PAPAL BULL

Some questions for the Pope on his 2010 visit to the UK, as posed by Peter Tatchell, Philip Pullman, Richard Dawkins, Ben Goldacre and more in New Humanist magazine: http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/2369/an-audience-with-the-pope

QUOTES

"The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a God."  Professor Stephen Hawking

"I believe there is something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government."  Woody Allen

"Do not adjust your tv set. There is a fault in reality." Parisian students, 1968

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin

"If triangles invented a god, they would make him three sided." Baron de Montesquieu

"The Moral Majority is Neither." Graffiti, Melbourne

"Nothing is stranger than the belief that an omnipotent, all-powerful being created the universe 5,000 years ago, and keeps an eye on everything but only gets involved in 'mysterious' ways." Ricky Gervais

"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine."  Patti Smith

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen

"Thank God, I am still an atheist." Luis Bunuel 

"The future is unwritten." Joe Strummer (or possibly, Julien Temple)

"Some are to blame, but all are responsible."  Barack Obama

"I stopped praying on the day when it occurred to me that a church steeple with a lightning rod on top showed an alarming lack of confidence in the whole enterprise."  Victor Lewis-Smith

 "Blasphemy is a victimless crime."  Bumper sticker quoted by Richard Dawkins

"Blessed are the cheesemakers."  Monty Python's Life of Brian

"There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Atheist Bus Campaign, London (see http://www.atheistcampaign.org)

"There's probably no Cod. Now start eating sustainable fish." Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming http://www.sustainweb.org/page.php?id=810

"The bad news is that God does not exist. The good news is that we do not need him." Bus advert banned in Genoa after objections from the Catholic Church.

"Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite." Karl Poppper

"Imagine there's a God." David Byrne

"Heaven and hell are what we create for ourselves, on this planet."  E O Wilson

"The idea of immortality itself survives and spreads because it caters to wishful thinking."  Richard Dawkins

"There is a grandeur in this view of life." Charles Darwin

"The relationship between religion and warfare is similar to the relationship between Ant & Dec - you could have one without the other, but what would be the point?"  Marcus Brigstocke

"If people are not thinking, then we really don't have any future." Vivienne Westwood

"All that is solid melts into air." Karl Marx

"The present order is the disorder of the future." Saint Just

"it is essential to nail one's colours to the mast as a humanist...I embrace the shared glories of humanity's intellectual and spiritual struggle to understand the universe into which we are born with honesty, openness and faith in our own natures." Stephen Fry

"Not even the greatest nonsense is beyond the reach of human invention." Ryszard Kapusckinski

"Hail guest, we ask not what thou art.
If friend, we greet thee hand and heart.
If stranger no longer be.
If foe, our love shall conquer thee." 

Inscription on western pillar, the Pylons, A23, north of Brighton