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The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society. Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is something positive wicked ... You can’t be a God person and a Good person ... What is moral about vicarious redemption? Christopher Hitchens, Freedom from Religion Foundation, 2007
It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book On God] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. ‘How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.’
Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled ‘theologians’, whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as ‘karmic reassignment’) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: ‘In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)’
I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of Harlot’s Ghost and The Armies of the Night. Christopher Hitchens
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things that takes religion. Professor Steven Weinberg
I suspect that religion is simply a parasite on a much older moral sense ... But it is surely far more moral to do good things for their own sake rather than as a way of sucking up to God. Our true sense of right and wrong has nothing to do with religion. I believe there is kindness, charity and generosity in human nature. And I think there is a Darwinian explanation for this. Richard Dawkins, The Root of All Evil? The Virus of Faith, Channel 4 2006
The war between Good and Evil is really just the war between two evils. ibid.
Goodness is natural to us; kindness is in our physiology. Richard Dawkins, Sex, Death and The Meaning of Life I: Sin, Channel 4 2012
The fib of all fibs that you can’t be good without God. Richard Dawkins & Dan Dennett, In Conversation, Oxford 2012
Many religion people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good ... Moral considerations lie hidden behind religious attitudes to other topics that have no real link with morality. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion p211
But what about the wrenching compassion we feel when we see an orphaned child weeping, an old widow in despair from loneliness, or an animal whimpering in pain? What gives us the powerful urge to send an anonymous gift of money or clothes to tsunami victims on the other side of the world whom we shall never meet, and who are highly unlikely to return the favour? Where does the Good Samaritan in us come from? ibid. p215
There are circumstances – not particularly rare – in which genes ensure their own selfish survival by influencing organisms to behave altruistically. ibid. p216
A gene that programs individual organisms to favour their genetic kin is statistically likely to benefit copies of itself ... The other main type of altruism for which we have a well-worked-out Darwinian rationale is reciprocal altruism. ibid. p217
In ancestral times, we had the opportunity to be altruistic only towards close kin and potential reciprocators. Nowadays, that restriction is no longer there, but the rule of thumb persists. Why would it not? ibid. p221
95,740. Hauser also wondered whether religious people differ from atheists in their moral intentions. Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should be different. But it seems they don’t. ibid. p225
Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that’s just sucking up. ibid. p226
Deontology is a fancy name for the belief that morality consists in the obeying of rules. ibid. p232
Not all absolutism is derived from religion. Nevertheless, it is pretty hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones. ibid. p232
It’s a ubiquitous feature but it doesn’t follow it has to be good for something. Daniel C Dennett, lecture Edinburgh University 2006, ‘Religion as a Natural Phenomenon’
The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth. Albert Einstein
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. Albert Einstein
The good die young. Late 17th century proverb
If you can’t be good, be careful. Early 20th century proverb
One good turn deserves another. Early 15th century proverb
You can have too much of a good thing. Late 15th century proverb
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth. Leo Tolstoy
I know in my heart that man is good.
That what is right will always eventually triumph.
And there’s purpose and worth to each and every life. Ronald Reagan
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil – which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama. Richard Feynman, cited James Gleick ‘Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman’, 1992
Of course if we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science; it is also to the credit of the moral choice which led us to the good work. Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad – but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Richard Feynman, The Value of Science, 1955
The pursuit of the good and evil are now linked in astronomy as in almost all science … The fate of human civilization will depend on whether the rockets of the future carry the astronomer’s telescope or a hydrogen bomb. Bernard Lovell, British astronomer
We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it. Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. Anne Frank