Chapman Cohen > Quotes

“Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. They thrive on servility and shrink before independence. They feed upon worship as kings do upon flattery. That is why the cry of gods at all times is “Worship us or we perish.” A dethroned monarch may retain some of his human dignity while driving a taxi for a living. But a god without his thunderbolt is a poor object.”
― Chapman Cohen

“ATHEIST is really a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term, it admits of no paltering and no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear-cut issues and unambiguous speech.”
― Chapman Cohen

“All my life I have made it a rule never to permit a religious man or woman take for granted that his or her religious beliefs deserved more consideration than non-religious beliefs or anti-religious ones.
I never agree with that foolish statement that I ought to respect the views of others when I believe them to be wrong.”
― Chapman Cohen

“If one believes in a god, one is a Theist. If one does not believe in a god, then one is an A-theist — he is without that belief. The distinction between atheism and theism is entirely, exclusively, that of whether one has or has not a belief in God.”
― Chapman Cohen

“It may also be noted in passing that both the theist and the Agnostic actually do deny the existence of particular gods without the least hesitation. No rational Agnostic would hesitate to deny the existence of Jupiter, Javeh, Allah, or Brahma. No Christian would hesitate to deny the existence of the gods of a tribe of savages.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense”
― Chapman Cohen

“[Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner belonged to] that small army of brave people who made it their duty, without thought of themselves or hope or expectation of reward, to strive for unpopular causes.

[Chapman Cohen on the death of noted freethinker and peace advocate Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner]”
― Chapman Cohen

“All science is a search for the conditions that determine phenomena.”
― Chapman Cohen, Determinism or Free-Will?

“Civilised man does not discover gods, he discards them.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“The whole of the argument of the advocate of the wider teleology is that God wanted the higher type. But if that is so why did he not produce it at once? What useful purpose could be served by producing at the end of a lengthy and murderous process what might just as well have been secured at the beginning?”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“We who know both sides know that in giving up the belief in deity we have lost nothing of value, nothing that need cause us a single regret. And on that point we certainly can speak with authority; for we have been where the Theist is, he has not been where we are.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“If theism be true man is mocked by a mirage. And the knowledge is made the more depressing by the belief that the plan is not accidental, it is not a product of the working of non-conscious forces, it is the preordained outcome of a plan that was deliberately resolved on by a being with full power to devise some thing wiser and better.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“Now, if the theist could prove that out of a number of equally possible lines of development living beings show one fixed form, and that against the compulsion of environmental forces, he would do something to prove the probability of some sort of guidance.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“The relation demanded by religion between man and God must be of a personal character. No man can love a pure abstraction; he might as reasonably fall in love with a triangle or profess devotion to the equator. The God of religion must be a person, and it is precisely that, as a controlling force of the universe, in which modern thought finds it more and more difficult to believe, and which modern science decisively rejects.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“And, truly, the case against Christianity is plain and damning. Never, during the whole of its history has it spoken in a clear voice against slavery; always, as we have seen, its chief supporters have been pronounced believers. They have cited religious teaching in its defence, they have used all the power of the Church for its maintenance. Naturally, in a world in which the vast majority are professing Christians, believers are to be found on the side of humanity and justice. But to that the reply is plain. Men are human before they are Christians; both history and experience point, to the constant lesson of the many cases in which the claims of a developing humanity override those of an inculcated religious teaching.

But the damning fact against Christianity is, not that it found slavery here when it arrived, and accepted it. as a settled institution, not even that it is plainly taught in its 'sacred' books, but, that it deliberately created a new form of slavery, and for hundreds of years invested it with a brutality greater than that which existed centuries before. A religion which could tolerate this slavery, argue for it, and fight for it, cannot by any stretch of reasoning be credited with an influence in forwarding emancipation. Christianity no more abolished slavery than it abolished witchcraft, the belief in demonism, or punishment for heresy. It was the growing moral, and social sense of mankind that compelled Christians and Christianity to give up these and other things.”
― Chapman Cohen, Christianity Slavery & Labour

“When a dog is about to rest it often tramps round and round the spot on which it is to recline. Naturalists explain this as the survival of an instinct which in the wild dog served the useful function of guarding it against the presence of harmful creatures hidden in the grass.”
― Chapman Cohen, Determinism or Free-Will?

“One cannot conceive man actually ascribing ethical qualities to his gods before he becomes sufficiently developed to formulate moral rules for his own guidance, and to create moral laws for his fellow man.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“The wide range of religious ideas and their existence at a very low culture stage, precludes the assumption that religious ideas are generated in the same conscious way as are scientific theories.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“A newly-born child has no volitions, only reflexes. It is only when experience has supplied us with an idea of what may be done that we will it shall be done. This consideration alone is enough to shatter the case for the supposed freedom of the will. [3]”
― Chapman Cohen, Determinism or Free-Will?

“Science gives up to religion that which cannot be known, and as it does not know what it is, that cannot be known, it surrenders to religion absolute vacuity as the proper sphere for its operations.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“Each stage of theistic belief grows out of the preceding stage, and if it can be shown that the beginning of this evolution arose in a huge blunder I quite fail to see how any subsequent development can convert this unmistakable blunder into a demonstrable truth.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“A satisfactory answer clearly cannot be found in the assumption that each person's actions proceed from an unfettered, autonomous will. The reason for the choice would still have to be discovered. Nor will it do to attribute the difference of choice to different environmental influences in which the "self" is placed. This would indeed be reducing the man to the level of a machine, or to a lower level still. And the same environmental influences do not produce identical results.”
― Chapman Cohen, Determinism or Free-Will?

“Man is a social animal; his character is a social product. The purely human qualities not only lose their value when divorced from social relationships, it is these relationships that provide the only medium for their activity. To say that a person is free to express moral qualities in the absence of his fellows is meaningless, since it is only in their presence that the manifestation of them is possible.”
― Chapman Cohen, Determinism or Free-Will?

“There is no exception to the fact that men have everywhere come to the conclusion that the earth was flat, and yet a wider and truer knowledge proved that universal belief to be quite false. The fact of a certain belief being universal only warrants the assumption that the belief itself has a cause, but it tells us nothing whatever concerning its truthfulness.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“All that we can say is that the belief in God is universal—with those who believe in him. And even here universality of belief is only secured by their refraining from discussing precisely what it is they mean by "God," and what it is they believe in. There is agreement in obscurity, each one dreading to see clearly the features of his assumed friend for fear he should recognise the face of an enemy.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“And why urge people to make an effort in this or that direction if everything, including the effort or its absence, is determined?”
― Chapman Cohen, Determinism or Free-Will?

“The deity they want, is, of course, finite, a person much like themselves, with thoughts and feelings limited and mutable in the process of time.... And for their purpose, what is not this is really nothing.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“Finally, it is one aim of this book to press home the point that the logical issue is between Theism and Atheism. That there is no logical halting place between the two, and that any attempt to call a halt is little more than a concession to a desire for mental or social convenience, seems to me as clear as anything can well be.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“And we know that the period during which the influence of Christian theism was strongest, was the period when the intellectual life of civilised man was at its lowest, morality at its weakest, and the general outlook most hopeless. Religious control gave us heresy hunts, and Jew hunts, burnings for witchcraft, and magic in the place of medicine. It gave us the Inquisition and the auto da fé, the fires of Smithfield and the night of St. Bartholomew.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative