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Today’s Our Periodic Pasta consists of a few select entries from The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce:

Evangelist: A bearer of good tidings, particularly such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbours.

Infidel: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

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]]> http://enchantednaturalist.com/2011/10/13/excerpts-from-the-devils-dictionary/feed/ 0 Louis Ambrose Bierce, American author http://enchantednaturalist.com/2011/10/11/evidence-and-indoctrination/ http://enchantednaturalist.com/2011/10/11/evidence-and-indoctrination/#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:11:20 +0000 Louis http://enchantednaturalist.com/?p=1579 ]]> Today’s Our Periodic Pasta:

“The vast majority of personal religious beliefs can be accurately predicted based solely on the beliefs of one’s parents or the culture one is raised in…Religionists should ask themselves, ‘Are my religious beliefs based on rationality and evidence or indoctrination?”‘

   – John Bice

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“Faith is the fatigue resulting from the attempt to preserve God’s integrity instead of one’s own.”

    -Matt Berry

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Today’s Our Periodic Pasta:

“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we [non-theists] are the ones that need help?”

   -Dan Barker

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Today’s Our Periodic Pasta:

“What happens when the same number of people pray for something as pray against it? How does God decide whose prayer to answer?…This spring when a small Kentucky town won the State High School Girl’s Basketball crown, the town’s newspaper, as well as the largest newspaper in Kentucky, gave credit for the victory to God’s answering their prayers. Why their prayers were answered and the prayers of the losers were not remains unknown. One possibility is that the Hazard team had a better ‘pray-er’-in the form of their principal, who was also a minister. If it turns out that the higher one stands in the religious hierarchy the better the chances that one’s prayers will be heeded, then it certainly behooves every athlete and every athletic team to employ the most religious ‘pray-ers’ possible. Certainly no one should ever enter any contest unpre-prayered!“

-Robert A. Baker

“It doesn’t matter what the particular problem is for a person’s faith. Having an omniscient God concept solves it. It could be the intractable and unanswerable problem of ubiquitous suffering; or how a man could be 100% God and 100% man without anything leftover, or left out; or how the death of a man on a cross saves us from sins; or why God’s failure to better communicate led to massive bloodshed between Christians themselves. It just doesn’t matter. God is omniscient. He knows why. He knows best. Therefore punting to God’s omniscience makes faith pretty much unfalsifiable, which allows believers to disregard what reason tells them by ignoring the probabilities.” (link)

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Today’s Our Periodic Pasta:

“I suspect that many who reject the scientific outlook…confusedly think that if the scientific world picture is true, then their lives must be futile because…man has no purpose given him from without. These people mistakenly conclude that there can be no purpose in life because there is no purpose of life; that men cannot themselves adopt and achieve purposes…”

     -Kurt Baier

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Today’s Our Periodic Pasta:

“The ‘person’ who is supposed to control the empirical world [but] is not himself located in it…is not an intelligible notion at all. We may have a word which is used [God], as if it named this ‘person,’ but…it cannot be said to symbolize anything…The mere existence of the noun is enough to foster the illusion that there is a real, or at any rate a possible entity corresponding to it.”

-Sir A. J. Ayer

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Today’s Our Periodic Pasta:

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

-Susan B. Anthony

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Today’s Our Periodic Pasta:

“Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine (in part) that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe-spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life.”

-Anonymous

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