Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it's a natural fact of life.
The human species _ mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns - does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn__ trust anyone who hadn__ had this. This has to do with landscape, light, music, love and an awareness of the transience of all things, and the melancholy that invests all this. So it isn__ just gaping happily at the sunset while listening to music, and doing that while knowing that it can__ last very long. But there is no need for the supernatural in this at all. There is no dimension of the supernatural of which this gives one a share.
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The human species _ mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns - does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn__ trust anyone who hadn__ had this. This has to do with landscape, light, music, love and an awareness of the transience of all things, and the melancholy that invests all this. So it isn__ just gaping happily at the sunset while listening to music, and doing that while knowing that it can__ last very long. But there is no need for the supernatural in this at all. There is no dimension of the supernatural of which this gives one a share.
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The only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society.
People see the cleverness of nature and suppose it's the cleverness of the animal itself but it was obvious to me that each and every segment of the animal isn't aware. How much I'd hate to live totally unaware of myself, I thought. What would be the point of living, of existing, if you weren't ever to know about it? I looked at the Fox Moth and pitied it, poor unconscious creature. But then, I supposed, at least it wouldn't be disappointed. It would never find out.
Evil_doesn__ mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to __he Christian majority___ private liking.
[Religion is] a fantasy [and is] completely empty of any explanatory content. It is also evil.
We advocate the atheistic philosophy because it is the only clear, consistent position which seems possible to us. As atheists, we simply deny the assumptions of theism; we declare that the God idea, in all its features, is unreasonable and unprovable; we add, more vitally, that the God idea is an interference with the interests of human happiness and progress. We oppose religion not merely as a set of theological ideas; but we must also oppose religion as a political, social and moral influence detrimental to the welfare of humanity.