Quotes on A/Theism, to help bake my thoughts

"It’s often imagined that nonbelievers like myself must be, in principle, closed to spiritual life. This is not true. You can have a deep spiritual and ethical life without lying to yourself or to your children about the nature of reality, without pretending to know things you do not know. There’s nothing that prevents a nonbeliever from experiencing ecstasy, and self-transcending love, and rapture and awe. In fact there’s nothing that prevents a nonbeliever from going into a cave and practicing meditation for a year, like a proper mystic.What nonbelievers don’t tend to do is make unjustified and unjustifiable claims about the nature of the cosmos, and about the divine origin of certain books on the basis of those experiences. That is a difference worth noticing." --Sam Harris, speaking at Ciudad de las Ideas (Puebla, Mexico, 11/8/2009)

"I have much in common with atheists. What I find time and time again is that the god they’ve rejected is the god I’ve rejected. The god who doesn’t encourage intellectual honesty, the god who doesn’t care about the environment because 'it’s all going to burn'…the god who would condemn billions of people to hell simply because they haven’t said or done the proper ritual that Christians can’t even agree on…Some gods should be rejected." -- Rob Bell

"I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional "opium for the people"—cannot bear the music of the spheres. The Wonder of nature does not become smaller because one cannot measure it by the standards of human moral and human aims." --Albert Einstein, in a 7 August 1941 letter discussing responses to his essay "Science and Religion" (1941)

"I have found no better expression than "religious" for confidence in the rational nature of reality as it is accessible to human reason. Wherever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism. ... I cannot accept your opinion concerning science and ethics or the determination of aims. What we call science has the sole purpose of determining what is. The determining of what ought to be is unrelated to it and cannot be accomplished methodically. Science can only arrange ethical propositions logically and furnish the means for the realization of ethical aims, but the determination of aims is beyond its scope. At least that is the way I see it. " -- Albert Einstein 

"Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don't claim them. Feel the artistry moving through and be silent." --Rumi