S.T. Joshi > Quotes

“The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should guard against the encroachment of religion in areas where it has no place, and in particular the control of education by religious authority. The attempts to ban the teaching of evolution or other scientific theories -- a feeble echo of medieval church tyranny and hostility to learning, but an echo nonetheless are serious threats to freedom of inquiry and should be vigorously combated.”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should not be cowed by exaggerated sensitivity to people's religious beliefs and fail to speak vigorously and pointedly when the devout put forth arguments manifestly contrary to all the acquired knowledge of the past two or three millennia. Those who advocate a piece of folly like the theory of an 'intelligent creator' should be held accountable for their folly; they have no right to be offended for being called fools until they establish that they are not in fact fools. Religiously inclined writers like Stephen L Carter may plead that 'respect' should be accorded to religious views in public discourse, but he neglects to demonstrate that those views are worthy of respect. All secularists -- scientists, literary figures, even politicians (if there are any such with the requisite courage) -- should speak out on the issue when the opportunity presents itself.”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“God's existence needs to be established independently before he can be brought into account for causation; it cannot be assumed at the start.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“I am He who howls in the night; I am He who moans in the snow; I am He who hath never seen light; I am He who mounts from below. My car is the car of Death; My wings are the wings of dread; My breath is the north wind’s breath; My prey are the cold and the dead.”
― S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft

“The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, immorality, impoliteness, or any of the other smokescreens used by the pious to deflect attention from the central issues at hand.”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“Even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided
only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge....
The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us. (MR 216)”
― S.T. Joshi, Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism

“any system of morals which has a theological basis becomes one of the tools by which the holders of power preserve their authority and impair the intellectual vigor of the young. ("Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?" [1954], Y 196)”
― S.T. Joshi, Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism

“The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind.”
― S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft

“The dominant question thus becomes not why religion has not died away but why it continues to persist in the face of monumental evidence to the contrary. To my mind, the answer can be summed up in one straightforward sentence: People are stupid.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“William James (1842-1910) was the first philosopher in America to gain universal celebrity. The hardheaded practical wisdom of Benjamin Franklin could hardly be termed a philosophy; from an entirely different perspective, the obfuscatory maunderings of Emerson did not count as such, either. Something with a bit more intellectual rigor of the English or German sort was needed if Americans were not to feel that they were anything but the ruthless money-grubbing barbarians they in fact were and are. James filled the bill. His younger contemporary George Santayana (1863-1952) was considerably more brilliant and scintillating, but for regular, 100 percent Americans he had considerable drawbacks. In the first place, he was a foreigner, born in Spain, even though his Boston upbringing and Harvard professorship would otherwise have given him the stamp of approval. Moreover, he was not merely suspiciously interested in art and poetry (The Sense of Beauty [1896], Three Philosophical Poets [1910]), but he actually wrote poetry himself! No, he would never do.
James, on the other hand, was just the sort of philosopher suited to the American bourgeoisie. His chief mission, expressed from one book to the next, was to protect their piety from the hostile forces of science and skepticism-an eminently laudable and American goal.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Malcolm Muggeridge, once a keen British social and cultural critic who in his old age became something of a religious fanatic. While working on his own documentary on Mother Teresa for the BBC, aired in 1969, he felt he had experienced an authentic miracle: After filming footage in a dark residence called the House of the Dying, Muggeridge was astounded to discover, when later viewing the footage, that the images were in fact clearly visible. Muggeridge himself exclaimed: "It's divine light! It's Mother Teresa. You'll find that it's divine light, old boy" (MT 27). (I like that "old boy" remark-so distinctively British.) Unfortunately, Muggeridge's cameraman, Ken Macmillan, calmly pointed out that the effect was the result of a new kind of film created by Kodak. But Muggeridge's "miracle" had by this time already spread and is still being talked about. To Hitchens, however, the significance of the episode is very different: "It is the first unarguable refutation of a claimed miracle to come not merely from another supposed witness to said miracle but from its actual real-time author. As such, it deserves to be more widely known than it is" (MT 27). But, alas, the average person is far more inclined to believe in "miracles," however fake, than in the debunking of miracles, however real.”
― S.T. Joshi, Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism

“Since it is impossible for us to know, prior to engaging in a discussion, which opinion is true and which is false, it is dangerous to entrust the government with the power to suppress what it believes to be falsehood; for that purported falsehood may turn out to be the truth. In any event, truth can be ascertained only by the full airing of views on all sides; in the absence of such an airing, even a true belief can become stale and lifeless.”
― S.T. Joshi, Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism

“There is no logical connection between having any degree of power, including the power to create the universe, and being morally good.

-A.J. Ayer”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“Shadows of spent time vibrated against intoxicating prisms of potential futures.”
― S.T. Joshi, A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

“One is not “converted” to Christianity- one must first be sick enough for it.

-Friedrich Nietzsche”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“The priest knows of only one great danger: that science – the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions – a man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to “know.”…. “Therefore man must be made unhappy” – this been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.

-Friedrich Nietzsche”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“The social-political future of the United States is one of domination by vast economic interests devoted to ideals of material gain, aimless activity, & physical comfort—interests controlled by shrewd, insensitive, & not often well-bred leaders recruited from the standardised herd through a competition of hard wit & practical craftiness—a struggle for place & power which will eliminate the true & the beautiful as goals, & substitute the strong, the huge, & the mechanically effective.”
― S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft

“Since the earliest days the church as an organization has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was apologist for the divine right of kings.... In the domain of pure ideas one branch of the church clings to the archaic speculations of Thomas Aquinas and the other labors under the preposterous nonsense of John Calvin....
The only real way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something that is not science and something that is not religion.... To argue that the gaps in knowledge which still confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity. When a man so indulges himself it is only to confess that, to that extent at least, he is not a scientist at all, but a theologian, for he attempts to reconcile science and religion by the sorry device of admitting that the latter is somehow superior to the former, and is thus entitled to all territories that remain unoccupied. (TG 260-61)”
― S.T. Joshi, Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism

“I have long ago lost my belief in immortality also my interest in it.... I have sampled this life and it is sufficient.... Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born.... There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.?”
― S.T. Joshi, Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism

“There are things beyond the veil of human understanding, strange, antediluvian monstrosities that stalk the shadows, preying on dark, lost minds, waiting at the rim of the Great Abyss to claim their own.”
― S.T. Joshi, A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

“[Marriage] promote[s] the moral order of the world - Edith Wharton "The Eyes”
― S.T. Joshi, The Cold Embrace: Weird Stories by Women

“Buckley goes on to declare: "What keeps Christians afloat is the buoyant knowledge that no devastating damage has in fact been done to Christian doctrine" (N 55). Ah, blessed Bill! - how strong a shield your ignorance must be! I suppose one should not be surprised at Buckley's staggering ignorance of science, ancient and modern, but one might expect him to have a slightly better notion of the scientific and philosophical implications of many of the Christian doctrines in which he professes to believe. And although he claims to have read much in the area of Catholic apologetics, he seems wondrously unaware of the multitude of skeptical tracts that have, for many intellectuals, shattered the foundations of religious belief, whether it be Robert G. Ingersoll's Some Mistakes of Moses (1879) or Joseph Wheless's Is It God's Word? (1926) or Bertrand Russell's Religion and Science (1935), all the way down to Antony Flew's Atheistic Humanism (1993), Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World (1995), and beyond.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“In the case of the god who still survives in the loyalty of men after his centuries of scrutiny, it can always be noted that little besides his name has endured. His attributes will been so revised that he is really another god.

-Carl Van Doren”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“Suppose that an infinite God exists, what can we do for him? Being infinite, he is conditionless; being conditionless, he cannot be benefited or injured. He cannot want. He has. Think of the egotism of a man who believes that an infinite being wants his praise!

-Robert Ingersoll”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“If I believe that God tells me to love my enemies, but at the same time hates His own enemies and requires me to have one will with Him, which has the larger scope, love or hatred?

-George Eliot”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“Who knows what wonders, what horrors, may have transpired in the dim past, before our race stood erect? Who can guess at the mysteries of the future, when we and all our works are passed away and the sun itself grows old? The”
― S.T. Joshi, A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

“Beauty as a gift from heaven has proved useless. It will, however, become the essence and impetus of life when man learns to see in the earth the only heaven fit for man.

-Emma Goldman”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“If we think that the search for God is a vain search, and that there is no reality to be discovered, then the history of religion becomes a study of the aberrations of the human mind.

-Cyril Bailey”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“Religionists do not apparently wish to acknowledge the secularist’s claim that moral behavior is, or can be, a product of the individual’s rational decision as to what is honorable and conducive to the smooth running of society, or even the long-term advantage to oneself. They instead fear that the average person will “run amok” and be completely amoral without the impetus of religion – without, in other words, the heavy emotional burden of realizing that his or her actions are constantly being monitored by a supernatural scorekeeper who, upon the individual’s death, will make a tally and determine the person’s ultimate destination, either above or below.”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“If we could only see, in one view, the torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, the lies, the slaughter, the violations of every obligation of humanity, which have flowed from this source along the course of the history of Christian nations, our worst imaginations of Hell would pale beside the vision.
-Thomas Henry Huxley”
― S.T. Joshi , Atheism: A Reader