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Babies have big heads and big eyes, and tiny little bodies with tiny little arms and legs. So did the aliens at Roswell. I rest my case. William Shatner
The World Health Organization estimates that eleven million children die every year in the world of the Cold War victors (‘the developing world’) because of the unwillingness of the rich to help them. The catastrophe could be brought to a quick end, the WHO study concludes, because the diseases from which the children suffer and die are easily treated. Four million die from diarrhea; about two-thirds of them could be saved from the lethal dehydration it causes by sugar and salt tablets that cost a few pennies. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy p241
Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own. Robert G Ingersoll
If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men ... What right have you, sir, Mr clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena. Robert G Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
Coliseum: Children’s Matinee. Monty Python’s Life of Brian 1979 ***** starring Graham Chapman & John Cleese & Terry Gilliam & Eric Idle & Terry Jones & Michael Palin & Kenneth Colley & Neil Innes & Gwen Taylor & Terence barler & Carol Cleveland & Spike Milligan et al, director Terry Jones, at the games
God has blessed us so much I can’t afford to feed you any more. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life 1983 starring Graham Chapman & John Cleese & Terry Gilliam & Eric Idle & Terry Jones & Michael Palin, director Terry Jones, Catholic father to children
Father [to children]: The mill’s closed. There’s no more work. We’re destitute. I’m afraid I have no choice but to sell you all for scientific experiments. ibid.
I can’t believe that God created parasites in order to torture small children. David Attenborough, televised interview
A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell – mouths mercy, and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him! Mark Twain, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shield it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God’s treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them. Your country and mine is an interesting one, but there is nothing there that is half so interesting as the human mind. Mark Twain, Letter from the Earth
The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain
Familiarity breeds contempt – and children. Mark Twain
When nonbelievers look carefully at stories in the Old Testament about God's relationship with his ‘children’, it can be difficult to avoid the conclusion that the relationship looks an awful lot like those which characterize abusive families.
The behavior, attitude, and demands of God in the Old Testament are very similar to the behavior, attitude, and demands made by abusive fathers and husbands. Austin Kline, RFM board post 26th September 2007, ‘God as an Abusive Father’
When a child has bone cancer, how can you say there is a living God? Stephen Fry, in conversation with Christopher Hitchens
Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
Abstinence Makes The Church Grow Fondlers. T-shirts & Bumper Stickers
Every time a child says, I don’t believe in fairies, there’s a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead. J M Barrie, Peter Pan, 1928
Epidemiology is also a ‘social construct’ with ‘societal causes’ etc. – but this doesn’t mean that the germ theory of disease isn’t true or that any rival ‘construct’ – like one suggesting that child rape will cure AIDS – isn’t a dangerous, deplorable, and unnecessary eruption of primeval stupidity. We either have good reasons or bad reasons for what we believe; we can be open to evidence and argument, or we can be closed; we can tolerate (and even seek) criticism of our most cherished views, or we can hide behind authority, sanctity, and dogma. The main reason why children are still raised to think that the universe is 6,000 years old is not because religion as a ‘social institution’ hasn’t been appropriately coddled and cajoled, but because polite people (and scientists terrified of losing their funding) haven’t laughed this belief off the face of the earth. Sam Harris
Tell the children the truth. Bob Marley
The details of my life are quite inconsequential. Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving lingerierier from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanise, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he had invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical: summers in Rangoon, luge lessons, in the spring we would make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds – pretty standard really. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery 1997 starring Mike Myers & Elizabeth Hurley & Robert Wagner & Seth Green & Mindy Sterling & Michael York & Fabiana Udenio & Will Ferrell & Mimi Rogers & Joe Son, director Jay Roach, Dr Evil & Scott at counselling
The so-called normal families that I studied in the course of this work – it was like walking into carbon monoxide gas chambers. People induced their children to adjust to life by poisoning themselves to a level of subsistence existence that they called life. R D Laing, psychiatrist
We should know the sanctity of life. We should cherish all children everywhere. And we compete and die, or cooperate and live and be joyful. David Halpin, Make War History
For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child. Friedrich Nietzsche