I'm going to apologize in advance for the nature of this ramble. It's going to be very quote heavy. A regular quote fest...fiesta...extravaganza...pile...Pile. It's a quote pile. A really really huge quote pile. Because, well, that's what my mind is doing right now, mulling over the words of others. Also because I had much much more to say, and having had to rush out the door before finishing this, I have since forgotten most of it...Eheheh...

At first this was purely going to be a continuation of last week's ramble. An attempt to force the reconstruction process. Then I decided it was going to be scientific instead, before I ran into an article that made me decide to write about politics, before running into one last article that settled me on religion. Not God, really, just religion itself. Hopefully you'll bear with me here, because I know I have a tendency to offend when I talk about religion. Some of that is intentional, most of it isn't.

The article contained the results of a study about American's and their belief in God. The relevant data:

82 percent of participants reported that they depend on God for help and guidance in making decisions.

71 percent said they believe that when good or bad things happen, these occurrences are simply part of God's plan for them.

61 percent indicated they believe God has determined the direction and course of their lives.

32 percent agreed with the statement: "There is no sense in planning a lot because ultimately my fate is in God's hands."

(http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience.....stamericanssay)

I have to be perfectly honest here. I find that to be utterly terrifying. It's not that so many people believe in God. We could sit here arguing all day if there is or isn't, and it won't do us any good. I mean, I can't even decide, so who am I to judge? It's the second, and especially the last number there that frightens me. “There is no sense in planning a lot because ultimately my fate is in God's hands.” Really? This is exactly the same problem I have with unrealistically optimistic people. It's just unreasonable. Untenable. Out of touch with reality. Not every bad thing in your life is a blessing in disguise. God is not going to pay your bills. God is not going to keep you alive. If I were to believe that the Christian God existed, I doubt very much that it's his job to carry you through the bad times. Doesn't it say somewhere in the Bible that God helps those who help themselves? Or to quote *shudders* Dr. Phil (Sorry, but I really like the quote.) “Pray to God, yeah, but swim for the shore.”

This represents, essentially, the biggest problem that I have with religion, in microcosm. I'm perfectly fine with religion, up to a point. That is the point at which one begins to sacrifice reason in the name of religion. Believe in God, by all means, believe in Christ if you're so inclined, but I'm sorry, the Earth is not six thousand years old, and yes your uncle was so a chimp.

I just don't understand it. I really don't. I can understand why someone would have faith that God exists. And as I've stated before, human consciousness is so limited that there are things about existence that we just can't know. Things that we simply aren't physically capable of understanding and perceiving. However, I don't understand faith when it comes at the expense of science and reason. I find the kind of faith that can cause someone to exempt themselves from responsibility, the kind of faith that excuses people from thought and the pursuit of knowledge and truth, the kind of faith that can cause a man to kill in the name of God, to be terrifying.

This is where my bit ends and the absolutely massive pile of quotes begins. These quotes are where my mind has been in the past few days, still struggling to redefine my concept of God. Considering that I doubt any of you really have the time or inclination to read such a long list, I put the ones that I felt were the most significant in bold. Should make skimming it a tad bit easier.

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"It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science." - Richard Dawkins

"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry." - Richard Dawkins

"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes." - Richard Dawkins

"Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it." - Richard Dawkins

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." - Richard Dawkins

"There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true." - Richard Dawkins

"What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child." - Richard Dawkins

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world." - Richard Dawkins

"Most people can't bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?" - Mark Twain

"Man is a Religious Animal. Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.... The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste." - Mark Twain

"The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive...but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born." - Mark Twain

"During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry." - Mark Twain

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also" - Mark Twain

"I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." - Mark Twain


"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." - Albert Einstein

"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence." - Bertrand Russell

"I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it.." - Edith Sitwell

"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration--courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth." - H.L. Mencken

"To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy." - David Brooks

"The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."" - Kurt Vonnegut

"It is the inevitable effect of religion on public policy that makes it a matter of public concern. Advocates of religiosity extol the virtues or moral habits that religion is supposed to instill in us. But we should be equally concerned with the intellectual habits it discourages." - Wendy Kaminer

“At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed -- a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh.

Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all the he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.” - Ernest Becker

"I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima." - Kurt Vonnegut

“If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.” - Douglas Adams

“Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'” - Douglas Adams

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” - Douglas Adams

“She who knows that she does not know is the best off. He who pretends to know but doesn't is ill. Only someone who realizes he is ill can become whole.” - Unknown source. I believe it's from Taoism. It's more than a little out of line with the others. Don't care. It's true.

"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion." - Arthur C. Clarke

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Now, if you'll excuse me, I did not want to be up that early this morning, so I'm going to go find something to do that requires even less brain activity than piling quotes on you. XD