
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I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.
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All you have to do is walk into any children's hospital and you know there is no God. Prayer doesn't make any difference. Those people pray for their beloved children to live and they die.
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Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.
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There are many gods which Christians reject. I just believe in one less god then they do. The reasons that you might give for your atheism toward the Roman gods are likely the same reasons I would give for not believing in Jesus.
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I threw out all the bath water, and there was no baby there.
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Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.
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The trouble is that neutrality is confused with hostility. We're not disrupting churches, or interrupting people's prayers. We're not fighting religion.
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I'm proud to be an atheist - it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.
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It is wrong for a secular government to promote prayer. We think the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. What if the president declared a National Day of Cursing God because He failed us on September 11? Americans would say, "You've overstepped your authority." That's how we feel when he promotes prayer.
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To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance.
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To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance. That implies that everyone else (such as the opposing football team, driver, student, parent) is de-selected, unfavored by God, and that I am special,above it all.
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It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions.
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Atheists are suffering from bad PR. What if Sesame Street had an atheist character?
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Some theists, observing that all 'effects' need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.
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If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.
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You believe in a book that has sticks turning into snakes, and you say we are the ones that need help?
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Look at the posture of prayer. It is the posture of slavery, of bowing before your master. We are a proudly rebellious country. We kicked out the master. Now here comes the government telling us to humbly bow again.
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There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling - absolutely essential to mental health and happiness.
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There is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, during his entire lifetime. This does not disprove his existence, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who was supposedly widely known to have made a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed.
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Truth does not demand belief.
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Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence? After all, don't we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines?
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It turns out that the word atheism means much less than I had thought. It is merely the lack of theism.
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People are always asking, "What's the purpose of life?" That's easy. Relieve suffering. Create beauty. Make gardens.
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As humanists, we urge today, as in the past that humans not look beyond themselves for salvation. We alone are responsible for our own destiny and the best we can do is muster our intelligence, courage, and compassion to realize our highest aspirations.