Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day:

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The Title of "Atheist"

Here's a great quote for the day.

It is a bit of a problem, the title "Atheist"--No one really wants to be defined by what they do not believe in. We haven't yet settled on a name, but you wouldn't expect a Baptist minister to go around calling himself an a-Darwinist. But it is crucial that people who do not have a sky god and don't have a set of supernatural beliefs assert their belief in moral values and in love and in the transcendence that they might experience in landscape or art or music or sculpture or whatever. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, it makes them give more valence to life itself. The little spark that we do have becomes all the more valuable when you can't be trading off any moments for eternity.

Ian McEwan in the TNR (via Andrew Sullivan)

Quote of the Day

"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."

-- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

(In)Validity of Faith

Here's a good Nietzsche quote for the day:

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Why the outspoken must remain so

"Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other's principles, nor experienced in each other's talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy...When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

–Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 82-83 (1770) in: Select Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 1, p. 146 (Liberty Fund ed. 1999).