Religion is a Mental Illness

Science has carried us to the gateway to the universe. And yet our conception of our surroundings remains the disproportionate view of the still-small child. We are spiritually and culturally paralyzed, unable to face the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find our actual place in the fabric of nature. We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go. That we even do science is a hopeful glimmer of mental health. However, it's not enough merely to accept these insights intellectually while we cling to a spiritual ideology that is not only rootless in nature but also, in many ways, contemptuous of what is natural. Carl believed that our best hope of preserving the exquisite fabric of life on our world would be to take the revelations of science to heart. -- Ann Druyan, "The Varieties of Scientific Experience, A Personal View of the Search for God"

“It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can't give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality.” -- Ann Druyan, on her late husband, Carl Sagan

"The Universe revealed by science is one of far more awesome grandeur than any religion has ever posited." -- Ann Druyan

“For most of the history of our species, we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.”

-- Ann Druyan

"I don't have any faith, but I have a lot of hope, and I have a lot of dreams of what we could do with our intelligence if we had the will and the leadership and the understanding of how we could take all of our intelligence and our resources and create a world for our kids that is hopeful."

-- Ann Druyan, Cosmos co-creator

"I held Carl's Hand as he died and I looked at him and he smiled and I said 'Goodbye, Carl.' And he said 'Goodbye, Ann.' And he closed his eyes and he died. We knew as we said those words we were never going to see one another again, and it was okay. It was very sad. But it was okay."

-- Carl Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan

“An immortal Creator is a cruel God, because he, never having to face the fear of death, creates innumerable creatures who do."

-- Ann Druyan

“Science is a way to keep from fooling ourselves... 

... and each other.”

-- Ann Druyan, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey