Atheism Quotations | Page 5

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

All creeds are fallible and uncertain evidences of evangelical piety.

Nothing is bigger than life. There's nothing noble in death. What's noble about never seeing the sunshine again? What's noble about having your legs and arms blown off? What's noble about being an idiot? What's noble about being blind and deaf and dumb? What's noble about being dead?

I make little distinction betwee those who commit evil and those who stand by and do nothing.

If god wanted people to believe in him, why'd he invent logic then?

It is true that a great deal of the rhetoric of the new atheism is often just the confessional rote of materialist fundamentalism (which, like all fundamentalisms, imagines that in fact it represents the side of reason and truth); but it is also true that the new atheism has sprung up in a garden of contending fundamentalisms.

I waver between a cop-out agnostic and principled atheism

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never heard of it when I started at a rather tender age; I was simply awed by dinosaurs. I thought paleontologists spent their lives digging up bones and putting them together, never venturing beyond the momentous issue of what connects to what. Then I discovered evolutionary theory. Ever since then, the duality of natural history-richness in particularities and potential union in underlying explanation-has propelled me.

... a fortuitous cosmic afterthought.

... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.

The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance).

... no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism.

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

Atheism is really nothing but a sorry litany of non-sequiturs, e.g., if God existed, why do we have all the evil and horrors in the world? But this presupposes that God is all-good, an obvious non-sequitur.

Atheism is rather in the life than in the heart of man

Atheism is a moral position - a rather rigid one, if you've ever read the opinions of its highest-profile espousers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

It's clear from the beginning that this is not a real science discussion. This is a showcase for intelligent design. They have created a straw man. They are trying to make science stand for atheism so they can fight atheism.

It takes a lot of thinking to get to the point where you don't believe, Atheism is a head thing. Women might be more inclined to be involved in something rather than to sit around and talk and talk.

Over our history there are always those who want to take this wall of separation and remove a brick here or there or damage it more than that. I think one has to be vigilant and constantly on the alert.

The mixing of government and religion can be a threat to free government, even if no one is forced to participate.... When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion, it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.

As I’ve said, I’ve never believed in God, which technically makes me an atheist (since the prefix “a” means “not” or “without”). But I have problems with the word “atheism.” It defines what someone is not rather than what someone is. It would be like calling me an a-instrumentalist for Bad Religion rather than the band’s singer. Defining yourself as against something says very little about what you are for.

WHAT WE NEED IN AMERICA TODAY IS A VIGOROUS RETURN TO THE GOD OF OUR FATHERS AND A MOST VIGOROUS DEFENSE AGAINST THE MINION OF GODLESSNESS AND ATHEISM.

Selfishness is the only real atheism.

Dying is not a crime.

But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,' I said. On the contrary - we are found!' said Aesop. But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?' Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood.

The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.

Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its fight channel.

Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.

The efficacy of religion lies precisely in what is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal; its efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion according as it demands more faith - that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the profane mind.

A belief is not true simply because it is useful.

I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job.

We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us.

On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth.

God speaks through me.

We know that men and women can be good without faith. We know that.

Baptists have long upheld the ideal of a free church in a free state. And from the beginning, they believed that forcing a person to worship against his will violated the principles of both Christianity and civility.

The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.

Do people ever reflect, one wonders, that the best way to protect against the penetration of one's secrets by others is to have the minimum of secrets to conceal?

Public schools are where the next generation of leaders are educated and where cultural exchange will take place.

There's a bait and switch going on here because the critics want the textbooks to question whether evolution occurred. And of course they don't because scientists don't question whether evolution occurred.

I think what bothers me so much of the time, is they take the data and theory and distort it. They must know they're distorting.

Science is a limited way of knowing, looking at just the natural world and natural causes. There are a lot of ways human beings understand the universe - through literature, theology, aesthetics, art or music.

You can't really be scientifically literate if you don't understand evolution. And you can't be an educated member of society if you don't understand science.

Addressing the conclusions of The God Delusion point by point with the devastating insight of a molecular biologist turned theologian, Alister McGrath dismantles the argument that science should lead to atheism, and demonstrates instead that Dawkins has abandoned his much-cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism.

There are good reasons to believe in God, including the existence of mathematical principles and order in creation. They are positive reasons, based on knowledge, rather than default assumptions based on a temporary lack of knowledge.

Atheism is rather in the lip, than in the heart of man.

God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it.

It is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

Let us enquire. Who, then, shall challenge the words? Why are they challenged. And by whom? By those who call themselves the guardians of morality, and who are the constituted guardians of religion. Enquiry, it seems, suits not them. They have drawn the line, beyond which human reason shall not pass -- above which human virtue shall not aspire! All that is without their faith or above their rule, is immorality, is atheism, is -- I know not what.

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.

The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests.

My last fear, the fear of God, died with my faith.

It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian 'become an Atheist,' but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pinned his faith to a negation. Such is our anguish of thirst!

We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it.

Beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.

Information doesn't kill you.

You've got to be digging it while it's happening 'cause it just might be a one shot deal.

Whatever you have to do to have a good time, let's get on with it, so long as it doesn't cause a murder.

Well Mike, I'm abnormal.

The last election just laid the foundation of the next 500 years of Dark Ages.

Yeah, I tell them to change the channel if they see some guy in a brown suit with a telephone number at the bottom of the screen asking for money.

Why doncha come on over to the house and I'll show 'em to ya?

My hands are small, but they're not yours, they are my own... I am never broken.

The savages are upon me and I feel my flesh burn beneath the teeth of their indifference.

The thing framed says that nothing framed it; the tongue never made itself to speak, and yet talks against him that did; saying that which is made, is, and that which made it, is not. But this folly is infinite as hell, as much without light or bound as the chaos or the primitive nothing.

Atheism is a cruel long term business, and I have gone through it to the end.

Despair is the only genuine atheism.

Seems as unfounded ... to say there isn't a God as to say there is.

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.

Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.

The separation of Church and State in everything relating to taxation should be absolute.

I'm now a bit anti-Jewish since my last visit to the synagogue, but my atheism does not necessarily reject religion.

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

I don't want them (religious followers) trying to inflict their belief on me.

Religion fosters servility and solipsism.

Atheism, nine times out of ten, is born from the womb of a bad conscience. Disbelief is born of sin, not of reason.

All worry is atheism, because it is a want of trust in God.

The Church does not dictate the policies of the nation. The Church proclaims the truth of God to which all these policies must conform.

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.

I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

Atheism is a theoretical formulation of the discouraged life...

I want to be left alone.

Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

The "Creed of Christendom" is alien to my nature, both emotional and intellectual.

The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.

The cruelty of a Fijian god, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a God who condemns men to tortures which are eternal.

Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.

Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.

Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.

Queegqueg no care what god made him shark ... wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god what made him shark must be one dam Ingin.