Dan Barker Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Dan Barker quote about:
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“I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.”
-- Dan Barker -
“I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil—you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself.”
-- Dan Barker -
“Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing "Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.”
-- Dan Barker -
“Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being....”
-- Dan Barker -
“Asking, ‘If there is no God, what is the purpose of life?’ is like asking, ‘If there is no master, whose slave will I be?’ If your purpose of life is to submit as a slave, then your meaning comes from flattering the ego of a person whom you should detest.”
-- Dan Barker -
“People are always asking, "What's the purpose of life?" That's easy. Relieve suffering. Create beauty. Make gardens.”
-- Dan Barker -
“The very concept of sin comes from the Bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?”
-- Dan Barker -
“I threw out all the bath water, and there was no baby there.”
-- Dan Barker -
“If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.”
-- Dan Barker -
“I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.”
-- Dan Barker -
“I'm proud to be an atheist - it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.”
-- Dan Barker -
“How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost ?”
-- Dan Barker -
“If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?”
-- Dan Barker -
“You believe in a book that has sticks turning into snakes, and you say we are the ones that need help?”
-- Dan Barker -
“You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say "God is love" they will claim that you are taking things out of context!”
-- Dan Barker -
“Isn't atheism just another religion?' No, it isn't. Atheism has no creeds, rituals, holy book, absolute moral code, origin myth, sacred spaces or shrines. It has no sin, divine judgment, forbidden words, prayer, worship, prophecy, group privileges, or anointed 'holy' leaders. Atheists don't believe in a transcendent world or supernatural afterlife. Most important, there is no orthodoxy in atheism.”
-- Dan Barker -
“Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.”
-- Dan Barker -
“Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.”
-- Dan Barker -
“It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.”
-- Dan Barker -
“Not thinking critically, I assumed that the successful prayers were proof that God answers prayer while the failures were proof that there was something wrong with me.”
-- Dan Barker -
“Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence? After all, don't we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines?”
-- Dan Barker -
“Faith is not the result of fuzy thinking. It is the cause of it.”
-- Dan Barker -
“In any open question, we should argue from what we do know to what we do not know. We do know that fervent legends and stubborn myths arise easily and naturally. We do not know that dead people rise from the grave.”
-- Dan Barker -
“Without "The Law of Moses" would we all be wandering around like little gods, stealing, raping, and spilling blood whenever our vanity was offended?”
-- Dan Barker -
“It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions.”
-- Dan Barker -
“People are invariably surprised to hear me say I am both an atheist and an agnostic, as if this somehow weakens my certainty. I usually reply with a question like, “Well, are you a Republican or an American?” The two words serve different concepts and are not mutually exclusive. Agnosticism addresses knowledge; atheism addresses belief. The agnostic says, “I don't have a knowledge that God exists.” The atheist says, “I don't have a belief that God exists.” You can say both things at the same time. Some agnostics are atheistic and some are theistic.”
-- Dan Barker -
“Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.”
-- Dan Barker -
“It is wrong for a secular government to promote prayer. We think the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. What if the president declared a National Day of Cursing God because He failed us on September 11? Americans would say, "You've overstepped your authority." That's how we feel when he promotes prayer.”
-- Dan Barker
