Michael Pitt Quotes
I'm a closeted nerd. I studied Richard Dawkins. I watched every lecture. He's sort of the leading scientific atheist of our time. He's very provocative. His whole thing is science over spirituality.
Radish, Christina. "Michael Pitt Talks I ORIGINS, Approaching the Science, His Own Spiritual Beliefs, Finding Out if He'd Have to Wear Contacts, and HANNIBAL." Collider, 17 July 2014.
Sometimes misquoted as “If there is no God, everything is permitted.”
This is an important quotation for several reasons. First, it demonstrates the extreme diversity of religion in America. To Swaggart, Evolution is a “Satanic Theory”. However, to most American religious leaders, Evolution, per se, is not problematic. The Roman Catholic Church has no trouble with Evolution; Catholic Universities teach Evolution as a basic part of their science curricula. Jews have no theological problems with Evolution. None of the main-line Protestant Churches have any theological opposition to Evolution per se. Yet there are other Protestant denominations who find that Evolution is in contradiction to a literal interpretation of the Bible and hence do not accept it. Second, it shows the extreme level of vituperation and disrespect that is given differing points of view by some of the extreme fundamentalists who do not have the traditional American religious tolerance for differing belief structures. Here Swaggart accuses the hundreds of millions of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist and other clerics and laypeople who see Evolution as a well-established explanation of much of science, of being not only atheists but atheists in league with the Devil. A third factor is that this quotation is an example of a Minister telling people what is or is not science and scientifically demonstrated. If a scientist without any religious training of study were ever to render judgments on theology, most of us would laugh and see it as ridiculous. However when a cleric like Swaggert, untutored and ignorant of even basic science, makes scientific pronouncements, he (and many other fundamentalists) find that reasonable.
While not all scientists are atheists, some are. Haldane was one of the classic atheists who would talk about his religious views publicly.
Scientists themselves contain religious believers as well as atheists and agnostics, While there are a number of scientists who argue against religion, there are many who do not and are believers. Albert Einstein, for example, was a believer in a universal God. See {631763}.
Michael Carmen Pitt is an American actor, model, and musician. Pitt is known in film for his roles in Murder by Numbers (2002), Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003), Gus Van Sant's Last Days (2005), and Michael Haneke's Funny Games (2007), and in television for his roles as Henry Parker in the teen drama Dawson's Creek (1999–2000), Jimmy Darmody in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (2010–2011), and Mason Verger in the second season of the NBC series Hannibal (2014). He has also appeared in the films Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Bully (2001), Silk (2007), Seven Psychopaths (2012), I Origins (2014), and Ghost in the Shell (2017).
