Overheard

I don't think Shakespeare believed in heaven or hell anymore than I do. I don't believe in an afterlife.

Novelist and freethinker Kurt Vonnegut
Feb. 13, 1945 - April 11, 2007
Speech, UW-Madison, Sept. 22, 2003
The Capital Times, Madison, Wis.
April 12, 2007

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' "

"Mr. Rosewater" alter ego
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine
By Kurt Vonnegut (1965 novel)

The policy from the White House has been to allocate funds to religious institutions, even those that channel those funds exclusively to their own particular group of believers in a particular religion. As a traditional Baptist, I've always believed in separation of church and state and honored that premise when I was president, and so have all other presidents, I might say, except this one.

Fmr. Pres. Jimmy Carter
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
May 19, 2007

In these books [the Old Testament] there are the warrants for genocide, for slavery, for the torture of children, for genital mutilation, for annexation, for rape and all the rest of it. . . . Look through the Hubble Telescope if you want to see something that's awe-inspiring; don't look to bloodstained old myths.

Christopher Hitchens
Debating Al Sharpton
New York Times, May 7, 2007

Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.

Rosie O'Donnell
Departing "The View" host
Associated Press, April 26, 2007

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide 'Christian leadership to change the world,' boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda--which is very different from simply being people of faith--is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It's also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.

But this conspiracy is no theory.

Columnist Paul Krugman
New York Times, April 13, 2007

I am an atheist and a professor at Virginia Tech. Dinesh D'Souza says that I don't exist, that I have nothing to say, that I am nowhere to be found.

We atheists do not believe in gods, or angels, or demons, or souls that endure, or a meeting place after all is said and done where more can be said and done and the point of it all revealed. We don't believe in the possibility of redemption after our lives, but the necessity of compassion in our lives. We believe in people, in their joys and pains, in their good ideas and their wit and wisdom. We believe in human rights and dignity, and we know what it is for those to be trampled on by brutes and vandals. We may believe that the universe is pitilessly indifferent but we know that friends and strangers alike most certainly are not. We despise atrocity, not because a god tells us that it is wrong, but because if not massacre then nothing could be wrong.

"Mapantsula"
Dailykos.com, April 19, 2007

Japan is the world's leading, truly secular democracy. I always personally felt that, in this respect, Japan stood as a beacon to the rest of the world: a country that could develop within a democratic system without the mumbo-jumbo of the god-botherers and faith-pushers, free of the rhetoric of moralistic do-gooders with immoral ulterior motives.

But something is changing Japan, leading its people once again into a pseudo-spiritual state of being. That something is the lofty-sounding but very dangerous rhetoric of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Japan.

Roger Pulvers
"Perish the thought that Japan may have god on its side"
The Japan Times, Jan. 14, 2007

In Their Own Words

Those that really believe in God will defeat him [Mormon presidential contender Mitt Romney] anyway, so don't worry about that--that's a temporary situation.

Rev. Al Sharpton
Debate with Christopher Hitchens
New York Sun, May 9, 2007

Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.

Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui
Videotaped manifesto
New York Times, April 19, 2007

Freedom of religion should not be mistaken for freedom from religion, and I want to thank the more than 100 members of the Texas House who voted to give religious expression in our schools the same protection as secular expression [after Texas House passed a bill to let student speakers sermonize during school football games, graduation, etc].

Texas Gov. Rick Perry
San Antonio Express-News
May 1, 2007