Dan Barker Theism Quotations

You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time, but I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime.

It turns out that the word atheism means much less than I had thought. It is merely the lack of theism.

Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god - both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

Some theists, observing that all 'effects' need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.

I took about a year to fully adjust. Like there's a death at the family or a divorce, you don't just snap your fingers and it's over.

Prayer never changes the laws of nature.

It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions.

If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?

If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.

Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.

I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.