Quotes from George H. Smith

It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear.

Atheism is the absence of a belief in a god, nothing more. If the theist wishes to draw monumental implications from this lack of belief, he must argue for his claims.

The theist must present an intelligible description of god. Until he does so, god makes no more sense than unie; both are cognitively empty, and any attempt at proof is logically absurd.

Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation.

A]ny being with the supposed capacity to create the logically impossible must himself be logically impossible.

Those in government are especially susceptible to the corruption of power, because government is institutionalized coercion.

Religion has had the disastrous effect of placing vitally important concepts, such as morality, happiness and love, in a supernatural realm inaccessible to man's mind and knowledge.

To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.

Let us have Men, Men who will say a word to their souls and keep it—keep it not when it is easy, but keep it when it is hard—keep it when the storm roars and there is a white-streaked sky and blue thunder before, and one's eyes are blinded and one's ears deafened with the war of opposing things; and keep it under the long leaden sky and the gray dreariness that never lifts. Hold unto the last: that is what it means to have a Dominant Idea.

The Christian theologian will never find a contradiction between the propositions of faith and reason, because it is his job to interpret them out of existence.

the Fallacy of the Stolen Concept. This fallacy, writes Nathaniel Branden, "consists of the act of using a concept while ignoring, contradicting or denying the validity of the concepts on which it logically and genetically depends.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his vitriolic but penetrating attack on Christianity, clearly recognized the function of sin in this context. "Sin," he writes, "...that form par excellence of the self-violation of man, was invented to make science, culture, every kind of elevation and nobility of man impossible; the priest rules through the invention of sin."1 In order to understand fully the nature

When chemistry has told me that nitric acid thrown in a person's face will cause great agony; when physics has told me that throwing a person out of a window will tend to cause broken bones or death; when economics has told me that promising to keep a person in old age will make him idle and improvident, then, and not till then, can ethics step in and forbid me to commit those actions.

One can be committed to conformity or one can be committed to truth, but not both.