PZ Myers Quotes

If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs - rethinking the world isn't an option.

FAITH. No one word personifies the absolute worst and most wicked properties of religion better than that. Faith is mind-rot. It’s the poison that destroys critical thinking, undermines evidence, and leads people into lives dedicated to absurdity. It’s a parasite regarded as a virtue. I speak as a representative of the scientific faction of atheism: it’s one thing we simply cannot compromise on. Faith is wrong.

Plantinga has written a short, 5 page summary of his views on evolution and naturalism, and it’s lucid (for Plantinga) and goes straight to his main points. The workings of the man's mind sit there naked and exposed, and all the stripped gears and misaligned cogs and broken engines of his misperception are there for easy examination. Read it, and you'll wonder how a man so confused could have acquired such a high reputation; you might even think that philosophy has been Sokaled.

Science is not infallible, but it has something religion lacks: a process of testing claims against real-world observations.

The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren't special. The universe does not revolve around you; this planet isn't privileged in any unique way; your country is not the perfect product of directed, intentional fate; and that tuna sandwich you had for lunch was not plotting to give you indigestion.

Science provides tangible evidence of its accuracy and importance. Religion makes excuses for its absence of the same.

Religion is an act of sedition against reason. Whatever religion is most seductive and likely to draw in victims to surrender their skepticism is the worst.

We live our lives for our life's sake, rather than for illusions about rewards and satisfaction after we're dead.

Silence is an argument in favor of the status quo. A refusal to address an inequity is a strategy for maintaining that inequity.

Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws- laws that apply everywhere and to everything, with no special exemptions or amplifications for your benefit- given variety by the input of chance. Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident.

Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don't ever wield the damned thing ever again.

Human beings are still fish.

We godless lack that certainty, and we know the world is a complex place that requires compromise and is not ruled by a moral force - virtue is subject to negotiation, and is found in working together with others to find mutually satisfactory solutions. Good is not absolute, it is an emergent property that arises from successful networks of individuals. It is also something that is measured by evidence: we look at the good that people do, not the promises that they make and never keep, or the lies that dovetail nicely into dogma. Competence is a virtue. Intent is meaningless without action.

Rational people have better things to do than grant unwarranted credibility to every half-assed delusion.

We shouldn't be gratuitously obnoxious, we should be purposefully obnoxious.

It's amazing how much detail Catholics will go into documenting why people shouldn't do the things that they all do anyway.

The hypothesis of the supernatural and/or a supreme being is vague, unfounded, and inapplicable in any practical fashion

religion is to misogyny as disease is to misery - not the sole cause, but a significant contributor

Very clever people are often very clever at creating rationalisations for insane beliefs.

Many of the religious apologists out there are not stupid people, they are often brilliant. People working in the field of theology and philosophy smart people everywhere. What they are those religious apologists are smart poeple who can build these amazingly intricate rationalizations for whatever weird practice they favor. Whether it's ritual cannibalism, or praying to spirits, or treating women as chattel. And they always building this on terrible shaky foundation of false premises.

We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned.

And of course death can't be conquered...but oh, the battle can be glorious.

Common sense - so rare it's a god damn superpower