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Aron Ra
190 quotes
“Your greatest strength, Ray, and possibly your only strength, is in pretending that you don't understand simple things.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Radio Paul's Radio Rants (September 17th, 2012)
“I would say the better part of my family identifies as Mormon or they identify as Christian – not that that’s a different thing because all of them identify as Christian because they all think that Mormon is Christian, just like every Mormon seemingly does. It is just other denominations that don’t think Mormons are Christians, just like they don’t think Catholics are Christian. This was an advantage for me growing up. I got to see the interdenominational bigotry within Christianity.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“People that make up stuff and call it truth have the power to imagine all kinds of nonsense. But that’s what it is all about. It really is make believe, and it took me the longest time to figure that out. I thought, honestly, naively, even into middle age. I was in my 30s before I realised there were some people who do not believe what they do for a reason.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“Let’s think hypothetically”, I said to someone, which is another thing the believers can’t really do, because that is kind of what they’re already doing. It destroys the self-made illusion to step in and jack that up with another illusion, even for a moment.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“There are so many people who tell me, “if I had a time machine and could prove that Jesus never rose from the dead”, with the admission that “I hope my faith and I are strong enough that I can keep on believing, even when my eyes tell me otherwise.” That’s make-believe! That’s lying to yourself. That’s the entirety of what religion is.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“Truth is really whatever can be shown to correspond to reality. Truth is what the facts are essentially. Facts are after all points of data that you can verify to be accurate. A lot of people hate these definitions because it completely undermines their theology. They can’t make the assertions that they want to by saying anything is the absolute truth, because under the definition of either word no you don’t!”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“I can show you the truth of evolution. I can show you the facts of evolution. I can show you the positively indicative and physical evidence that is exclusively concordant with one conclusion over any other. I can do that all day, but religion can’t. No religion can because they’re all just made up. They don’t have any truth at all in them, none of them. The best that you can get out of people is that they can give anecdotal nonsense or will cite logical fallacies or they will say, “Somebody wrote once that there were Christians back in the 1st century and that means Jesus existed.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“There is no question on whether the prophets existed. We are talking about whether the religions they invented were true. Can you show me the truth of that? Of course, they can’t. None of them can. They don’t want to. They don’t need to. I have seen people make that admission too.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“When people use religion as their only reason for whatever laws they want to impose of people or on other things, these are always mostly unjust.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“Think about every example, every time someone comes up with religion as the reason why they want to impose it. It is always stupid. It is always imposing bigotry or limitations against somebody else’s freedom because you want to pretend in your special brand of pixie dust that is different from the gods and monsters other people want to make up. That’s what it is all about. There is simply no true religion because literally none of it is true.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“Blasphemy is not a crime. It’s a right. It needs to be exercised. We have the right not to believe lies. That’s important. Freedom of religion means freedom from religion as well. You can’t have freedom to practice your religion if you’re not free from the dominant religion. It is basic sense.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“The pledges come from a believers’ standpoint. The country needs to earn the support of its citizenry. You can’t extort it. You can’t get people indoctrinated by always saying every morning before class where they’ll never question what you’ll do.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“In a sense, the American Dream was foreigners could come to this country and, through hard work, they could be successful, make a new start, and realise and fulfil their dream despite their caste or their religion in their homelands. So Trump erected a system that denies them all of that. A system that sets castes, restricts religion, prohibits foreigners, and breaks all of the groundwork for small business, and for them to be able to do anything.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“I am supportive of people. I am supportive of the American Dream Trump is trying to destroy. I want them to understand. Regardless of your religion, you don’t get special privileges because you claim to believe something different from everybody else. You don’t get special privileges because you get to claim that you believe the same things as the majority.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)
“You’re not immortal, you’re not eternal and to believe otherwise is to diminish everything that you really have. Life is precious because it is short and there is nothing after it. There is no purpose and there is no destiny beyond anything you give it yourself. If you want your life to mean something try making someone else’s life meaningful. - “Give the Devil His Due”, 1st November 2014,”
“Let’s forget for the moment the generalizations about what the Muslim religion as a whole had to do with September 11th. How did anyone ever get the idea that Hinduism had anything to do with that whatsoever? And how is it that no one in this country can tell a Muslim or a Hindu apart from a Sikh? How do these people justify their own senseless stupidity? It pains me that our paranoid reactionary religiously-bigoted society produces people of such stark hatred and bewildering inanity.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kill ‘em all; let God sort ‘em out.", Patheos (December 30, 2012)
“I’m gonna miss the old sith lord. He was the best pope atheists could hope for. He started out as a Hitler youth actually wearing a Nazi uniform. As a Cardinal, he famously conspired to conceal sex crimes against children for the sake of the church. As pope, he addressed an audience in an AIDS ravaged area of Africa, and told them that use of condoms actually increased risk of STDs. His objection to birth-control took precedence over human life. That is how evil he is.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pope Palpatine", originally at Patheos (February 12, 2013)
“The idea that certain races (or species) are ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ was not Darwin’s idea but the universal language of all prior naturalists since forever. Darwin acknowledges this, but does not contribute to it, other than to suggest that Caucasians are not the ultimate form of mankind.”
Aron Ra (born 1962) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Darwin’s view of the ‘races’ of men", originally at Patheos (January 1, 2015)
“It doesn’t matter what our out-dated, hate-filled, prejudicial doctrines and man-made mythologies might have said. There is no such thing as a ‘religion of peace’. Religion only knows how to react violently because they don’t understand reason and have never practiced tolerance. That’s why secular humanist diplomats will be necessary in order to end wars and other violations of human rights.”
“It seems that religion only knows how to react violently, out of vengeance. Again this is because it’s a belief system rooted in dichotomy and bigotry, with little or no desire to consider extenuating circumstances and NO ability to question itself objectively.”
“Despite the severity of their punishments, religions have still consistently failed in virtually all attempts to curtail criminal behavior, and have in fact actually empowered or promoted criminality in many ways. More reasonable laws are usually more effective.”
“Religion doesn’t solve the problem of rape at all; it exacerbates it. It should be (and in some atheist societies, it is this way) that women could walk about scantily-clad or even nude, and that men would have respect or sanity enough not to be violent against them on such paltry excuses as a lack of human decency or self control. I mean, you don’t bludgeon children to death when someone’s kid is crying loudly and annoying you, right? So why would you victimize a woman just because you find her attractive? That’s sick, but that is the attitude that is typically perpetuated by religion.”
“Now I would say that any honest earnest quest for truth must begin with the abandonment of faith. Are you prepared to lie in order to maintain your self-induced delusion? Or are you bold enough to question your own convictions and even test them to find out if they’re true, and discard them if they are not? That’s the rift. That’s the difference between us.”
“There is nothing reasonable about faith. Those two words mean completely opposite things. Putting them together creates an oxymoron, That’s why William Lyin’ Craig thought it would make a clever book title. Faith is an unreasonable conviction which is assumed without reason and defended against all reason. That’s why faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have. It really is!”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe; all that matters is why you believe it, and how accurate you can show your beliefs to be.”
“Unsupported assertions of impossible absurdities are indistinguishable from the illusions of delusion, and no one should believe anything that requires faith. Because faith requires that we believe without question, without reservation, without reason. That is irrational, foolish; that’s what a fool is. Your Bible got it wrong. Any assertion that requires faith should be rejected for that reason.”
“The supposedly sacred fables in the Bible describe God as creating evil intentionally, of consorting with evil, being compelled by evil, and of gambling with the devil -with human suffering as the desired outcome. In fact, God is depicted as being almost entirely evil himself, throughout the entire cluster of repugnant horror stories.”
“I wasn’t really a fan of kaiju, (giant Japanese monsters) only Godzilla himself. He was my hero as a boy, and even now his roar has been my only ring tone any of the cell phones I have ever had.”
“I like Godzilla as much as the next guy. No, I like Godzilla more than the next guy! Since I was a little kid, I watched all those absurd rubber-suit movies thinking how cool it would be if we remade Gojira as a big budget block-buster. They failed to do that in 1985, when they brought back Raymond Burr. They failed to do that in 1998, with Tristar’s GINO (Godzilla In Name Only) and I’m sorry to say that they failed again with the latest attempt.”
“If you can’t give me any reason to believe you, then I have no reason to believe you. Come back when you can show me you’ve got something to consider.”
“[Religion] is predominantly evil and entirely deceitful, has only negative correlations statistically, and is frequently maliciously abusive physically mentally and emotionally. It has historically always obstructed education and retarded or impeded progress in whatever application it has ever touched. All the worst atrocities in history were done in the name of religion and our greatest advances were made in opposition to it. I’m an antitheist because religion is factually historically ethically and morally wrong.”
“There are no special attributes to distinguish Christianity from any other collection of baseless lies. If there were no Christians tomorrow, we’d still have Muslims and a slough of other indefensible belief systems.”
“[Religion] is literally a delusion, but one caused by conditioning rather than pathology. There are a number of studies showing a negative correlation of faith as debilitating certain areas of the brain. So religion can lead to, conceal, or even encourage mental disorders without actually being one itself.”
“Asking for the meaning of life is no different than a fortune teller casting tea leaves, chicken bones, or Tarot cards, then looking at the random mess they created and wondering what that means. Abrahamic religion offers no purpose either, apart from a Stockholm syndrome, because the best you can hope for is to be imprisoned by an indomitable despot and have to press your lips to his colon for the rest of eternity –or else suffer a fate worse than death. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
“Personally I think the only meaning your life will ever have is whatever your involvement means to someone else. The best strategy I think, if you want your life to mean something, try making someone else’s life meaningful. But if you want your life to mean something five billion years from now, it won’t –no matter what. Sorry. But what matters now still matters now.”
“For me to believe in God would probably require blunt force trauma to the brain, or perhaps a debilitating cognitive disorder. What would it take for you to believe that the myth of Persephone explains the seasons? Or that babies are delivered by a stork?”
“A society run by reasonable, rational, educated, objective, skeptical people who know that actions work and prayer doesn’t –would tend to be atheist. We’ve already seen the world run by Christians. Whenever religion has had rule over law, the result has historically always been an automatic violation of human rights and an attack on factual education. So yeah, any Utopia would have to be humanist.”
“[In the Qur’an] faith is still defined the same as in the Bible, a belief in what is not seen. This explains why the remaining scripture relies on the logical fallacy of the circular argument routing back to the assumed conclusion. There is nothing that is indicated by evidence, nothing that is verifiably correct, just empty assertions of impossible nonsense that you’re supposed to swallow without question simply because it says so.”
“[According to the Qur’an] God will punish me for not believing even though it is his fault that I don’t believe. God doesn’t need to seal my heart and my ears or cover my eyes. How about providing something that I could see or hear that would actually indicate a god? Why does God demand faith in lieu of evidence? I think it’s not just that there is no evidence, but that the reason there isn’t is because there is no god either.”
“If you say you believe in God, but you don’t really believe in God, then how you could you possibly be trying to fool God? Wouldn’t you have to believe there is a god if you’re going to try and deceive him? And what is the deception? Are you trying to trick God into thinking you believe in him? If you don’t believe in God then that’s not even possible. So already the Qur’an reveals sufficient absurdity to prove that it cannot have been authored by any god. Seriously, could this be any less ridiculous if it were written in Arabic?”
“According to mainstream non-religious sources, a fool is one who too readily accepts improbable assertions from questionable sources on insufficient evidence. So it is no wonder that the Bible and the Qur’an both use the opposite definition, so that the wise are called foolish and only fools are wise. By definition, one would have to be a fool to be fooled by either book. As for “putting things right”, the only way to do that is to identify unsupported assertions and examine what the facts really indicate, and that always goes against faith.”
“So the failure of scripture to describe anything accurately is obfuscated by assuming the conclusion with confirmation bias. Once again it is God who leads the unbelievers astray, and not their desire to understand the world as it is. And even though several of the world’s richest and most successful, and even the most charitable people are unbelievers, they are still considered losers. Of course the Qur’an is wrong about all these things, and I’m glad to be back in a country where I am allowed to say that. But those are the sort of lies that religion needs to sell itself.”
“It is important to note that humans are a subset of apes, being members of the taxonomic superfamily Hominoidea. This is no arbitrary classification, but one that is objectively verifiable through phylogenetics. This is a fact that can be proven regardless what you would rather believe. Yet no religion either accounts for this fact nor even acknowledges it, as it stands against all their collective mythology.”
“Imagine that you are the creator of the universe. What message would you impart to your people? Whatever your answer, this wouldn’t be it. If one could read a passage like this and imagine that these are the words of an actual deity and an infallible genius, then I don’t think I could reach such a person to reason with them. I could only pity them. (The reference is to verses 67-70)”
“If you can’t show that it’s true, then you can’t call it truth. Knowledge is similar to truth in that it a justified belief. Knowledge is demonstrable and testable with measurable accuracy. If you can’t demonstrate your knowledge to any degree at all by any means whatsoever then you don’t actually know what you think you do, no matter how convinced of it you are. Without evidentiary support, then it is only an empty assertion unworthy of serious consideration.”
“So do something that would have worked anyway whether God is real or not, and then simply assume that it worked because God is real. Of course. That’s religious logic for you.”
“We ‘unbelievers’ are not a threat; we offer help. Whoever comes away from delusion will be better off. Just ask some of those who already have. They’ll be happy to help you.”
“There can be no benefit of an exorcism. It’s not like there could ever be an instance where an actual demon is involved, and a priest would be helpless even in that situation if there were any reality to that. Even if there were some placebo effect to the ritual, it still encourages belief in things that would still persist in the imagination and thus never be fully cured even in the mind of believers. And if the problem stems from any sort of actual mental disorder, then the ritual only postpones or replaces actual medical attention.”
“I’ve never heard of any skeptic being exorcised with the intent of debunking the practice. But it sounds like a good idea, and I think I would be an ideal candidate to do that –since believers often think I look scary anyway.”
“I have encountered devil worshippers and even interviewed one on my podcast. They are not representative of Satanism. The Satanic Temple, for example, is entirely atheist, Satanists may be hedonists and may not necessarily be scientifically literate scholarly skeptics. So Satanists are not representative of atheists either. But I applaud them because the Satanic Temple has been very proficient in their defence of secular politics, much more so than typical science advocates who aren’t Satanic. Nobody cares what the nerds say. But when the Satanists speak up, then believers listen.”