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Shorties: Nice, Concise Quotations for Skeptics

 
 
 
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ideologyhunter

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Some of these, like the Twain, are chestnuts, but I still find them sturdy and memorable. (I've copied some of them into Gideon Bibles.) I hope some of you can add more examples.

Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tenant for the mind of an honest man.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
- Susan Ertz

For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward; but the memory of them is lost.
- The Holy Bible

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
- Thomas Jefferson

Every religion of any consequence teaches that all the rest are insane, immoral, and against God.
- H. L. Mencken

You can safely assume that you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
- Anne Lamott

(The Bible) is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
- Mark Twain

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
- H. L. Mencken

Every religion springs from two universal needs: to explain the origin of the human race and to be comforted about the harsh finality and loss that is death. Whether this involves pyramids, seventy-two virgins, healing frogs, burning bushes, walking on water, or tribes of alien forebears, the camaraderie, the mythologies, and the comfort factors are about the same.
- Dick Cavett

A gay Irish priest in New Delhi
Tattooed the Lord's Prayer on his belly.
By the time that a Brahman
Read down to the Amen,
He blown both salvation and Kelly.
- Michael O'Donoghue
 
IT IS EASIER FOR A RICH MAN TO GET THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE THAN GET TO HEVAEN.
 
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
[Thomas Paine, Age of Reason]

Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now,
The place to be happy is here --R.G. Ingersoll

Believing in God because most people are moral is like believing in Cupid because most people fall in love.

I can see farther standing on my feet than bowed on my knees.
 
"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense."

- Bertrand Russell
 
When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Yogi Berra

There is a sucker born every minute. Attributed to PT Barnum.

Don't take any wooden nickels.

If something is too good to be true, it probably isn't.
 
"Faith is like a piece of blank paper whereon you may write as well one miracle as another." ~ Charles Blount (1654-1693)


"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as a useful tool." - Seneca


"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." Susan B. Anthony
 
Josephine K. Henry
Awakening Kentucky womanhood

February 22, 1846 - 1928

Is not the Church to-day a masculine hierarchy, with a female constituency, which holds woman in Bible lands in silence and in subjection? No institution in modern civilization is so tyrannical and so unjust to woman as is the Christian Church. It demands everything from her and gives her nothing in return. (Statement, The Woman's Bible, 1898)
 
Here's three more I enjoyed:

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
- Benjamin Franklin

I listen to these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: 'Have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion?' But that's a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it's going to be offend people. Tough.
- Daniel Dennett

In July in Dadeville, Ala., Mr. Gabel Taylor, 38, who had just prevailed in an informal Bible-quoting contest, was shot to death by the loser.
-Newspaper filler item, 1996
 
A lot of people hate my skepticism, and I think I understand why. The psychics offer wonders and endless possibilities in a world that often seems difficult and mundane. They promise health, wealth, wisdom, eternal life. But if you examine the record, it's not the psychics but the hard-nosed scientists who have actually delivered the things that improve human life. And, to me, science describes a world far more interesting than any psychic fantasy. It's a good world - not perfect - but it's ours. So we'd better learn to live with it, the way it is.
-Sherry Austin

Eric Idle's comment on deciding to give Mel Gibson a copy of Monty Python's Life of Brian: Can you believe he made the same movie and missed all the jokes?
 
Buddha says: "Do not flatter your benefactor!". Let one repeat this saying in a Christian church : it immediately purifies the air of everything Christian.

- Nietzsche​
 
Some of my favorites from Robert A. Heinlein (who was greatly influenced by Mark Twain):

- God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.

- Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

- 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 of history.

- One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
 
She did not hide the fact that she was a whore; in fact she showed me all her junk, causing me to turn away, as I had from her whore sister. She recalled her whoring days in Egypt, and it made her rock that thing day and night. She lusted after her johns, the ones who had donkey cocks and a jizz flow like a racehorse has.
- The Holy Bible (modern translation of Ezekiel 23:18-20)
 
ideologyhunter said:
She did not hide the fact that she was a whore; in fact she showed me all her junk, causing me to turn away, as I had from her whore sister. She recalled her whoring days in Egypt, and it made her rock that thing day and night. She lusted after her johns, the ones who had donkey cocks and a jizz flow like a racehorse has.
- The Holy Bible (modern translation of Ezekiel 23:18-20)
Click to expand...

OK, I just read that one. That passage is definitely the incel bible. Hot women have contempt for men, so the men get called by God to band together and humiliate and murder the women for not loving them enough.

It's refreshing to see that no matter the time period or culture you look at, all of humanity is joined together in brotherhood to be a bunch of useless dipshits.
 
“It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism.”
GK Chesterton
 
Scepticism = the realization that sources must be questioned. (Chesterton's quote is like that idiotic Christian trope that science is a religion.)
 
Lion IRC said:
“It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism.”
GK Chesterton
Click to expand...

That's not true at all, though. The skeptic KNOWS they have a bias and accounts for it through bias-reduction methodologies. The methodologies are what have no bias; although, to be accurate, the skeptics are always looking out for bias and trying to establish various ways to crush it. You can get excellent recognition in scientific circles for innovative ways to crush bias.
 
Lion IRC said:
“It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism.”
GK Chesterton
Click to expand...

Why shouldn't we have a bias towards skepticism? Should we just believe anything without questioning it? :rolleyes:

"You're biased towards asking questions about things!"
 
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