On A Future State
      If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction. In proportion as man taught himself, his and his resources augmented with his knowledge; science, the arts, industry, furnished his assistance; experience assured him or procured for his means of resistance to the efforts of many causes which ceased to alarm as soon as they became understood. In a word, his terrors dissipated in the same proportion as his mind became enlightened. The educated man ceases to be superstitious.
--Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

      Man in his ignorance supposed that all phenomena were produced by some intelligent powers with direct reference to him.
--Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)

      Without God all things are possible.
--Dosteovski (1821-1881)

Holidays In Hell
      If God really wanted us to go to church a lot, he would have given us wider behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with.
--P. J. O'Rourke (1988)

      If wars are an act of God, then in order to make peace we must thwart the devil.
--Samuel Tolsdorf

The Ways Of An Atheist
      We no longer hold that Eve's snake or Baalam's ass could talk like humans do, or that the earth is flat and has four corners, or that the rain comes from opening the windows of the heavens, or that all disease is due to demons or evil forces. The further our science progresses, the more miracles recede. Yesterday's miracles are merely the reflection of yesterday's ignorance.
-- Bernard Katz (1924)

Confronting War
      When dealing with the war problem the disturbing thought which comes to mind again and again is that people are likely to get just what they deserve.
--Ronald J. Glossop (1983)

THE BANKRUPTSY OF RELGION
      Let us make a science of life and resources of humanity on this planet; let us organize it as men organize a great business. So that the work of the world will alternate happily with the play of the world; let us act as if there is no heaven, and the one chance of happiness we have is before the heart ceases to beat; let us each be apostles of the social spirit until a sound standard of conduct rules the world.
--Joseph McCabe (1867-1955)

All Of The Questions You Ever Wanted To Ask American Atheists, With All Of the Answers Vol.11
      At the end of this presentation, I will not have several ushers pass along each aisle with baskets so that you can drop in your donations – tax deductible, of course.
      Please note that I do not have draped on my body an $800 silk suit, $400 lizard shoes, that my fingers are not dripping with diamonds, nor do I sport a solid gold Rolex watch.
      Nor, at the end of this will I plead that you give me money for the starving children in Sri Lanka (who will never see any money collected by any evangelical weeping over them.) …
      It takes a religious huckster to offer what religion has for sale. It takes a knowledgeable and principled educator to present the issues of Atheism.
--Jon Murray and Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1982)

Evolution And The Myth Of Creationism
      Darwin noticed that many more offspring of various plants and animals were produced than actually survived. A female Cod, for example, can produce over 1,000,000 eggs per year, a maple tree produces thousands of its winged fruit each spring; the oceans teem with larva of all sorts that will never reach maturity. Thus the productive capacity of organisms greatly exceeds any actual, realized popultion size. Overproduction of offspring is a fact of nature, one that cries out for explanation. Darwin also noted that no two individuals of any species, except the very rare identical twins, are utterly alike. In other words, their is variation in nature, everywhere. Darwin therefore reasoned that there is competition – for survival, mates, space, food, shelter, and other resources – in which the favorable variations tend to be preserved by nature and the unfavorable ones tend to die out. He called this process natural selection. The consequences of natural selection is biological evolution, which Darwin termed "descent with modification." This is still, 131 years later, considered a good discriptive definition of evolution.
      Darwin had no knowledge of genetics (the science of heredity); and the fossil record, although beginning to be known in 1859, was not nearly as well understood as it is now. Today we have the benefit of genetics and a more complete paleontology (the scientific study of fossils) in explaining evolution. It is a remarkable achievement that Darwin arrived at essentually the view that science has today without any genetics at all and with a somewhat limited view of the fossil record.
      In today's terminology the relationship between natural selection and evolution is explained as follows. Some genetic variants may be better adapted to their environment than others of their sort, and will therefore tend to survive to maturity and leave more offspring than will organisms with less favorable variations. This differential reproduction of genetic varients is the modern definition of natural selection. It results in a change in the frequency of occurance of certain genes over time within a population – more of some genes, fewer of others. Change of this sort, and their manifold consequences as the generations come and go, constitute the definition of evolution. In summary, evolution is a change of gene frequency braught about by natural selection (differential reproduction) and other processes acting upon the variations produced by sexual reproduction, mutation, and other mechanisms. The environment is the selecting agent, and because the environment changes over time and from one region to another, different variants will be selected under different environmental conditions. The Canada of the ice age was a different environment than the Canada of today.
--Tim M. Berra (1990)

In the Beginning
      How did the universe begin? Who decided on the planets, the sun and moon, the stars, the earth? How are our seas and continents made – and why? Who created the millions of plants, insects, birds, fish and animals that live on earth.
      Since the human race itself began, we have tried to find answers to questions such as these. Modern scientists say that the universe resulted from enormous explosions in space, or from a process as gradual and purposeful as water wearing away a stone, they say that life on earth began with a chance chemical reaction at the one moment when conditions were exactly right, and from that single accident all plants and animals (including ourselves) evolved. But as well as scientific explanations there are others, stories made up and handed down for thousands of years, growing ever more fanciful and detailed on the way.
      Creation-stories were told in every human settlement on earth, from Austrailia to the grass-plains of America, from the lush tropical islands to the glaciers and volcanoes of Iceland. Each of the fourteen stories in this book is a different account of the same events, suited to the climate and lifestyle of the people who first told it…
--Helen Cherry and Kenneth McLeish (1984)