“If you had said years ago that we would see many more people living together before marriage and double the number of kids being born out of wedlock, moralists would have seen it as proof of the decline of civilisation and the collapse of our moral fibre. But the reality is that the taboos we once thought immovable are completely flexible.”
Bernard Salt
“How much love is there in the concept of eternal torture? The single most evil idea ever thought up by humanity. And it's only in the New Testament.”
Anon.
“Charles Darwin didn't do for God. German biblical criticism did; the scholarship on lost texts, discoveries of added-to texts and edited texts. All pointed away from the initial starting-block of faith; that the texts transmitted immutable truths. Realising that 'holy' texts are, like most other things in life, the result of an accretion of human effort and human error is one of the most troubling discoveries any believer can make.”
Douglas Murray
“William Clifford [the 19th Century philosopher] advanced a principle known as 'the ethics of belief', according to which we are morally entitled to hold a belief only if we are also logically entitled to hold it. We are logically entitled to hold a belief – about what is true as well as what is right – only when it satisfies appropriate standards of logic and evidence, which are objective in their application. In this case, every suitable investigator, confronted with the same range of alternative hypotheses, the same body of evidence, and the same rules of reasoning, would arrive at the same conclusions as to which beliefs should be accepted, rejected, or left in suspense. Beliefs about souls and gods would be left in suspense, since there is no way to determine their truth or falsity objectively.”
“Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.”