Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition |
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time. |
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander. |
I am the beneficiary of a lucky break in the genetic sweepstakes. |
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. |
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. |
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. |
I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books. |
I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice as to how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and that it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' And Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.' |
I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending. |
I sit here and think, with more than a little astonishment, that I have been writing and publishing Science Fiction now for just three-eighths of a century. This isn't bad for someone who only admits to being in his late youth- or a little over thirty, if pinned down. |
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die. |
If I am right, then [religious fundamentalists] will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If THEY are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites. |
If I could trace my origins to Judas Maccabaeus or King David, that would not add one inch to my stature. It may well be that many East European Jews are descended from Khazars, I may be one of them. Who knows? And who cares? |
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. |