From Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals
When the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: "let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and just" --this, listened to calmly and without previous bias, really amounts to no more than: "we weak ones are, after all, weak; it would be good if we did nothing for which we are not strong enough"; but this dry matter of fact, this prudence of the lowest order which even insects posess (posing as dead, when in great danger, so as not to do "too much"), has, thanks to the counterfeit and self-deception of impotence, clad itself in the ostentatious garb of the virtue of quiet, calm resignation, just as if the weakness of the weak--that is to say, their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality--were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act. This type of man needs to believe in a neutral independent "subject," prompted by an instinct for self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified. The subject (or, to use a more popular expression, the soul) has perhaps been believed in hitherto more firmly than anything else on earth because it makes possible to the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of any kind, the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and their being thus-and-thus as a merit.
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Would anyone like to take a look into the secret of how ideals are made on earth? Who has the courage?-- Very well! Here is a point we can see through this dark workshop, But wait a moment or two, Mr. Rash and Curious: your eyes must first get used to this false iridescent light.-- All right! Now speak! What is going on down there? Say what you see, man of the most perilous kind of inquisitiveness--now I am the one who is listening.--
--"I see nothing, but I hear the more. There is a soft, wary, malignant muttering and whispering coming from all the corners and nooks. It seems to me one is lying; a saccharine sweetness clings to every sound. Weakness is being lied into something meritorious, no doubt of it--so it is just as you said"--
--Go on!
--"and impotence which does not requite into 'goodness of heart'; anxious lowliness into 'humility'; subjection to those one hates into 'obedience' (that is, to one of whom they say commands this subjection--they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weak man, even the cowardice of which he has so much, his lingering at the door, his being ineluctably compelled to wait, here acquire the flattering names, such as 'patience,' and are even called virtue itself; his inability for revenge is called unwillingness to revenge, perhaps even forgiveness ('for they know not what they do--we alone know what they do!'). They also speak of 'loving one's enemies'--and sweat as they do so."
--Go on!
--"They are miserable, no doubt of it, all these mutterers and nook counterfeiters, although they crouch warmly together--but they tell me their misery is a sign of being chosen by God; one beats the dog one likes best; perhaps this misery is also a preparation, a testing, a schooling, perhaps it is even more--something that will one day be made good and recompensated with interest, with huge payments of gold, no! of happiness. This they call 'bliss.'"
--Go on!
--"Now they give me to understand that they are not merely better than the mighty, the lords of the earth whose spittle they have to lick (not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God has commanded them to obey the authorties)--that they are not merely better but also 'better off,' or at least will be better off someday. But enough! enough! I can't take any more. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are manufactured--it seems to me it stinks of so many lies."
--No! Wait a moment! You have said nothing yet of the masterpiece of these black magicians, who make whiteness, milk, and innocence of every blackness--haven't you noticed their perfection of refinement, their boldest, subtlest, most ingenious, most mendacious artistic stroke? Attend to them! These cellar rodents full of vengefulness and hatred--what have they made of revenge and hatred? Have you heard these words uttered? If you trusted simply to their words, would you suspect you were among men of ressentiment? ...
From Camus' The Stranger
That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if
I wanted to marry her. I said it didn't make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her.
I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't love her. "So why marry me, then?"
she said. I explained to her that it didn't really matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married. Besides, she was the one who
was doing the asking and all I was saying was yes. Then she pointed out that marriage was a serious thing. I said, "No."
She stopped talking for a minute and looked at me without saying anything. Then she spoke. She just wanted to know if I would have
accepted the same proposal from another woman, with whom I was involved in the same way. I said, "Sure." Then she said she
wondered if she loved me, and there was no way I could know about that. After another moment's silence, she mumbled that I was peculiar,
that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might hate her for the same reason. I didn't say anything, because I didn't
have anything to add, so she took my arm with a smile and said she wanted to marry me. I said we could do it whenever she wanted.
From Muhammed's Hadith
A true believer views his sins as though he were sitting beneath a mountain which he fears may fall on him, but an evil-doer views his sins as a fly that moves across his nose.In this world be a stranger, or as one who is just passing along the road.
In two things an old man's heart never ceases to be that of a youth, in love of this world and in hoping long.
Were a man to posess two valleys full of gold he would be wanting a third, for nothing will ever really fill a man's belly but the dust.
From Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being
For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a pulic in mind, means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of intimate screts about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster. That was why Sabina did not suffer in the least from having to keep her love secret. On the contrary, only by doing so could she live in truth."Religion Is A Gigantic Fraud" by James Hervey Johnson
Intelligent men do not decide any subject until they have carefully examined both or all sides of it. Fools, cowards, and those too lazy to think, accept blindly, without examination, dogmas and doctrines imposed upon them in childhood by their parents, priests, and teachers, when their minds were immature and they could not reason.
[Some] 433,000,000 Mohammedans believe that the Koran was brought by an angel from heaven; 335,000,000 Hindus believe one of their gods, Siva, has six arms; 153,000,000 Buddhists believe they will be reincarnated; 904,000,000 Christians believe a god made the world in six days, Joshua stopped the sun by yelling at it, and Jesus was born of a virgin and nullified natural laws to perform miracles.
There is absolutely no scientific proof of any of these claims. Science has shown them to be contrary to all known facts. It is more intelligent to classify them as false. Religions are all based upon the primitive superstitions of ignorant, stone-age men who had no knowledge of science and thought the world was flat. The Catholic Church imprisoned Galileo for life and burned Bruno at the stake because they disagreed with these superstitious beliefs.
These primitive beliefs have been kept alive by a vast army of priests, preachers, and rabbis because it is to their great profit to promote them, first, by imposing them on the helpless brains of children, and second, by saturating the air, TV, press, and schools with their childish superstitions and unreasonable claims. They fool the ignorant and make the gullible and the intelligent alike pay tribute to them. Their multi-billion-dollar properties and incomes are exempt from taxes; they get half-fare on trains, busses, and planes; and receive billions of dollars in grants of taxpayers' money to help build up their political power, wealth, and luxurious living. Taxes could be cut 10 percent if churches paid their just share. That would mean a probable saving of 20 billion dollars a year to the people of the U.S. every year of their lives. Some priests also indoctrinated with superstition from childhood probably believe what they preach. It pays them handsomely to do so.
Religious beliefs are against common sense. There is no god, just because priests say so. There are no angels, devils, heavens, hells, ghosts, witches, nor miracles. These superstitious beliefs are promoted for the purpose of making the gullible believe that by paying money to the priest-class, they will be favored by one of the gods. There is nothing supernatural -- nothing contrary to natural law.
Religion has caused untold ignorance, murder, torture, fear, poverty, unhappiness, wars, and has kept the world 10,000 years behind the times. It still does, while the millions support the priestly loafers in comfort and ease. For ages the independent thinkers have been murdered, ostracized, tortured, and suppressed and their writings destroyed. Only in recent years have a few courageous thinkers been free to criticize religions.
Great thinkers and scientists -- Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Charles Bradlaugh, Luther Burbank, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Henry L. Mencken, Charles Smith, Joseph Lewis, Rupert Hughes, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, Mark Twain, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, Clarence Darrow, Chapman Cohen, George McDonald, George Bernard Shaw, and hundreds of others -- have discarded all or most of the religious beliefs.
This leaflet will be shocking to the unfortunate victim brain-whipped by religious indoctrination from childhood. But those who have a spark of intelligence will examine the facts, will stop paying tribute to the religious profiteers, and lose their fear of a mythical god and mythical hell.
If the gods which foolish people pray to were decent beings they would not permit innocent children to die of cancer, be blind, suffer from polio, muscular dystrophy, syphilis. A good god would not have manufactured fleas, bedbugs, chiggers, lice, rattlesnakes, sharks, deadly germs, sickness, diseased brains, idiots, and insanity. All these things are the result of blind, natural evolution. A just god would not cause some innocent people to die or be disabled for life in airplane, train, and ship disasters while others survived.
The Thinkers Club appeals to you to examine both sides so we may all escape from this religious oppression which degenerates the minds, forces all to pay tribute to the priestly parasites, and retards human progress.