Atheism Quotes - Page 3

The greatest admission a human can make is that perhaps he does not have the intelligence, the vision, the grasp to fully understand the universe, and that perhaps no human ever will. To put it all down to some omnipotent deity is a cop-out. Factor in fairy tales of an afterlife and it becomes a comforting cop-out.

Neal Asher

I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

William F. Buckley Jr.

A few years ago the Deists denied the inspiration of the Bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time they worshiped what they were pleased to call the God of Nature. Now we are convinced that Nature is as cruel as the Bible; so that, if the God of Nature did not write the Bible, this God at least has caused earthquakes and pestilence and famine, and this God has allowed millions of his children to destroy one another. So that now we have arrived at the question -- not as to whether the Bible is inspired and not as to whether Jehovah is the real God, but whether there is a God or not.

Robert G. Ingersoll

I always got a bit pissed off with those broadsheet sceptics who make their living being passionately angry about homeopathy, God, synchronicity or whatever, because it's as if they can't get past their emotions, and in their rage they become as faith-driven as the beliefs they criticise. I always said they give scientists a bad name. After all, science has to be about asking unthinkable questions, not closing down debate.

Scarlett Thomas

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Stephen Greenblatt

My name is Matt Besser, and I'm an Arkansas Razorback. My father is a Jew from Little Rock, Ark., my mother was a Christian from Harrison, Ark., and somehow I'm an atheist now living in L.A. I am a Razorback living in the Razorback diaspora.

Matt Besser

I have a firm belief in such things as, you know, the water, the Earth, the trees and sky. And I'm wondering, it is increasingly difficult to find those elements in nature, because it's nature I believe in rather than some spiritual thing.

Bill Blass

I was brought up Catholic. I'm lapsed. From the age of three I was with the nuns. Now I'm an atheist.

Paul Bettany

I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief....And supposedly 95% of Americans say they believe in God - that's worrying....Religions are Trojan horses which conceal profoundly strange psychopathy strains. There's no other explanation for them. The sheer fear of death has been the main engine of religions for a very long time.

J.G. Ballard

I think there is a puritanical wind that is blowing. I have never seen such a lack of separation between church and state in America, I don’t believe in God, but if I did I would say that sex is a Godgiven right. Otherwise it’s the end of our species.

Kevin Bacon

It is odd that the Bible says, ‘God created man,’ whereas it is the other way round: man has created God. It is odd that the Bible says, ‘The body is mortal, the soul is immortal,’ whereas even here the contrary is true: the body (its matter) is eternal; the soul (the form of the body) is transitory.

Béla Bartók

One of the first unanswerable questions I asked was when I was eight years old. Some cousins of mine always said a prayer before eating: God is kind, God is good, And we thank him For our food.At that time we always heard the children in Europe were starving, therefore we should not waste any food. Two questions arose in my mind. First, what I knew about poetry was that it had to rhyme, and 'food' and 'good' didn't rhyme, so I always said 'Fud' with a silent sneer, and made it rhyme.Second: I once asked my aunt if god is good and we thank him for our Fud, why are the kids in Europe starving? I asked her if the kids in Europe were all bad. I remember her saying, 'Be thankful that you have food,' but, of course, she couldn't deal with the rest of it.I never accepted religion so I had nothing to reject as such. The history of 'Christiansanity' (my own coinage of which I am proud!) is so brutal of mind, emotions, freedom, progress, science, and all that I hold precious, that by any standards of justice its leaders in almost any given period would be incarcerated for life, or worse!

Madison Arnold

But the question is, historically, part of the group that you're a part of - whether it's racial, gender, religious, whatever - how has your group fared historically? The groups that you're a part of? Like, for me, as an atheist, Jew, I'm gonna go on, uh - oh and Emma Goldman is one of my great heroes and I really think that anarchism is a fantastic principle by which to fashion a utopian society even if we can't get there. Like historically, that does not go well.

Jacob Appelbaum

After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

Russell Baker

Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?

Peter Atkins

Well it's fairly straightforward: there isn't one [a god]. And there's no evidence for one, no reason to believe that there is one, and so I don't believe that there is one. And I think that it is rather foolish that people do think that there is one.

Peter Atkins

Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.

Uri Avnery

We're surrounded by people who don’t make that distinction. If you say to them ‘there’s a monster living in my closet, you can’t see him, but you gotta have faith that he’s there’ people would say ‘well that’s ridiculous, you’re out of you’re mind, you should be locked up’ but the same thing does not apply to a guy living on a cloud... We suspend our powers of logic.

Seth Mcfarlane

If Heaven actually exists, I don't need anyone to be my real estate broker. After all, what is religion but an attempt to sell you a share in the ultimate gated community?

Quentin R. Bufogle

I am an atheist, a rationalist and a humanist.

Pierre Berton

Until I was twenty I was sure there was a being who could see everything I did and who didn't like most of it. He seemed to care about minute aspects of my life, like on what day of the week I ate a piece of meat. And yet, he let earthquakes and mudslides take out whole communities, apparently ignoring the saints among them who ate their meat on the assigned days. Eventually, I realized that I didn't believe there was such a being. It didn't seem reasonable. And I assumed that I was an atheist.As I understood the word, it meant that I was someone who didn't believe in a God; I was without a God. I didn't broadcast this in public because I noticed that people who do believe in a god get upset to hear that others don't. (Why this is so is one of the most pressing of human questions, and I wish a few of the bright people in this conversation would try to answer it through research.)But, slowly I realized that in the popular mind the word atheist was coming to mean something more - a statement that there couldn't be a God. God was, in this formulation, not possible, and this was something that could be proved. But I had been changed by eleven years of interviewing six or seven hundred scientists around the world on the television program Scientific American Frontiers. And that change was reflected in how I would now identify myself.The most striking thing about the scientists I met was their complete dedication to evidence. It reminded me of the wonderfully plainspoken words of Richard Feynman who felt it was better not to know than to know something that was wrong.

Alan Alda

Upon the shadowy shore of death the sea of trouble casts no wave. Eyes that have been curtained by the everlasting dark, will never know again the burning touch of tears. Lips touched by eternal silence will never speak again the broken words of grief. Hearts of dust do not break. The dead do not weep. Within the tomb no veiled and weeping sorrow sits, and in the rayless gloom is crouched no shuddering fear.I think of those I have loved and lost as having returned to earth, as having become a part of the elemental wealth of the world – I think of them as unconscious dust, I dream of them as gurgling in the streams, floating in the clouds, bursting in the foam of light upon the shores of worlds...

Robert G. Ingersoll

If you describe yourself as "Atheist," some people will say, "Don't you mean 'Agnostic'?" I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god - in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It's easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it's an opinion I hold seriously. It's funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague wishy-washy Agnosticism - both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much.

Douglas Adams

I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.

Darren Aronofsky

The Oracle pursued a logical course of confuting theism, and leaving 'a-theism' the negative result. It did not, in the absurd terms of common religious propaganda, 'deny the existence of God.' It affirmed that God was a term for an existence imagined by man in terms of his own personality and irreducible to any tenable definition. It did not even affirm that 'there are no Gods'; it insisted that the onus of proof as to any God lay with the theist, who could give none compatible with his definitions.

J.M. Robertson

It hurts so badly when you grow up and understand that everything you believed in and devoted yourself were just fallacy and stupidity.

M.F. Moonzajer

How you can argue with those who whip, stone and murder people because they wanted to live their life?

M.F. Moonzajer

Religion has kept all of us suffocated, I can’t raise my voice you can’t raise your voice, still they call us fundamentalists.

M.F. Moonzajer

If you look up 'atheism' in the dictionary, you will probably find it defined as the belief that there is no God. Certainly many people understand atheism in this way. Yet many atheists do not, and this is not what the term means if one considers it from the point of view of its Greek roots. In Greek 'a' means 'without' or 'not' and 'theos' means 'god.' From this standpoint an atheist would simply be someone without a belief in God, not necessarily someone who believes that God does not exist. According to its Greek roots, then, atheism is a negative view, characterized by the absence of belief in God.

Michael Martin

After debating with a religious scholar you leave the room but suddenly you are pushed and about to hit the ground. If you fall and hit the ground; they will tell you, you saw the power of God he made you fall and now you are on the ground. If you fall but not hit the ground; they will tell you he just gave you a warning, he pushed you but later stopped you from hitting to ground to prove you his power. If you fall but not hurt; they will tell you, he hit you to the ground and as he is kind he didn’t let you to be hurt. If you fall and hurt; they will tell you, you saw the power of God, how he teaches the hypocrites, he just punished you by hitting you to the ground. If you even didn’t fall and walked away; they will tell everyone, God will show him one day his power; and certainly we all fall one day or another. The foundation of religion is on misbelieve and misunderstanding of the reality of nature and physics; it is not the God that changes things, but the one who takes the credit.

M.F. Moonzajer

Atheism ... goes back to the Ancient Greek (a — a negative prefix, theos — god), evidencing the antiquity of the outlook of those who saw no presence of God (or gods) in their everyday lives, or who even denied the very existence of God (or gods). There are different types of atheism, but atheism in one form or another has existed in every civilization.[T]he concept "atheist" partially coincides with such notions as "skeptic," "agnostic," and "rationalist" and it borders with such notions as "anticlerical," "God fighter" (theomachist), and "God abuser" (blasphemer).It is wrong to identify an atheist as one who denies God, though this is what opponents of atheism usually claim. If such people exist, it would probably be more correct to call them the "verbal" murderers of God, for the prefix a- means denying as elimination. ... I would like to stress that the prefix a- does not necessarily mean rejection. It can mean "absence of." For example, "apathy" means "absence of passion." Thus, the concept "atheist" does not necessarily mean nihilism.

Valerii A. Kuvakin

If the United Nations wants to do something to be remembered forever, I guess that would be freeing people from insanity of religion.

M.F. Moonzajer

Torturing innocents, murdering civilians and destroying public property; they are all the gifts we have been given by religion.

M.F. Moonzajer

In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessings. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.

A.A. Lewis

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. They thrive on servility and shrink before independence. They feed upon worship as kings do upon flattery. That is why the cry of gods at all times is “Worship us or we perish.” A dethroned monarch may retain some of his human dignity while driving a taxi for a living. But a god without his thunderbolt is a poor object.

Chapman Cohen

To understand why I jumped from the Mormon wagon train requires an understanding of what Mormons are and how they think. While Mormons have some quaint, quirky and fanatical ideas, they really aren't much different from millions of poor, guilt-ridden souls who, throughout the march of human history, have hitched their hopes to mass movements of one sort or another. Eric Hoffer, in his brilliant treatise, "The True Believer," explains the attraction of joining a cause: "A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following 'by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated by freeing them from their ineffectual selves--and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole'. "Of all the cults and philosophies that competed in the Graeco-Roman world, Christianity alone developed from its inception a compact organization."Once I realized this, it wasn't much of a leap out of religion altogether once I flew the Mormon coop. I simply wanted to be free from organizational groupthink. I escaped from the stuffy attic of religion's "pray, pay and obey" mentality into journalism's open laboratory of "who, what, where, when and why.

Steve Benson

...The existence or non-existence of an undefined 'god' are quite poin

Herman Bondi

In a society where women are truly equal to men, a kid bred by a theist mother and an atheist father is born an agnostic. In a patriarchal society, the kid is automatically an atheist.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Years ago atheism was an individual phenomenon; today atheism is social, the atheist who once was a curiosity, is now a component part of some of the governments of the world. Once men quarreled because they wanted God worshipped in a certain way; now they quarrel because they do not want God worshipped at all. The wars of religion of the seventeenth century have become the wars against religion of the twentieth century.

Fulton J. Sheen

One of the main reasons and excuses behind every religious failure is a” FALSE PROMISE”.

M.F. Moonzajer

In 1857, Bizet departed for Rome and spent three years there. He studied the landscape, the culture, Italian literature and art. Musically he studied the scores of the great masters. At the end of the first year he was asked to submit a religious work as his required composition. As a self-described atheist, Bizet felt uneasy and hypocritical writing a religious piece. Instead, he submitted a comic opera. Publicly, the committee accepted, acknowledging his musical talent. Privately, the committee conveyed their displeasure. Thus, early in his career, Bizet displayed an independent spirit that would be reflected in innovative ideas in his opera compos

Georges Bizet

At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.

George Bernard Shaw

I am an atheist.

Hans Bethe

(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser)At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was...

Pierre Boulez

[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Jürgen Habermas

I'm an atheist, and I don't have any belief in an afterlife. You could say that I'm resigned to the fact that this wonderful life that we get here is it. And having hit 60, it's a good time to get resigned to these things and not be too nervous or upset - and enjoy what great times one can have.

David Gilmour

Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

Jonathan Haidt

Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution.

Andrew Carnegie

I am not religious in any sense; in fact, I consider myself an atheist.

Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar

I whispered, under my breath, an atheist’s prayer... whatever the hell that is.

William Jiang

I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue.

Richard E. Leakey

Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teaching, and most of these teaching have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas and most of these dogmas have been false.All stories about gods and devils, of heavens and hells, as they do not conform to nature, and are not apparent to sense, should be rejected without consideration. Beyond the universe there is nothing and within the universe the supernatural does not and cannot exist.Of all deceivers who have plagued mankind, none are so deeply ruinous to human happiness as those imposters who pretend to lead by a light above nature.The lips of the dead are closed forever. There comes no voice from the tomb. Christianity is responsible for having cast the fable of eternal fire over almost every grave.

Gratis P. Spencer

I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.

Brian Eno

I guess it's true what they say: if we could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people.

C.J. Anderson

There is no higher authority.

Russell T. Davies

And what hypocrisy it is on the part of our Government to have the Bible in our courts of law for the culprit to take his oath upon and then be tried for the very crimes which the Bible itself sanctions.

Joseph Lewis

Children are born atheists. Then they are indoctrinated and abused by so-called 'God's representatives.' Innocents are scarred emotionally and psychologically by those who are sworn to protect them.

C.J. Anderson

The traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly criticised by philosophers. But the theologian can, if he wishes, accept this criticism. He can admit that no rational proof of God's existence is possible. And he can still retain all that is essential to his position, by holding that God's existence is known in some other, non-rational way. I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another, so that the theologian can maintain his position as a whole only by a much more extreme rejection of reason than in the former case. He must now be prepared to believe, not merely what cannot be proved, but what can be disproved from other beliefs that he also holds.

John Leslie Mackie

Sin? Sin is a delusional sickness spawned to peddle a delusional treatment.

C.J. Anderson

It’s a strange myth that atheists have nothing to live for. It’s the opposite. We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for.

Ricky Gervais

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Atheism Quotes - Page 3

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