Edwin Kagin > Quotes

“There are Atheists in foxholes
Atheists in hurricanes
There are Atheists in all the roles
Denied by your refrains

Atheists are your fellow citizens
People who love and laugh and cry
Atheists are your relatives and friends
Don't insult them with a lie

Atheists in many foxholes served
And some have had to die
Give Atheists the thanks deserved
Don't dismiss them with a lie

Atheists are all around you
They work, they help, they care
And no matter what you think is true
Atheists are everywhere
And no matter what you think is true
They do not want your prayer”
― Edwin Kagin

“This book is no more about baubles, or about blasphemy, than a book on ‘creation science’ is about creation or about science. The book’s title was to get you to buy it. Thanks. Hope you like it. If you are reading this for free in a store, go buy the damn book. If you like it, tell others and write nice letters about it. If you don’t like it, you are encouraged to give it such a hard time that lots of others will want to buy it. You know, sort of like The Catcher in the Rye, or The Satanic Verses, or Ulysses. Might never have heard of any of these if some group with the temporary power to do so didn’t ban one or more of them at various unhappy times. Anyone who thinks Ulysses is a dirty book has never read Ulysses. The same type people will probably buy a copy of The Confessions of St. Augustine off the rack at the bus station for titillation en route.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“This is a wake up call. Don’t press the snooze alarm. The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court-ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with their god’s anointed. Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe a god’s finger was on their trigger. Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare. One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a fancy word for biblical interpretation. When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like ‘eupraxophy.’ Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases—those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god—tend to share certain operational assumptions. These include the belief that: (1) Every word of the Bible is true. (2) The English translation of the Bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture. This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks. (3) The Bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality. (4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles. (5) The Bible is without error. (6) No part of the Bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part. (7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the Bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict. The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the ‘Word of God’ (the Bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called prophecy), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality. The Bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“On the Coming
American Religious Civil War (ARCW) (August 1995) War is hell. Little understood aphorism. THIS MAY BE YOUR FIRST NOTICE OF THE COMING AMERICAN RELIGIOUS CIVIL WAR (ARCW). If so, you should date and preserve this warning. Then your distant descendants (maybe the “Daughters of the ARCW”) can have something to be smug about—in the unlikely event that they, and this notice, survive the fires, and anybody can still read. The ARCW has already been started by the superstitious. They call it a “civil war of values.” The shooting has already started. They call that “protecting innocent life.” The purpose of the war is to overthrow science and constitutional democracy and to replace them with the Bronze Age myths and laws of ancient Iraq that became preserved in a collection of writings known, in translation, as The Holy Bible. They regard this undertaking as “bringing America back to God.” Loyal Americans should regard it as treason.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“History tells lies. It is important to understand this to understand the ARCW. A particularly harmful lie is that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation. The traitors truly believe this because it has been taught them since they colored pilgrims with crayons in church nursery school while their parents were in the sanctuary learning to be more judgmental. As the young bigots grew into adultery [sic], they accepted this teaching uncritically, just as they accepted that everything in the Bible is true, and that science is wrong, if not evil, when it proves that humans have evolved from non-human life forms. The traitors should, in fairness, be permitted to prove the intensity of this mental abuse in their defense at the ARCW war crimes trials.         America was not established as a Christian nation. To the contrary, it was intentionally set up as a godless nation. That’s why no god or religion of any kind is mentioned in our Constitution. This was so important that it was memorialized in the first words of the first amendment to our Constitution, to wit, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof....” The people who started this country knew what religious war and holy terror was, and they wanted to be very clear that America was a democracy set up under human law, not religious authority or rule. This was made exquisitely clear when, in a treaty with Tripoli, signed by President John Adams on June 10, 1797, the United States Senate unanimously declared, “...the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” That’s that, said the grammarian. People who don’t like the American way, and think church and state should not be separated, really ought to move to Serbia where they can kill and rape non-believers with impunity.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“one of this book’s great pleasures. Did I mention Edwin’s passionate zeal? Edwin Kagin is well known in the greater Cincinnati and northern Kentucky area as a fighter for church-state separation, the civil rights of unbelievers, and the independence of scientific inquiry. When evangelist Kenneth Ham of an outfit called Answers in Genesis came to the area and proposed to open a museum of young-earth creationism opposite the entrance of a Kentucky state park famed for its fossil deposits, Edwin leapt into action, mobilizing FIG and sundry members of greater Cincinnati’s scientific and educational communities as he went. It turned into one of organized humanism’s more colorful success stories: the campaign Edwin led blocked Kenneth Ham from opening his museum for several years. Ham finally got his museum built, but he had to settle for a far less conspicuous location. During this period Edwin frequently unleashed his pen in the general direction of the Reverend Ham, producing everything from vitriolic essays to hilarious doggerel. Not a few of the “baubles” in this book came out of the Battle of Big Bone Lick (which was the name of the state park).”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“The problem is that they are not content to believe what they want and let others believe, or not believe, as they choose. The ARCW they have declared has the avowed purpose of making our democracy one nation under their idea of god. This is treason in its purest and most virulent form. America was not founded on biblical principles. There is nothing in the Bible about democracy. Democracy was invented in Greece, some five hundred years before Jesus. It was overwhelmed for centuries in religious bloodbaths of kings and emperors, and, with minor exceptions, disappeared from human affairs until it was rediscovered and memorialized in the Constitution of the United States of America. To insure that dictators and priests would be kept forever at bay, after much debate, our Constitution was consciously created as a godless document that established a wholly secular state. Love it or leave it.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“From a search of the sacred text itself, using a computerized King James Bible, available in Christian bookstores, we discover that the following words do not appear in the Bible: cooperate; cooperation; moral; traditional values; rational; rights; morals; independence; congress; compromise; progress; republic; republican; democrat; democracy; insight; morality; jury; vote; test; due process; consequences; coincidence; parliament; majority; minority; constitution; achievement; aspire; human; invention; explore; discovery; humanity; humanism; university; universe; homosexual; fairness; harmony; treaty; logic; sexuality; abort; abortion; fetus; poet; poetry; artist; creativity. [Editor’s note: As a matter of fact, the word ‘brain’ also is not to be found there either!] If the Bible is the foundation of morality and our way of life, we are in serious trouble indeed. If the ARCW is lost, we will have no need for those omitted words.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“There are no original ideas or thoughts in the Bible. Much of it is plagiarized from Egyptian and Babylonian sources. There is little that passes for morality as we understand it. Slavery is condoned, as is the murder of children of nonbelievers; a rebellious son should be stoned to death, and women are to be totally subjugated to men. A man could have many wives in the Old Testament. If it is argued that the New Testament created a ‘New Covenant’ wherein only one wife is permitted, we might wonder if the changeless god might have changed his mind. If so, how can every word of the Old Testament be taken as the will of the same god?”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“If the author of the “Song of Solomon” in the Bible appears to drool over a woman’s breasts, this is not to be understood in some sexual sense that would keep the Bible out of family-friendly libraries, but rather as a poetic metaphor of Christ’s love for his church. See, it’s really quite simple.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“Blasphemy is a remarkably plastic crime. At some times and in some places it was, and maybe in some places it still is, punished by a fine or by simply deciding you will go to hell when you die. At some times and in some places, including right now in some places, being convicted of the crime of blasphemy can get you executed (killed) for blasphemy. Here’s how it works. If you are a Christian, it is blasphemy to say that Jehovah didn’t have a son, i.e. Jesus. People have gotten killed horribly for saying that that god was childless instead of acknowledging that he miraculously made a baby on the unwed body of an underage girl. Fine so far. But if you are a follower of Islam, it is blasphemy to say that Allah had a son or any child of any kind at all. So, pay your money and take your chance. No matter which side you come down on, someone will want to kill you for blasphemy. Some folks in the past, and maybe now, thought anyone should be killed who thought One-True-God was not three separate gods in one god. Others thought anyone who thought some god was more gods than one god should be killed. What for? For blasphemy, of course. In Christianity alone, people have been murdered for whether they believed converts should be baptized by being dunked in water or by having water sprinkled on their heads. And for many other things. And these are only two religions. There are lots more, most containing subgroups within them, each claiming the only truth, and each having their unique catalogue of what constitutes blasphemy.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy

“Fanatics feel that only the godless and the immoral could possibly understand the Bible as a collection of diverse literary myths, sexy stories, primitive laws, and biased histories, unconnected in their presentation, and unworthy of belief in their totality. Such true believers are quite satisfied with the famous refutation of reason of the early Christian church: “I believe it because it is absurd.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy