We shouldn’t teach both. The media shouldn't equate both. If Thomas Jefferson knew we were blurring the line this much between Church and State, he would turn over in his slave.
As for me, I believe in evolution and intelligent design. I think God designed us in his image, but I also think God is a monkey. Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
These people suffer from one of the strangest of all brain disorders. It makes them think they have been touched by God. But their unusual condition is giving scientists an unusual insight into faith and the human mind ... Could it be that the physical make-up of our brain programs us to believe in God? Horizon: God on the Brain, BBC 2003
Professor Gregory Holmes, one of the world’s leading experts in paediatric neurology, believes the fact that Ellen White’s visions followed a head injury is no coincidence. ibid.
St Paul is a case in point. He famously encountered God who appeared to him in a blinding flash. And what about Moses the bringer of the Ten Commandments? He believed he heard the voice of God speak to him from a burning bush. ibid.
Professor Ramachandran of the University of California decided to pursue the link between the temporal lobes of the brain and religious experiences. ibid.
Scientists now believe what happens inside the mind of temporal lobe epileptic patients may just be an extreme case of what goes on inside all our brains. For everyone it now appears that temporal lobes are key in experiencing religious and spiritual belief. This explosive research studying how religious faith affects the brain is the inspiration for a completely new field of science: neuro-theology. ibid.
Dr Persinger has taken his research a stage further. He believes naturally occurring electromagnetic fields might also be capable of generating this sensed presence. This explains, he argued, not just our sense of God but perhaps also other supernatural experiences too. ibid.
So Horizon decided to set Dr Persinger’s theory and machine the ultimate test. To give a religious experience to one of the world’s most strident atheists Professor Richard Dawkins. ibid.
Despite the setback with Professor Dawkins, Dr Persinger’s research shone over a thousand human guinea-pigs has gone further than any other to establish a clear link between spiritual or religious experience and the temporal lobes of the human brain. It has put his research at the very cutting-edge of neuro-theology. ibid.
Could it be we somehow evolved religious belief as a survival mechanism? But if religious faith is somehow a by-product of evolution, does that mean belief in a God can be dismissed as a quirk of Nature? ibid.
For some reason our brains have developed specific structures that help us believe in God. Remarkably it seems, whether God exists or not, the way our brains have developed we will go on believing. ibid.
In 1973 Horizon looked at a scientific study of religious believers. Many of the people involved believed that God revealed Himself to them directly. Horizon: The End of God? A Horizon Guide to Science and Religion, BBC 2010
In 2006 Horizon looked at what can happen when Science and the Bible conflict. ibid.
Whatever the reality even the most hardened critics agree our brains mean God is here is stay. ibid.
In the unity of the godhead there are three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. These three persons being truly distinct one from another. Thus in the words of the Athenasian creed the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. Yet there are not three Gods but one God. Catholic Encyclopaedia
Only by love can men see me, and know me, and come unto me. He who works for me, who loves me, whose End Supreme I am, free from attachment to all things, and with love for all creation, he in truth comes unto me. Bhagavad Gita, Hindu epic poem incorporated into the Mahabharata
God dwells in the heart of all beings. ibid.
Respond: Stephen Hawking has not yet disproved God’s role in creation: The existence of the universe cannot be explained by science alone ... The skills that make one good at physics are not necessarily the skills that one make good at philosophy. Philip Goff, University of Hertfordshire, article The Guardian
Floods, plagues, fire and brimstone – these legendary punishments were inflicted by a vengeful God. God’s Wrath, Discovery 2010
Approximately seven thousand years ago an ancient flood is thought to have swept across the Black Sea region. ibid.
It was the discovery of freshwater shells in the saltwater Black Sea that offered proof of the flood. ibid.
There is a practically universal demand for a causal story ... You require a causal link and you attach to that an incredible superstructure of cultural and religious thought. David Aaronovitch, The Big Questions: Is There Any Evidence For God? BBC 2012
You want it to be; you conjure it into existence. ibid.
So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, The World’s Need
Among the most detestable villains in history, you could not find one worse than Moses. Here is an order, attributed to ‘God’ to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers and to debauch and rape the daughters. I would not dare to dishonor my Creator’s name by [attaching] it to this filthy book. Men and books lie. Only nature does not lie. Thomas Paine
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine and murder. For the belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. And the Bible is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind. Thomas Paine
There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice. Thomas Paine
It is not a god, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes. Thomas Paine
That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not. Thomas Paine
Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life. Jiddu Krishnamurti
There’s no need for a God. Dan Barker, lecture 2001, ‘Losing Faith in Faith’
God can go fuck himself. God is a cunt. American Honey 2016 starring Sasha Lane & Shia LaBeouf & Arielle Holmes & Riley Keough & McCaul Lombardi & Crystal B & Chad Mckenzie Cox & Garry Howell & Kenneth Kory Tucker et al, director Andrea Arnold, Star
May we never forget that in the sunshine of our lives, through the storm and after the rain – it is all with God – in all ways and forever. ALL PRAISE TO GOD. John Coltrane, A Love Supreme album dedication
The biggest placebo of them all – God. Derren Brown: Fear and Faith, Channel 4 2012
We’re all born with an inbuilt hard-wired tendency to believe. ibid.
Even atheists often betray a tendency to give purpose and meaning to events in their life that really they shouldn’t. ibid.
We create the idea of an agency – that God takes an interest in us, and is pulling strings in our lives. ibid.
We all find ways of making ourselves happy. ibid.
I talk to God but the sky is empty. Sylvia Plath
People think of faith as being something that you don’t really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument ...
He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason. Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom