Sunday, December 9, 2007

Mitt Romney is a religious wackjob

A spokesman for the Mitt Romney campaign is thus far refusing to say whether Romney sees any positive role in America for atheists and other non-believers, after TPM inquired about the topic yesterday.

Here's a few for you Romney:

1. Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov
2. I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. — Andrew Carnegie
3. All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway
4. Lighthouses are more helpful then churches. — Benjamin Franklin
5. Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche
6. The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. — George Bernard Shaw
7. Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. — Kurt Vonnegut
8. I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. — Frank Lloyd Wright
9. Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. — Denis Diderot
10. A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. — Samuel Clemens
11. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. — Sigmund Freud
12. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. — Edward Gibbon
13. The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. — Ferdinand Magellan
14. Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. — Woody Allen
15. It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous. — Gloria Steinem

2 Comments:

Blogger Vic de Jesus said...

Magellan quote is a fabrication

“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.” Ferdinand Magellan

The quote is a fabrication of Robert Green Ingersoll. It is found in his essay “Individuality.” This may be accessed at http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/individuality.html
It’s in the fourth paragraph of his essay:

It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions, -- some one who had the grandeur to say his say. I believe it was Magellan who said, "The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church." On the prow of his ship were disobedience, defiance, scorn, and success.

This was first pointed out, as far as I know, by Dr. Tom Gorski in his website “Knowing What Ain’t So” at http://www.churchoffreethought.org/cgi-bin/contray/contray.cgi?DATA=&ID=000011010&GROUP=048. Dr. Gorski is one of four founders of the The North Texas Church of Freethought.

To the credit of Wikiquote it clearly points out the quote is disputed and attributes it to Ingersoll http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Ferdinand_Magellan

At http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Religion/Atheist%20Quotes.htm it immediately corrected the attribution: "The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church."
..........Robert Green Ingersoll (not Ferdinand Magellan)

At http://www.iidb.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-63650.html they already were able to determine that it was Ingersoll who in fact said the words he attributes to Magellan. “Regarding a flat earth, please note that Ingersoll used a quote attributed to Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521), the Portuguese and Spanish explorer: ‘The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.’ Ingersoll uses this quote to make a point: ‘The trouble with most people is, they bow to what is called authority.’ Ingersoll's thrust in this article is that ‘It is the duty of each and every one to maintain his individuality’ and ‘There can be nothing more utterly subversive of all that is really valuable than the suppression of honest thought--No man, worthy of the form he bears, will at the command of church or state solemnly repeat a creed his reason scorns.’ I agree with Ingersoll. If you do not, that is certainly your privilege.” The author assumes Ingersoll got it from an authentic source. But I have read the primary sources on Magellan—eyewitness accounts by Antonio Pigafetta, Gines de Mafra, Francisco Albo, The Genoese Pilot, Martinho de Aiamonte, Sebastian Elcano—nowhere is there such a statement from Magellan. Ingersoll most definitely cites no authority.

Vicente Calibo de Jesus
ginesdemafra@gmail.com

December 15, 2007 9:31 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

#12 is actually from Seneca, an ancient Roman philosopher. Good post, nonetheless!

December 21, 2007 10:24 PM  

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