A.J. Ayer on atheism
A.J. Ayer19 quotes“I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one’s existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.”
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While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is … for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer Even logical positivists are capable of love.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis – about the meaning of what we say – and there is all of this … all of life.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a ‘reality’transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.
A.J. AyerA.J. Ayer
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That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
Ben HechtBen Hecht Some are Atheists by Neglect; others are so by Affectation; they, that think there is no God at some times; do not think so at all times.
Benjamin WhichcoteBenjamin Whichcote Therefore coercion of the non-invasive, when justifiable at all, is to be justified on the ground that it secures, not a minimum of ‘ invasion, but a minimum of pain.
Benjamin TuckerBenjamin Tucker To imagine that “God moves in mysterious ways” is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts.
Barbara SmokerBarbara Smoker Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
Barbara EhrenreichBarbara Ehrenreich The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism, and other burning issues by burning the ismist, which is fine proof that there is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God.
Ben LindseyBen Lindsey The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed.
Bartolome de las CasasBartolome de las Casas The possession of unlimited power corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding.
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