Människan har skapat Gud till sin avbild, längre räckte inte hennes fantasi" Tage Danielsson To understand God, you have to become one. Samantha Atkins "To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the responsibility to acquire information, digest and use it to understand what you can." - Peter Greenaway "Quantum cosmology impinges on supposedly religious issues - but that makes those issues scientific issues; it doesn't transform the science into mysticism." -- Greg Egan - http://www.midnight.com.au/eidolon/issue_11/11_egan.htm A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes. --James Feibleman Why should I go around insulting God? I don't believe in him. If I did, I might insult him. "Irrationality is the Great Baby Blankie of Humankind." -- Olga Bourlin In the Second Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised a story is written concerning one day when the apprentice Clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached Wen and spake thusly: 'Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?' Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: 'A fish!' And Clodpool went away, satisfied. Terry pratchett, Thief of Time Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist. -- Academician Prokhor Zakharov "For I Have Tasted The Fruit" I do not trust a prophet. He is the go-between of gods and men. They are so far apart. How can he be true to both? -- Lord Dunsany, The Laughter of the Gods There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He. - Nietzsche If god doesn't like the way I live, Let him tell me, not you. If god really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. [Mikhail Bakunin] ...what's the point of making non-addictive drugs illegal? If anything which alters the mental state of the individual is to be illegal in case he's unable to function in society, can we have a ban on religion please? -mathew@mantis.co.uk "No sight so sad as that of a naughty child," he began, "especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?" "They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer. "And what is hell? Can you tell me that?" "A pit full of fire." "And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?" "No, sir." "What must you do to avoid it?" I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: "I must keep in good health, and not die." Charlotte Bronte _Jane Eyre_, 1846. "Ray, the next time someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!" Ghostbusters "To the Maharal of Prague, who was the first to realize that the statement 'God created man in His own image' is recursive" The dedication of Sussman's Ph.D. thesis. "Given the total indifference to human suffering displayed by the almighty, `playing God' involves twiddling one's thumbs while millions die in extreme agony from horrible diseases. All this `putting an end to human suffering' is surely the work of the devil." Eco Quotations Below are some selected quotations from the works of Umberto Eco. In a few cases for the lengthier quotations, I have deleted a few sentences to make for a tidier paragraph. Sorry if this offends anyone. If anyone has any quotes they would like to add, please mail them to me! Nonfiction In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness. -- "Travels in Hyperreality" (1975) from Travels in Hyperreality Terrorism [is] a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine . . . The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the "heroes" underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise. -- "Striking at the Heart of the State" (1978) from Travels in Hyperreality When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches moves us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime. -- "Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage" (1984) from Travels in Hyperreality A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations. -- Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1984) The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text. -- Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1984) Today I realize that many recent exercises in "deconstructive reading" read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity. -- Preface to Misreadings (English translation 1993) Fiction For what I saw at the abbey then (and will now recount) caused me to think that often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us. -- The Name of the Rose, First Day, Sext "Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened. "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height. -- The Name of the Rose, Second Day, Nones "But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?" I asked, for no good reason. "Is Jorge right?" "Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . ." -- The Name of the Rose, Second Day, Compline "What terrifies you most in purity," I asked? "Haste," William answered. -- The Name of the Rose, Fifth Day, Nones "I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand is the relation among signs . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe." "But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something. . . ." "What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless . . . The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away." -- The Name of the Rose, Seventh Day, Night "Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth." -- The Name of the Rose, Seventh Day, Night Idiot. Above her head was the only stable place in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business, not hers. A moment later the couple went off -- he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter -- their first and last encounter -- with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude? -- Foucault's Pendulum, Chapter 1 I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. -- Foucault's Pendulum, Chapter 7 "Gentlemen, I will now show you this text. Forgive me for using a photocopy. It's not distrust. I don't want to subject the original to further wear." "But Ingolf's copy wasn't the original," I said. "The parchment was the original." "Casaubon, when originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original." -- Foucault's Pendulum, Chapter 18 "There's only one culture: strangle the last priest with the entrails of the last Rosicrucian." -- Foucault's Pendulum, Chapter 33 I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing. -- Foucault's Pendulum, Chapter 87 Restless, he dreamed of his shipwreck, and dreamed it as a man of wit, who even in dreams, or especially in them, must take care that as propositions embellish a conception, so reservations make it vital, while mysterious connections give it density; considerations make it profound; emphases uplift, allusions dissimulate, transmutations make subtle. -- The Island of the Day Before, Chapter 1 In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace. -- The Island of the Day Before, Chapter 5 "Sir," Saint-Savin replied, "the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to a heaven where only the planets live in eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void." -- The Island of the Day Before, Chapter 5, Umberto Eco When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and suddenly realized that I was talking to myself. Mystical explanations.-- Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial. from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.126, Walter Kaufmann transl. "As man is, god once was. As god is, man may become." Book of Mormon A Super Intelligence (or a Lao Tzu, or a Siddhartha Gautama) wins Pascal's Wager by becoming a god. "Zenarchy" "If absolute power corrupts absolutely, Where does that leave God?" George Daacon My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests." - George Sntayana Så gott om kärlek och godhet är det inte här i världen att man har rätt att slösa bort något av dem på inbillade väsen Nietzsche "Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof." -- Ashley Montague "I bring you word of a new religon that can be received enthusiastically in every corner of every Earthling heart. National borders will disappear. The lust for war will die. All envy, all fear, all hate will die. The name of the new religon is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. The flag of that church will be blue and gold. These words will be written on that flag in gold letters on a blue field: Take Care of the People and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself. The two chief teachings of this religon are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and luck is not the hand of God."

- Niles Winston Rumfoord in Kurt Vonnegut Jr's "The Sirens of Titan."

"O Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos.... What could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last."

- Rev. C. Horner Redwine in Kurt Vonnegut Jr's "The Sirens of Titan."

Here lies a toppled god -- His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, A narrow and a tall one. Tleilaxu Epigram DM 141 There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual to the other. Proverbs of Muad'Dib DM 11 "One who would walk in the Way of the Craftsman must do one thing more. He must remember, always, that he is building a temple to God. He is building an edifice in conciousness in which he, himself, is an individual stone. In time, each human being will square his stone and place it in that temple, and when that temple is complete, God will behold God in the Mirror of Existence and there will be then, as there was at the beginning, only God." - W. Kirk MacNulty, The Way of the Craftsman "Science may never be able to prove or disprove the existence of God, but it can make him irrelevant." - D. Bailey The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." Bernard Shaw "I was an ateist until I found out I was god." But I was not, to use the theological phrace, _receptive_. The great obstracle to the influx of grace was my own perfect happiness, and it is well known that God takes no thought for the happy, any more than He does for birds and puppies, perhaps realizing they have no need for Him and mercifully letting them alone. John Glassco John 10:34 Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your law, 'I have said you are gods'?" "It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him." -Arthur C. Clarke Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy, and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole. Teilhard de Chardin I don't believe in God, not that I don't believe in his existence. I don't believe in God in the the same sense that I don't believe in abortion. It's time to stop worshipping gods and aim at becoming gods. Markoff Chaney God is a ridiculously small human concept compared to the coherent intelligence of the universe. Everything doesn't need to have a primate alpha male in charge to be an intelligent system. RAW "...the only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it." - Daniel C. Dennett .... I'm as good as that guy called Jesus I can cure a cripple with a prosthesis I can walk on water when it freezes... --- Exit 57 I'm trying to create a methodone for religious heroin! T.0. Morrow Thomas Hassan | Art for Arts sake | 10 thassan @ magnet.at | Money for Gods sake | cc "One would normally define a "religion" as a system of ideas that contain statements that cannot be logically or observationally demonstrated... Godels theorem not only demonstrates that meathematics is a religion, but shows that mathematics is the only religion that proves itself to be one!" The World within the world. J D Barrow. "Our gods are dead. Klingon warriors slew them, millennia ago. They were more trouble than they were worth." ---Worf It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us. -Peter De Vries God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper. -R. Buckminster Fuller Although quantum physics refuted Albert Einstein's expostulation that "God does not play dice," the arms race, overpopulation, and the ozone layer incline me to believe He plays a little high-stakes poker now and then. "My atheism is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests." - Santayana I see no difference between physical and spiritual. How about this: a physical mind, a physical body, a physical soul, a physical heaven, and a physical God. I notice that the definitions of those concepts are very mystical. I believe mysticism is tactic used to keep people stupid. Stupid people are too busy arguing about things to notice they are being killed. It is memetic warfare. Mike Cowar "Someone who wants to understand the universe, but is too lazy to study physics." - Definition of a mystic, attrib. Mark Twain The second face had the classical beauty that could belong to a man as well as a woman. There was no particular expression of virility nor of femininity. Still it wasn't a blank face; it expressed youth -- eternal triumphant youth -- transcending everything else. The expression proclaimed pure simple existence, superior to any mystery, torment or nostalgias. It was a plenitude, not self-contained, but expressing limitlessness. In other words, it was a face of a god and very human at the same time. This head proclaimed, "God is human and human is God." William Markiewicz "Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek." - Tom Robbins Coincidences are spiritual puns. -- G. K. Chesterton "Gods are born and die, / but the atom endures." / (Alexander Chase) "The very concept of sin comes from the bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?" Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith".