Wisdom, Love, Joy and Dreams
“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. ”
― Pablo Picasso
Deism and atheism are faith-based myths. We are finite creatures in an infinite universe: parts of life are beyond our ken. We can embrace the mystery.
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“God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”
― John Lennon
“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
“The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.” ― Ray Bradbury
“I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.”
― Percy Blythe Shelley
Is God an invisible man in the sky?
“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.”
― Albert Einstein
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins,
Rejection of the sky god is another religious myth.
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
― Isaac Asimov
There exist no objective proofs for either notion.
“I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959
“The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” 
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
Beyond faith, perception, truth and lies: infinity remains beyond our ken.
“The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe.”
― Einstein
Values and moral codes do not depend on myths…
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
― Dalai Lama XIV
Sometimes religious flights of the the imagination can have consequences.
“Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.”
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire,
Perhaps we can imagine, dream, discover or create better ways to live.
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
― Albert Einstein
“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin
“The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”
― Carl Sagan
“The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays
“It is a fine thing to establish one’s own religion in one’s heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.”
― D.H. Lawrence
Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
― Langston Hughes
“I’ll let you be
in my dreams
if I can be in yours”
― Bob Dylan,
“You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP
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