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POPS15 Quotes by Famous Atheists Bertrand Russell: “You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”
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POPSWhy Atheists are So Smart Thus when Christopher Hitchens and other atheists routinely dismiss religious claims on the grounds that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence," they are making what philosophers like to call a category mistake. We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason. When atheists summarily dismiss the immortality of the soul or the afterlife on the grounds that they have never found any empirical proofs for either, they are asking for experiential evidence in a domain which is entirely beyond the reach of experience. In this domain, Kant argues, the absence of evidence cannot be used as the evidence for absence. Notice that Kant's argument is entirely secular: It does not employ any religious vocabulary, nor does it rely on any kind of faith.
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POPSPeople of science and religion need not disagree "But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.--2 Peter 3:8" This is what I wondered aloud in Bible Study when I was 18. Maybe Genesis was a parable like most of the bible, and the earth was not literally created in six days. I asked our pastor why evolution couldn't be the method God used to create. And he called me an idiot. He was too preoccupied with shouting & stomping, being indignant and offended by the suggestion that he and a monkey have a common ancestor. That was when I was 18. I'll be 36 this month and I haven't been to church since. I'm against religion, but it's nice to see a pastor giving his students permission to at least open their minds a narrow crack. I don't know for sure, and YOU don't know either! Let's not fight about it.
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POPSTeaching Kids Not To Think Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The proposal was supported by the Queensland Government and a Bill was introduced to Queensland Parliament, before being rejected. Bishop, with the support of the Christian Lobby, threatened to withhold funding from the Queensland school system if the changes were made. She claimed the proposed changes would open the door to cultish groups to start preaching ‘unacceptable views’, such as witchcraft and paganism. The reality is that these groups do, and always had, have potential to schools under the Education Act. This is because they are based on a belief in the supernatural, and therefore count as religious belief. Humanist studies remain excluded precisely because they do not subscribe to supernatural belief. Bishop would have been better off arguing that algebra shouldn’t be taught, as it opens the door to weird letters posing as hypothetical numbers.
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POPSBible Stickers This was thought up as an answer to the stickers put on some science textbooks that covered evolution.
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POPSSouth Carolina, Bringing ignorance to a college near you! Three times as much funding for religious schools and supporting the idea of Creationism to supplant evolution. Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer) points out other ignorances this level of funding generates at http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/08/06/time-to-saw-south-carolina-off-from-the-us-and-set-it-free/#comments
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