Welsh-Pakistani photographer living in London, outspoken secular humanist, sceptic, critical of religion, love science and nature, 1 chromosome pair short of a chimp.

Posts Tagged: religion

My Thoughts: #Atheism and Authority

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1 year ago    |   Tags: atheism religion my thoughts   |   Notes: 2

Atheism doesn’t depend on an authority figure. Religious people love authority! That’s why you always get them quoting from the Quran and Hadiths because no matter what is being said, what matters to them is who said it. Even if the most silliest thing is propagated by Muhammad, then it must be true because Muhammad said it. Atheism doesn’t work like that. I couldn’t care less what Harris/Hitchens/Dawkins say. What matters is how their ideas and arguments stand on their own merits.

Happy Birthday #ChristopherHitchens!

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1 year ago    |   Tags: quote religion  

Would like to wish my favourite atheist, author, contrarian, and a god-bashing heathen, Christopher Hitchens, a very happy birthday. Your epic Hitchslaps and courage to stand up to theocratic bullying, and your reasoning and rationality are thoroughly missed.

Here’s one of my favourite quotes of his:

“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

 Here’s a toast to you Hitch. Cheers.

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1 year ago    |   Tags: quotes religion god  

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known."

- Carl Sagan from Pale Blue Dot.

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1 year ago    |   Tags: quotes religion god atheism  

"The beliefs of the religious are very offensive to me. I do not go and burn down the nearest Baptist or Catholic church. I don’t call for you to form mobs to vindicate my hurt feelings. I’m an atheist. I have a natural resistance to profanity. It comes from Antigone. It comes from Sophocles. It doesn’t come from monotheism. The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism. If you don’t have the right to criticize religion, you have no right at all. It is the most important argument we have, ever since the dawn of civilization."

- Christopher Hitchens