By the way, I didn’t want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur’an and The God Delusion. They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity’s knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

Second, from The Meming of Life post on Obama’s atheist mother:

So thank you, Ann, from all the nonreligious parents following in your footsteps. We now have a resounding answer for those who would question whether we can raise ethical, caring kids without religion:

Yes We Can.

God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is.
–Douglas Adams

“It makes no sense whatsoever that an infinite, omnipotent god would need to incarnate himself as a human and then subject himself to an agonizing and bloody death just so he could persuade himself to forgive us and save us from the cruel fate he created for us. It makes even less sense that the all-wise creator of the universe would manifest himself in an isolated corner of the world during a primitive age of its history, teach proverbs identical to those of the other belief systems of the day, promise to return quickly to destroy the world, and then vanish utterly for a span of time now going on two thousand years, leaving behind no trace except for a few hazy memories and anonymous writings that he had ever been here at all. These are the irrational and nonsensical claims that truly deserve to be investigated and subjected to critical inquiry.”

Robert A. Heinlein, quoted in “2000 Years of Disbelief,” James A. Haught, ed.

“The great religious traditions do not have a monopoly on addressing the most fundamental and challenging issues. They share that honour with the secular, philosophical tradition. And one advantage of a more philosophical approach to such questions (which certainly doesn’t rule out religious answers, of course) is that it doesn’t prejudge the issue. Rather than approaching such questions in a genuinely critical, open-minded way, religious enquirers have sometimes already made up their minds: they’ve already decided that only a religious answer will do.”

Stephen Law, The War for Children’s Minds (p. 135)

I see religious people as illogical by definition.
Doing things to please a non-existent cloud being is hardly rational.

All atheists wants to do is eradicate the crazy notion that God wants us
to do X and Y and we’ll burn in hell for eternity (Thanks God!) if we disobey him.

To me, atheists just want more science and logic in our lives.
We see no difference in praying and asking a Magic 8 Ball for guidance.

When a plane crashes and 290 of the 300 people die, religious people say
“God must’ve had a plan for those ten people,” but an athieist wonders why
they don’t say, “God must have wanted those 290 people dead,”

When you see religiously-insane, Oklahoma handjobs handling rattlesnakes,
don’t you say to yourself, “How stupid and illogical can some people be?”
That’s how we see all religious people – as snake handlers without the danger.

I’ll bet you think it’s crazy for Muslims to expect 72 virgins in their afterlife,
but you see it as rational that God will welcome you to his giant cloud city?

To me, that’s as rational as “Step on a crack, break your Momma’s back.”
No matter how many cracks you step on, your Momma’s back will be just fine.

The best way out of this is everybody gets to believe whatever they want
but
we shouldn’t saddle future generations with the crazy idea that there is a God.

Like racism, religion needs to be fazed out.
I chose to follow logic and common sense and I invite you to join me.

“ . . . my answer to the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is akin to the answer I would give to the question ‘What is the meaning of such and such a book?’ The meaning of a book is to be found in the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, and the chapters it contains. Likewise, the meaning of life is to be found in the meaningful moments, episodes, and achievements that occur within our brief appearance here on earth. A book doesn’t lack meaning because it comes to an end on the last page. Nor do our lives lack meaning because they come to an end when all neural activity ceases.”
-Raymond Bradley

Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity’s knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

– PZ Myers, The Great Desecration