Please don’t take the above to condone the attitude that feeling something makes it true (the fallacy of emotional reasoning).
Or consider this Julian Baggini quote: “Goblins, hobbits… God is just one of the things that atheists don’t believe in, it just happens to be the thing that, for historical reasons, gave them their name.” Actually, no.In this sense, I feel that Montaigne’s quote above throws the baby out with the bathwater.A favorite of mine, in a similar vein to the Seneca the Younger quote: “If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods, that fancy enthusiasm or deceit adorned them, that weakness worships them, that credulity preserves them, and that custom respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests.” -Baron d’Holbach “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” -Galileo …Although ambiguous, it is provocative considering yet another quote by a mind of approximately equal influence…But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” This one is my own: ” God does not work in mysterious ways – he works in ways that are indistinguishable from his non-existence” I like these too: “God is infinite: an infinite amount of nonsense one can know about nothing.” -?“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr.