Atheist Quotes by John Cooper Clarke, Ray Comfort, John Churton Collins, John Updike, Mahatma Gandhi, Friedrich Nietzsche and many others.
I’ve never met a happy atheist.
I am surprised that anyone can profess to be an atheist.
In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends.
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?
It amazes me to find an intelligent person who fights against something which he does not at all believe exists.
After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
Fundamentalism isn’t about religion, it’s about power.
By night an atheist half believes in a God.
What is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?
The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty.
For me, equal citizenship for Muslims, Christians, Jews, Atheists and Agnostics is an indisputable principle. Whoever you are, you should get the same rights with no discussion and no compromise.
Isn’t the essential pillar of Catholicism papal infallibility? Well, then how can the church ever change its mind about anything unless God gets confused one day? Not all religions claim the direct authority of God speaking to their leader. You know, I’m an atheist, but I’m a Puritan atheist.
Atheistic evolution isn’t an intelligent belief, as atheists would have the black community believe.
Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.
The habit of arguing in support of atheism, whether it be done from conviction or in pretense, is a wicked and impious practice.
I believe in the separation of church and state. We all have our own religious beliefs. There are people out there who are atheists, who don’t believe at all. . . . They are citizens of Minnesota, and I have to respect that.
I am circumcised, and I tell you something, I despise it. I despise it. I despise it… I am completely pissed off that I’m circumcised.
I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
The divine is perhaps that quality in man which permits him to endure the lack of God.
I’m not scared of dying, because I’m an atheist. I won’t even know I’m dead. You know why? Because I’ll be fГ№ckin’ dead.
Everybody that is just is called to form part of the Kingdom of Heaven-whether they be Buddhas, Jews, or Atheists-as long as they are good.
Atheists anger doesn’t prove that we’re selfish, or joyless, or miserable. It shows that we have compassion, and a sense of justice. We’re angry because we see terrible harm all around us, and we feel desperately motivated to stop it.
I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.
Then why did you tell me?
The hypocrite, certainly, is a secret atheist; for if he did believe there was a God, he durst not be so bold as to deceive Him to His face.
Even an atheist finds God when they point at what they don’t believe in.
There are atheists and Christians, and there are people in both groups who are a little too heavy-handed.
I am an atheist, and I believe that religion should not be in the classrooms; it has to be in the churches. In the classrooms, you have to form citizenship, not people with religious beliefs, that corresponds to the private sphere.
I’m not an atheist. I do have faith in God. I do not judge people for their faith. I judge people who use religion to hurt people. I don’t believe in a religion that shuns people for their beliefs, or that you should hurt people for their beliefs.
There is in every village a torch – the teacher; and an extinguisher – the priest.
When it comes to God’s existence, I’m not an atheist and I’m not agnostic. I’m an acrostic. The whole thing puzzles me.
Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be.
When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*
I am not an atheist; I believe in God. But my religion ends there. I have my own personal belief system that is so strong it allows me to do what I do. I don’t have to worry about going to Hell because of Slayer, you know? Everyone has a personal belief system and believes in life somehow.
If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon-because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.
The atheist risk everything for the present and the future, on the basis of a belief that we are uncaused by any intelligent being. We just happen to be here. That one is willing to live and die in that belief is a very high price to pay for conjecture.
Gods always behave like the people who make them.
I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator – that’s beyond my conceit.
“I refuse to prove that I exist” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.”
“Oh,” says man, “but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn’t it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don’t. Q.E.D.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
“Oh,” says man, “but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn’t it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don’t. Q.E.D.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
A lot of people, to attack an outspoken atheist, one of the things they’ll do is say, ‘You are as bad as the fundamentalist Christians.’ And my answer is always, ‘I hope so.’
He’s a Catholic, a Hindy, an atheist, a Chein, a Buddhist, a Baptist and a Jew, and he knows, he shouldn’t kill.
The point for me is people who are atheists or are coming from different religious traditions; they are coming from their own sources and specific roots. We should analyze these.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
The 21st century – and the atheists – needs the presence of religion, just as religion must deal with the real challenges and the thinkers of the day in order to sharpen the conscience and the intelligence of those who study the timeless sacred texts in a spirit of responding to the questions of their time.
If there are atheists, who is to be blamed if not the mercenary tyrants of souls who, in revolting us against their swindles, compel some feeble spirits to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
I’m sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don’t think there’s any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.
Some people suggest that a worldview is like a set of glasses that color the way you see the world around you. A Christian interprets the world one way, and an atheist interprets the same world a completely different way since he’s looking through different worldview “glasses.”
I think the neoatheists have set atheism back a few decades. And I’m a self-described atheist.
If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?
…if you ask me whether or not I’m an atheist, I wouldn’t even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I’m supposed not to believe in, and I’ve never seen an explanation.
There are no atheists in the foxholes of Bataan.
All religions are pieced together out of elements which seem so at odds with reason that any intelligence laughs at them.
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no libertarians in financial crises.
If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.
Atheists have just as much of a right to the public discourse as any … people of any religious faith in this country.
There either is a god or there is not; there is a ‘design’ or not.
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
I am an atheist and do not know the meaning of the ‘religious pain’ that is felt by believers of every cast when what they believe in is insulted.
I used to be an atheist until I realized that I was God.
Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
I’ve been an atheist ever since I heard there was only a stairway to heaven
I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That’s me.
I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs.
A man cannot become an atheist merely by wishing it.
From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
I would believe any religion that could prove it had existed since the beginning of the world. But when I see Socrates, Plato, Moses, and Mohammed I do not think there is such a one. All religions owe their origin to man.
I am an atheist.
I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.
Theists and atheists are equally religious.
If god created man in his own image, how come I’m not invisible?
If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Fear is the mother of all gods.
Religion is all bunk.
God reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.
There are no atheists in the foxholes.
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
I’m not an atheist, but I’m not a Christian, either.
Sex has become more and more attractive because of its condemnation by priests
Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?
Who knew that the devil had a factory where he made millions of fossils, which his minions distributed throughout the earth, in order to confuse my tiny brain?
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.
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.
Atheism is an effect of that knowledge [a poll showed atheists knew more about religion than anyone else], not a lack of knowledge. I gave a bible to my daughter. That is how you make atheists.
Atheists have an excellent longevity record because we have no place to go after we die, so we take good care of ourselves and our world while we are here.
I’m a polyatheist – there are many gods I don’t believe in.
Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.
Young atheists abound, but old atheists are rare.
How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don’t see how that can become an ideology.
We shall say without hesitation that the atheist who is moved by love is moved by the Spirit of God; an atheist who lives by love is saved by his faith in the God whose existence (under that name) he denies.
The atheist suicide bomber is unfaithfully committed to his mission
Virtually every agnostic lives like an atheist, living completely irreligious lives
Well, you know, Thomas Jefferson, who was the author of the Declaration of Independence said he wouldn’t have any atheists in his cabinet because atheists wouldn’t swear an oath to God. That was Jefferson and we have never had any Muslims in the cabinet.
Good churches are not built by bad men; at least, there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in the society. These minsters were neither built nor filled by atheists.
I don’t see why Christians should censor themselves out of any forum in which our perspectives can be heard. I disagree with the theology of many groups that I address; Jews, for example, who do not accept Jesus, or atheists.
Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
There are people who try to get atheists to form a sort of atheist church and have atheist community singsongs and things. I don’t see the need for that, but if people want to do it, why shouldn’t they?
A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.
Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.
I was fascinated that one could have such perceptual changes, and also that they went with a certain feeling of significance, an almost numinous feeling. I’m strongly atheist by disposition, but nonetheless when this happened, I couldn’t help thinking, ‘That must be what the hand of God is like.’
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?
The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion. It is an atheist, nihilistic religion – but it is a religion that is obligatory for all
The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there’s any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.
There’s a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god.
What you should do is to say to outsiders that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our association than an atheist.
The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.
Would the atheist continue such, let him beware how he admits Love into his breast: for God will surely come along with him.
It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?
I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.
Actually, I don’t like Atheists very much – at least most of them ~ because they are not motivated to move into the community and attempt to correct the injustices which are everywhere apparent against them.
To even win a nomination in this country, you have to say you’re a person of great faith. You have to pledge to the people out there that you put your faith in things that are unable to be proven – that you suspend critical thinking as the way to go.
You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.
I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.
Most people can’t bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
Atheists in our midst are proof that all consciences can be accommodated here, even those that have no ground for holding that conscience is sacred, inalienable, and prior to civil society.
It does not matter whether you are a theist or atheist, what matters is sincerity, forgiveness, and compassion.
Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive. We all may talk about religion as a powerful social force, but unlike other similarly powerful institutions, religion is not to be questioned, criticized or mocked.
For a while, I became an atheist; now that I’m grown up, though, I’m not hard-edged enough to be an atheist. Even though I live with a flaming atheist, I love going to temple. I love all the rituals.
I do not believe in God. I’m an atheist. I consider myself a critical thinker, and it fascinates me that in the 21st century most people still believe in, as George Carlin puts it, ‘the invisible man living in the sky’
I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time. She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic.
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
Born again?! No, I’m not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time.
In the middle of the storm, the ‘a’ of the atheist drops!
Political correctness is tyranny with manners.
Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.
We are either going to go down the socialist road and become like Western Europe and create, I guess really a godless society, an atheist society. Or we’re going to continue down the other pathway, where we believe in freedom of speech, individual liberties, and that we remain a Christian nation.
What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
The atheist is not interested in anything except attacks on atheism.
Atheist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair was murdered. Jon Murray and Robin Murray-O’Hair were also murdered by individuals involved with the atheist organization.
For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
It just seems like atheists are not included in the basket of diversity in America, which is odd because we are the biggest minority. That is a bigger minority than any other minority you can name.
I was told that The Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.
If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes.
If God were alive today, He’d be an atheist.
Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.
Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing.
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.
An ineffably holy God, who has the utmost abhorrence of sin, was never invented by any of Adam’s descendents.
Atheist, without God, I look to humankind for sympathy, for love, for hope, for effort, for aid.
For a while, I thought of myself as an atheist until I realized it was a belief, too. It’s a shame everything has to have a label.
Theology is ignorance with wings.
Hast thou reason? I have. Why then dost not thou use it? For if this does its own work, what else dost thou wish?
Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
God is dead not because He doesn’t exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He doesn’t.
I’m not a religious person; I would call myself an atheist. I don’t have a good story behind it, I’m just reasonable.
In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.
I suspect that here theists and atheists would agree: Human beings have within them the ability to choose evil or good. We wake up each day facing the age-old struggle of good and evil. In some situations mental illness clouds our judgment.
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)
Armstrong lives as he rides – surrounded by a cocoon of aides and helpers, his gimlet eyes focused on victory…. The self-described atheist has become a deity… but the inquiry’s findings may cause the Armstrong faithful to ask, Was the miracle a mirage?
I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
If people are good because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-seeing Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood of believing in God.
An atheist is as religious as a theist.
Who needs Satan when you have a God like this?
I studied every page of this book, and I didn’t find enough love to fill a salt shaker. God is not love in the Bible; God is vengeance, from Alpha to Omega.
A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.
A god that does not manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist.
The annoying thing about being an atheist is that you’ll never have the satifaction of saying to believers, ‘I told you so.’
I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.
In New York, Catholic groups have forced an art gallery to shut down an exhibition of a six-foot image of Jesus in chocolate. So, the Archbishop of New York was very upset. He said, ‘It is appalling to make Jesus out of food! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go bake some communion wafers.’
I was born Jewish, but I am an atheist. I dont believe in God.
A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.
I was the black atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns.
God’s trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be professed atheists who are also men of honour and high public spirit.
In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
As far as I can tell from studying the scriptures, all you do in heaven is pretty much just sit around all day and praise the Lord. I don’t know about you, but I think that after the first, oh, I don’t know, 50,000,000 years of that I’d start to get a little bored.
Atheists often denounce Christianity as harsh and negative. But in reality it offers a much more positive view of the human person than any competing religion or worldview. It is so appealing that adherents of other worldviews keep free-loading the parts they like best.
Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.
Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats; They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to being herded.
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend.
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.
The atheist realizes that there must not only be an acceptance of his right to hold his opinion, but that ultimately his is the job to turn his culture from religion, to eliminate those irrational ideas which have held the human race in intellectual slavery.
We (atheists) act in good conscience because we believe in moral principles, not because we expect a reward in Heaven.
The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, And those with religion, but no brains.
Atheists would teach men to be moral now, not because God offers as an inducement reward by and by, but because in the virtuous act itself immediate good is insured to the doer and the circle surrounding him.
I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.
As an atheist, I believe that all life is unspeakably precious, because it’s only here for a brief moment, a flare against the dark, and then it’s gone forever.
I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this.
I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.
Hmmm, completely a-religious – atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
Materialism sets us free from sin-by proving that there is no such thing as sin. There’s just antisocial behavior, which we can control with measures like laws and educational programs.
Question: How do you know you’re God? Answer: Simple. When I pray to him, I find I’m talking to myself.
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
It has been asserted, that a moral Atheist would be a monster beyond the power of nature to create: I reply, that it is not more strange for an Atheist to live virtuously, than for a Christian to abandon himself to crime! If we believe the last kind of monster, why dispute the existence of the first?
My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
I’m a praying atheist. When I hear an ambulance siren, I ask for a blessing for those people in trouble, knowing that no one’s listening. I think it’s just a habit of mindfulness.
The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious beliefin lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.
The Cross! There, and there only (though the deist rave, and the atheist, if Earth bears so base a slave); There and there only, is the power to save.
All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.
The zeal of atheists is the most admirable thing about them.
I’m against anything atheists represent because I believe in God.
It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don’t understand.
A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
I’m an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.
There is no God. There’s no heaven. There’s no hell. There are no angels. When you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you.
It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination – an inability to tolerate mistery.
I come from generations of progressive, atheist Jews.
Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home there?
In the theater you create a moment, but in that moment, there is a touch, a twinkle of eternity. And not just eternity, but community. . . . That connection is a sense of life for me.
By night an atheist half-believes in God.
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.
If you believe in God, that’s a belief. If you are an atheist, it’s a belief too, because you cannot prove that God does not exist.
I’m not saying that I think atheists are better than other people. God, no. What I am saying is I do feel that this an integral part of who I am. And it’s not something that I could comfortably think of not sharing with the person I loved most in the world.
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
Emotionally I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.
I was an atheist and I came to experience a relationship with God which had a radically transforming effect on my life, on my relationships, on every aspect of my life, for the better. So, obviously I hope other people will experience that.
Je puis nier une chose sans me croire obligГ© de la salir ou de retirer aux autres le droit d’y croire.
I don’t say that I’m an atheist. I don’t like that term, because I think it mirrors the certitude of religion. I say I don’t know. And if you don’t know – and you don’t – just man up and say you don’t know. Don’t turn to silly stories and ancient myths.
I went with agnosticism for a long, long time because I just hated to say I was an atheist – being an atheist seemed so rigid. But the more I became comfortable with the word, and the more I read, it started to stick.
I have the honesty to say I’m an Atheist. There is nothing that supports the idea of a personal God.
Belief is the death of intelligence.
In theater or movies you see either ‘I’m religious’ or ‘I’m an atheist.’ I’ve never seen too much discussion of ‘I believe there’s a higher power but I’m hesitant to reach out to him because I don’t know if I’m worthy of his attention.
There’s something in every atheist, itching to believe, and something in every believer, itching to doubt.
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.
I always like a dog so long as he isn’t spelled backward.
It’s fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza.
You know, for a long time I became almost atheist. I believed in nothing. And it was tough for me to believe in anything at all because I had believed so strongly. And I divorced myself of spirituality, I think.
The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. According to Renan, “The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedest of all men.”
If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
People who commit crimes should be responsible for those crimes. It doesn’t matter whether they’re priests or ministers or atheists.
If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?
If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
Millennials, in particular, consider themselves to be spiritual, but they’re not necessarily going to anybody’s church. It’s not like the world is becoming hardcore, Richard Dawkins-atheist, but people are looking to sort of synthesize science – people love science, especially the millennials.
I`m not a slave to a god that doesn`t exist.
It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.
For my part I cannot believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in a God who has neither humour nor common sense.
It takes more faith to be an atheist than to believe in God.
If someone tells me that I’ve hurt their feelings I’m still waiting to hear what your point is.
We atheists have to accept that most believers are better human beings.
I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame – Southern Methodist University game and doesn’t care who wins.
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.
Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky.
I don’t believe in God, in prayer, in going to temples begging God to give me and my family happiness. I am not asking everyone to be an atheist, but good thoughts are not spent in a temple.
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god […], I’m willing to bet he’s an atheist too.
God loves atheists. The former ones make the most compelling theists because they’re so empirically familiar with how atheists think.
As the editor-in-chief of the do-it-yourself magazine ‘Make,’ I’ve met scores of dedicated makers. They come from all walks of life – rich, poor, young, old, male, female, religious, atheist, liberal, conservative.
Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I’ll be universally censured, including by many atheists.
My atheism doesn’t define my day-to-day life at all. But I realize – and maybe it is because, unlike people who sort of stay comfortably in a religion, I had to do a lot of thinking and reading before I realized that I was an atheist.
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine – but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you’ve been bad or good – and CARES about any of it – to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.
I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the “opium of the masses”—cannot hear the music of the spheres.
A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
Believers often forget that most atheists used to be religious, that many non-believers used to think they had a personal relationship with their God and they used to ‘feel’ the power of prayer. They’ve since learned that it was all a farce, that their feelings were internal emotions and not some external force.
As for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the other foot. Atheists don’t claim to know anything with certainty — it’s the believers who know it all.
I am an atheist… I don’t understand religion at all. I’m sure I’ll offend a lot of people by saying this, but I think it’s all nonsense.
Being a pastor for 20 years I realized that the labels, agnostic, atheist, believer, everybody’s human and everybody wants to know what kind of universe we’re living in, and everybody’s living according to a story.
When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?
I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but I do believe in ghosts.
What does an atheist scream when they come?
They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it’s a good thing.
If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
…the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.
An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident.
Christian families are under attack in America! The Communists, Masons, Atheists, Humanists, Evolutionists, and other Godless sickos want to destroy the family. Parents beware; the government wants your child!
O Reader! hast thou eer stood to see The Holly-tree? The eye that contemplates it well perceies Its glossy leaes Ordered by an Intelligence so wise As might confound the Atheist’s sophistries.
I enjoy being Jewish, but I’m an atheist… I hate fundamentalism in all its forms. Jews, Catholics, Baptists, I think they are all potty and capable of destroying the world.
I say I’m an atheist but I wouldn’t mind being visited by a ghost.
At Oxford University, the certainties of my atheist faith (and atheism is a faith) began to crumble
All that my work has shown is that you don’t have to say that the way the universe began was the personal whim of God.
Today when the Fundamentalists are once more insisting that the fundamentals of fundamentalism are fundamental to our being No. 1 on the Lord’s totem pole, it’s very brave of you to invite the “resident atheist” of mid-Missouri to share her thoughts with you.
I am also atheist or agnostic (I don’t even know the difference). I’ve never been to church and prefer to think for myself.
No, I’m not religious. At all. I’m an atheist.
There is presumably a calendar date a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.
It doesn’t have to be the Grand Canyon, it could be a city street, it could be the face of another human being – Everything is full of wonder.
Darwinism’s atheism prevents science from knowing why things are as they are. Without God there is no answer to the why for anything.
Even David Hume, one of history most famous skeptics, said it’s just barely possible that God exists.
Emancipation from error is the condition of real knowledge.
I turned atheist in the ’90s when India went through troubled times – communal riots, bomb blasts… Mumbai, where I live, was badly affected. I blamed religion; also, extremists on both sides – right and left.
An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.
Everything I do is somehow rooted in humanity. It’s always about people; it’s always about ego. It’s always about desperation. It’s quite existential. You know, ‘Am I leading a good life?’ That might be because I’m an atheist, and I think this is all we’ve got, so you better be nice. And have fun.
There are absolute atheists … Absolute atheism is in no way a mere absence of belief in God. It is rather a refusal of God, a fight against God, a challenge to God.
One of the things that made me suffer no regret when I was called away from the cramped intellectual jail of atheism into a wider and more wonderful world, was my growing conviction that my fellow atheists were shallow, men without insight into real human nature.
The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
I reject her [Ayn Rand’s] philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.
Atheists are like wild feral dogs wih no master. But Christians are like loving dogs with a giving and loving master. Domesticated dogs will love you always, but Feral wild dogs HAVE to be put down. they are a danger to us all.
Beware when you take on the Church of God. Others have tried and have bitten the dust.
What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
When I learned that there was such a thing as an atheist, I looked it up – and found out that the definition fitted me to a tee. Finally, at the age of 24, I found out who and what I was. Better late than never.
In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled – that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist.
Science and reason liberate us from the shackles of superstition by offering us a framework for understanding our shared humanity. Ultimately, we all have the capacity to treasure life and enrich the world in incalculable ways.
If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate….Try science.
I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge
If all the Atheists & Agnostics left America, they’d lose 93% of The National Academy of Sciences & less than 1% of the prison population.
It’s not any huge secret that I’m an atheist.
There may or may not be atheists in foxholes, but I’m certain there are none in the Ku Klux Klan.
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God … I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
As far as specific bands from the 90s death metal era, I love Death, Carcass, Possessed, Morbid Angel, Gorguts, Autopsy, Atheist, etc.
Following the herd is fine, until they all run off the side of a cliff together.
Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother’s parents were very steeped in.
Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.
In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We’re only one God away from total agreement.
There is nothing more profane than the image of an atheist with tears in his eyes conducting the glory and passion of Handel’s Messiah.
I’m noticing an exciting trend around the country: a resurgence of interest in Christian apologetics (the defense of the faith). This is a reaction to the current attacks on the essentials of Christianity that are coming from militant atheists, radical professors, and Internet gadflies.
I consider myself an atheist. My wife is Jewish. And I’m fine with my son being raised as a Jew. He’s learning Hebrew and is really into it. I will talk to my own son about my atheism when the time is right. But there’s a great tradition of Jewish atheism, there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews.
If thou beest ever so exact in thy morals, and not a worshiper of God, then thou art an atheist.
Women priests. Great, great. Now there’s priests of both sexes I don’t listen to.
As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.
The ultimate creative thinking technique is to think like God. If you’re an atheist, pretend how God would do it.
The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.
God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it.
God exist whether or not men may choose to believe in Him. The reason why many people do not believe in God is not so much that it is intellectually impossible to believe in God, but because belief in God forces that thoughtful person to face the fact that he is accountable to such a God.
People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.
Religion features more now in my life than it did when I was a kid – my dad rejected the Catholic church as a young man. I had no religious upbringing, but certainly, Dad was a kind of secular humanist. I don’t know if he was an atheist or agnostic. I regret I didn’t talk to him about it.
I don’t know about you, but I call impromptu vomiting harm.
The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is because vampires are allergic to bullshit.
For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice.
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches.
Pope Francis said that atheists are still eligible to go to heaven. To return the favor, atheists said Popes are still eligible to go into a void of nothingness.
Fear is the mother of all gods … Nature does all things spontaneously, by herself, without the meddling of the gods.
Everyday is an atheist holiday.
The hands that help are better far than lips that pray.
The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy.
With the near-death or clinical near-death phenomenon some people who are brought back from ‘death’ have reported being alive the entire time they were ‘dead.’ This phenomenon occurs among people with a wide diversity of religious belief and no religious belief at all – from atheists to Zen Buddhists.
But in America, if you’re an atheist, you lose.
The atheist is cheating whenever he makes a moral judgment, acting as though it has an objective reference, when his philosophy in fact precludes it.
I’d be more willing to accept religion, even if I didn’t believe it, if I thought it made people nicer to each other but I don’t think it does.
It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
Thank you, but I’m afraid I can’t accept your compliment. You see, I’m an atheist, so if I’m also God, that would mean that I don’t believe in myself, and at this point in my life, I don’t need the added insecurity.
It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.
I am against the word ‘anti’ because it’s a little bit like ‘atheist,’ as compared to ‘believer.’ And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is.
A Christian telling an atheist they’re going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they’re not getting any presents from Santa.
I am atheist in a very religious mould. I’m always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? I read the King James Bible, as all English writers should. And when I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.
That is the whole trouble with being a heretic. One usually must think out everything for oneself.
Atheists who keep asking for evidence of God’s existence are like a fish in the ocean wanting evidence of water.
The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have… whether you like it or not.
Just the idea that we, these little collections of atoms and molecules, are part of the world, but a part that can look at the rest of the world and figure it out in a self-referential way, is kind of breathtaking.
The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.
Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
An atheist can be charitable but not religious. But the religious man must be charitable.
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
Religion is against women’s rights and women’s freedom. In all societies women are oppressed by all religions.
No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.
In America, now, let us – Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, wiccan, whatever – fight nativism with the same strength and conviction that we fight terrorism. My faith calls on its followers to love one’s enemies. A tall order, that – perhaps the tallest of all.
God knows, I’m not the thing I should be, Nor am I even the thing I could be, But twenty times I rather would be An atheist clean, Than under gospel colours hid be Just for a screen.
Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth.
New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema.
I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
If only I wasn’t an atheist, I could get away with anything. You’d just ask for forgiveness and then you’d be forgiven. It sounds much better than having to live with guilt.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
I grew up in a Catholic family in the Midwest. And I knew people of different faiths and people that were atheists and people that were agnostic.
I have not tolerated an atheist in the ranks of the SS. Every member has a deep faith in God, in what my ancestors called in their language Waralda, the ancient one, the one who is mightier than we are.
I’m glad the universe is pointless. It means if I get to the end of my life, the universe can’t turn to me and go, ‘What have you been doing, you idiot? That’s not the point!
Religion is like a virus that affects the behaviour of its host in such a way as to propagate itself further.
I never thought about it, but as an atheist, maybe Nascar is my church?
Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life – except religion … Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our ‘godly gift’ of reason when we cross their mental thresholds?
A Buddhist or a good atheist is as acceptable to God as a good Catholic.
There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call “atheists,” and those who think they are facts are “religious.” Which group really gets the message?
No one knows loneliness like an atheist. When an average person feels isolated, he can call through the depths of his soul to One who knows him and sense an answer. An atheist cannot allow himself that luxury, for he has to crush the urge and remind himself of its absurdity.
Believe nothing,
No matter where you read it,
Or who has said it,
Not even if I have said it,
Unless it agrees with your own reason
And your own common sense.
No matter where you read it,
Or who has said it,
Not even if I have said it,
Unless it agrees with your own reason
And your own common sense.
By pagans the Jews (and later Christians) were seen as perverse, almost indeed as atheists, for they denied the very existence of other gods.
Atheism is cheap on people, because it snobbishly says nine out of ten people through history have been wrong about God and have had a lie at the core of their hearts.
It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.
We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.
It is the black work of an ungodly man or an atheist, that God is not in all his thoughts. What comfort can be had in the being of God without thinking of him with reverence and delight? A God forgotten is as good as no God to us.
I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.
I followed him up the stairs. I was a fornicator, of unnatural appetite, in thrall to an Atheist. I repeated the words in my head and tried to feel the shock of them, but they remained strange and cruel, far removed from Ferris and me. It was simpler to say I was in love.
Since I was both an atheist and an absurdist, I had decided that the most absurd thing I could do would be to develop an intimate relationship with the God I didn’t believe in.
I’m a linear thinking agnostic, but not an atheist folks.
God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.
It’s odd that the word ‘atheist’ even exist. I don’t play golf, is there a word for non-golf players ?
It is only thanks to God that I’m an atheist
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
An ethical atheist is infinitely more valuable than an unethical pious! What matters is whether you are ethical or not; your beliefs are utterly trivial beside this matter!
I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.
The ACLU is to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews.
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint’s self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.
Shouldn’t atheist have an equal obligation to explain pleasure in a world of randomness. Where does pleasure come from?
You might say I was a passive atheist through my teenage years.
I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.
From about the age of 5, I was aware that I didn’t fit. I was the black, atheist kid in the all-white, Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly.
If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I’d be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.
The vast majority of the world knows there’s no reason to circumcise. Someone should tell the doctors.
For those in love with an illusion often refuse to accept reality
I would not say that ethical behavior is not possible for the atheist or agnostic. It is. A couple of pretty good examples are Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. However, I will have to say that if we take the human lot as a whole, these two men must be seen as exceptions.
There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.
Mystery is made a convenient Cover for absurdity.
I was not an atheist. Few people really are, for that means blind faith in the strange proposition that this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere.
The existence of a world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all of his perfection, creating imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell.
I am what you call a non-believer. I don’t even want to say I’m an atheist because frankly I don’t want to join their club either. But the point is, I am a fallen catholic, I’m not religious, and that’s all well and good.
When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
If you divide Christians into denominations, agnostics and atheists come in third, behind Catholics and Baptists. That’s interesting when you contrast it with the lack of influence of nonbelievers.
I turned atheist in the 90s when India went through troubled times – communal riots, bomb blasts… Mumbai, where I live, was badly affected. I blamed religion; also, extremists on both sides – right and left.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
What God lacks is convictions- stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something- not try to be everything.
I have I guess 3 passions.В One is the Constitution. The other is jazz and the other is being an atheist prolifer which, of course, gets me in a lot of trouble – all of which combines into free expression.
The best reply to an atheist is to give him a good dinner and ask him if he believes there is a cook.
No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn’t see any need to go beyond that.
If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.
A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity
Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
None of the miracles with which ancient histories are filled, occurred under scientific conditions. Observation never once contradicted, teaches us that miracles occur only in periods and countries in which they are believed in and before persons disposed to believe in them.
The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know.
For a God that created everything, it is mystifying why he created so much competition.
I don’t think anything gives your life joy and meaning. I think your life simply has joy and meaning. The love for my children, the love for my parents and the love for my friends is the end in itself. The meaning is life.
Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today…
I suppose I’m a lapsed Catholic. You would consider me an atheist or agnostic.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
Civill Wars of France made a million of Atheists, and 30000 Witches.
According to my definition of God, I’m not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I’m looking at God. Whenever I’m listening to something I’m listening to God.
I agree about Shaw – he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.
The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.
I made my daughter read the whole. That’s how you make atheists.
As an atheist you have to rationalize things… Then you have to try and make some sort of sense out of your problems. And if you try and find you can’t, you have no choice but to be good and scared — but that’s okay!
The finger of the atheists’ own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.
I’m still very much an atheist, except that I don’t necessarily see religion as being a bad thing. So, that’s a weird thing that I’m struggling with that seems to be offending both atheists and people that are religious.
Secrets of the incomprehensible wisdom of God, unknown to any besides Himself! Man, sprung up only of a few days, wants to penetrate, and to set bounds to it. Who is it that hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His counselor?
Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.
If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
The religion of the atheist has a God-shaped blank at it’s heart.
Refer me to one atheist who denies the existence of God…. Etymologically, as well as philosophically, an atheist is one without God. That is all the ‘A’ before ‘Theist’ really means.
When I deeply look at a pious, I see no affection but fear; and when I look at an atheist, I see no fear but conceit!
I think it’s perfectly consistent to say that I want my government to be operating for all faiths and all peoples, including atheists and agnostics, while also insisting that there are values tha tinform my politics that are appropriate to talk about.
Although I’m not Christian, I was raised Christian. I’m an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I’ve got a very strong sense of morality.
Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothГЁse-lГ .
In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chance’s of theism’s truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else.
The use or abuse of Christianity in contradiction to the very message of the gospel reveals not the gospel for what it is, but the heart of man. That is why atheism is so bankrupt as a view of life, for it miserably fails to deal with the human condition as it really is.
I was an atheist most of my life, and now I am a God-fearing Catholic because of the miracle of life. And I’m pro-life.
Some atheists are quite explicit that their atheism comes first. One of the most famous is Richard Lewontin, a professor of genetics, who said it wasn’t science that compelled him to accept a materialistic explanation of the universe. It was an a priori materialism.
For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists, but between oppressors and oppressed, between those who want to keep this unjust society and those who want to struggle for justice.
Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.
An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.
There are atheists, and I love them. In fact, I died for them.
Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.
This above all; to thine own self be true.
Science knows it doesn’t know everything; otherwise, it’d stop. But just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.
If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!
Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.
Fidel is a Marxist-Leninist. I am not. Fidel is an atheist. I am not. One day, we discussed God and Christ. I told Castro, I am a Christian. I believe in the Social Gospels of Christ. He doesn’t. Just doesn’t. More than once, Castro told me that Venezuela is not Cuba, and we are not in the 1960s.
I was being foolish. An atheist can’t stand behind their assertion that God doesn’t exist. The stupidest thing I ever could have done was to reject His Truth.
If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that one could not get proof of his existence.
An armed society is a polite society.
I’m still an atheist, thank God.
Communism is what happens when atheism meets bureaucracy.
I think we atheists should tolerate the religious not because their views are just as valid as ours, but because experience has shown that we are unlikely to convert them, and so we have to find some way to live in peace with them, even if we find their views false or otherwise objectionable.
Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.
Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God. That is to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of a cause which you understand not at all.
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.
Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
My father was an atheist, absent. He was a salesman; I was four years old when he told me that the end of life was death.
The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself; but is the Theist any other? Well, perhaps; for he has seen the shadow of God and clutched at it.
It is a bizarre thought that in this [U.S. 2008] presidential cycle we could have had a woman in the White House we might have a black man in the White House but if either of them had said they were atheists neither of them would have had a hope in hell.
…It would be more consistent that we call [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.
Indeed, it’s futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.
I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
Although I’m an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised.
The Atheist complains about the wind. The Christian prays for it to change. The Satanist adjusts his sails.
There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.
It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian.
Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.
Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.
We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal Opposition.
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
I’m not an activist. I’m trying to get off the whole atheist racket.
An atheist waving a cross at a vampire was a truly pitiful sight.
I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them.
I’m an atheist – a good old North Korean-style atheist.
First the priests arrive. Then the conquistadores.
Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who straightforwardly call themselves atheists.
Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.
The Internet has helped atheists and agnostics coalesce as never before.
The great tragedy of atheists is that they walk through this world and have no one to thank.
The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed Christian notions.
But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
The statements of atheists ought to be perfectly clear of doubt. Now it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material.
As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
I am a daylight atheist.
Atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it.
You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe
Most scientists I know don’t care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
The world holds two classes of men; intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.
I rightly pass for an atheist.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
She flashes me a smile so devastating that it could even make an atheist believe in God.
Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God.
Personally, I think the ‘Christian family’ should be called a Christian fantasy.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.
That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.
As [The Nation columnist Katha] Pollitt points out, when one starts looking beneath the surface of things and adding together the out-front atheists with the indifferent nonbelievers, you end up with a much larger group of people than Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Unitarians put together.
It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality.
It is relatively unusual that a physical scientist is truly an atheist. Why is this true? Some point to the anthropic constraints, the remarkable fine tuning of the universe. For example, Freeman Dyson, a Princeton faculty member, has said, ‘Nature has been kinder to us that we had any right to expect.’
Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God’s behalf. This ‘blasphemy of certainty’ is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.
I’m an atheist, and I believe religion is totally against human rights and women’s rights.
Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence
All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.
It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist. … I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.
If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.
… the atheists, libertines, despisers of religion … that is to say all those who usually pass under the name of Free-thinkers.
Even though I don’t believe in God, I feel strangely compelled to fight the atheist label.
An atheist chaplain would be the perfect vehicle for convincing wounded warriors that they should end their lives because there’s nothing in the future and there’s nothing now, so why not just save money and kill themselves.
On the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists.
People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.
No man will say, “There is no God” ’till he is so hardened in sin that it has become his interest that there should be none to call him to account.
Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.
In a religiously uniform culture, it is natural for people to take for granted the truth of the prevailing religion and its associated metaphysical propositions.
I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.
I’m not an atheist. How can you not believe in something that doesn’t exist? That’s way too convoluted for me.
I try to take people at face value and then beyond, taking them out of face value and out of the category of being Black, Latino, Asian, White, Jewish, Muslim or Christian or Atheist, none of that matters to me.
Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated.
I told my kids I just want three words on my tombstone, if I have one. I’ll probably be cremated. One is “woman.” I’m very comfortable in that role. I’ve loved being a woman, I’ve loved being a mother, I’ve loved being a grandmother. I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That’s me.
I believe that pluralistic secularism, in the long run, is a more deadly poison than straightforward persecution.
But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.
I’m an atheist. The good news about atheists is that we have no mandate to convert anyone. So you’ll never find me on your doorstep on a Saturday morning with a big smile saying вЂJust stopped by to tell you there is no word. I brought along this little blank book I was hoping you could take a look at.’
All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
The conventional heaven with its angels perpetually singing etc nearly drove me mad in my youth and made me an atheist for ten years. My opinion is that we shall be reincarnated.
When I was growing up I was an atheist, then an agnostic, and then I had a good eight or ten years of being quite a serious Christian.
Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?
The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. There is something else here, and there will always be something else – something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else.
Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.
“Agnostic” is a much more recent word than “atheist”, coined by Thomas Huxley in 1869 to mean “without knowledge of God” and acquiring the usage of “being doubtful about the existence of God.”
I was brought up Catholic. I’m lapsed. From the age of three I was with the nuns. Now I’m an atheist.
An argument frequently used by believers [is] to force unbelievers to soften their terms by accepting their opponents’ definition; “Atheist” means without a concept of God that is logically convincing, not with proof that God does not exist.
Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.
If you can frame climate change as an alternate religion, or as one more of those issues where the pointy-headed liberal atheist scientists are trying to discredit the Bible, then you’ve already got a ton of people on your side who are concerned about heresy, other religions, or teaching evolution in schools.
Humanism or atheism is a wonderful philosophy of life as long as you are big, strong, and between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. But watch out if you are in a lifeboat and there are others who are younger, bigger, or smarter.
What reason have atheists for saying that we cannot rise again? That what has never been, should be, or that what has been, should be again? Is it more difficult to come into being than to return to it.
When I go to Iran, I see… that there are all different shades and colors in Iran, from atheist to religious zealot. So Iran is no different than any other country. I mean, they are connected with the rest of the world.
Science is agnostic when it comes to god; not atheistic, as some people prefer to read that laden word wrongly; just agnostic.
Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of god a pretty good definition of insanity?
The whole history of the Christian Church is a mixture of errors and violence.
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.
Pop was a devout Roman Catholic; I’m a lapsed Catholic. I’m not the village atheist, but I exert my right not to believe, and I doubt I would have been very public about that were he still alive, simply just so as not to hurt his feelings.
I am an atheist. I don’t think there’s anything divine. Beautiful, impressive, awe-inspiring – sure, but not divine.
I spent most of my adult life essentially agnostic or an atheist.
Without God man has no reference point to define himself. 20th century philosophy manifests the chaos of man seeking to understand himself as a creature with dignity while having no reference point for that dignity.
Sometimes when I’m faced with an atheist, I am tempted to invite him to the greatest gourmet dinner that one could ever serve, and when we have finished eating that magnificent dinner, to ask him if he believes there’s a cook.
What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?
Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.
I’m at the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum.
For all their raving, ranting, and name-calling, these atheists will stand before God one day-and they will exist for eternity, though sadly they will be separated from God unless they repent and receive the free gift of salvation.
The atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.
An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.
It is curious that atheists have proved to be so intolerant of those who have a faith.
My dad was a militant atheist, or is a militant atheist. My mum was sort of bought up in a religious family because she was a Protestant from Ireland but wasn’t especially religious.
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
God will not take shelter behind a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither a schoolman nor theologian, but our Father in Heaven.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
I’m kind of an evangelical atheist.
Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.
Atheist’s denial of God’s existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist’s claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God’s existence.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Confession without repentance is just bragging.
Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist, must be rather silly people.
The great Creator to revere
Must sure become the creature;
But still the preaching cant forbear,
And ev’n the rigid feature:
Yet ne’er with wits profane to range
Be complaisance extended;An atheist laugh’s a poor exchange
For deity offended.
Must sure become the creature;
But still the preaching cant forbear,
And ev’n the rigid feature:
Yet ne’er with wits profane to range
Be complaisance extended;An atheist laugh’s a poor exchange
For deity offended.
Christopher Hitchens is perhaps the greatest orator ever. He’s such a famous atheist.
In two senses: One is that you cannot go on the street and shout that you are an atheist, the other is that you are never given the intellectual framework for calling your faith into question.
We should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit.
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
There’s a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.
I grew up Jewish, became an atheist and a Marxist, and 28 years ago, at age 26, became a Christian.
I like churches and Catholic symbolism, and although the art at the Vatican is overwhelming to see, I appreciated it even as an atheist.
Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves, is all we will ever have – and that, in its profound simplicity, is the meaning of life.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.
We should foster a culture in which people’s private religious beliefs, including atheists and agnostics, are respected.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.
We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.
Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason and anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is time now for reason, education and science to take over.
Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.
Well, I don’t call you an atheist then. I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder and the mystery, then that is what God is. That is what God is, not the bearded guy in the sky.
Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.
I used to be an atheist, but I’ve chilled out a bit on that.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.
Worry is really just a form of atheism. Every time you worry, you’re acting like an atheist. You’re saying, “It all depends on me.” That’s just not in the Bible.
I’m the world’s least happy atheist. I miss having religious faith, but trying to have it seems like trying to be in love with someone that you’re not in love with.
Who are beneficiaries of the Court’s protection? Members of various minorities including criminals, atheists, homosexuals, flag burners, illegal immigrants (including terrorists), convicts, and pornographers.
Agnostics cannot understand Christ for the same reason a thief find a policeman -they don’t want to.
I’ve won every debate I’ve had with an atheist, and never converted even a single one.
We should foster a culture in which people’s private religious beliefs, including atheists and agnostics, are respected. And that’s the kind of culture that I think allows all of us, then, to believe what we want. That’s freedom of conscience. That’s what our Constitution guarantees.
I don’t mind if other people call me an atheist, but I call myself a naturalist. Atheism doesn’t tell you much about what I do believe in; the term naturalist opens up the discussion better.
It is unfair to label me anti-Islam. I am an atheist and a secular humanist.
I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think what a waste of energy. If people want to believe in this god, or that god, that’s fine by me, believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.
Do you think I am superstitious? I am a super-atheist.
I don’t differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural.
Atheist n. A person to be pitied in that he is unable to believe things for which there is no evidence, and who has thus deprived himself of a convenient means of feeling superior to others.
The believer in God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for everything else.
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
You know, it’s a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic.
The making of an Atheist implies a mental stimulation and training which brings into play the primary factors of social progress.
Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.
For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned
Although God believers don’t need evolution to be false, atheists need evolution to be true.
If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.
One hates what one fears.
In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.
We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There’s not much personal about the laws of physics.
I believe the earth is stationary, but you have to realize I was an atheist for seven years. I just believed everything was a lie – all the wars, that there was no government, that corporations ran the world, that everything was a fraud – that everyone lied about everything.
You are all stardust.
I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.
The first principle of freedom is the right to go to hell in your own handbasket.
I’m proud to be an atheist – it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.
I’m an atheist, a devout atheist, but I find religion fascinating. Primarily because of cultural references, as in: This is what we grew up with. Both on a personal level and a collective level.
Government has no Right to hurt a hair of the head of an Atheist, for his Opinions. Let him have a care of his Practices.
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that the Ten Commandments are a historical document that contains moral, ethical, and legal truisms that any person of any religion or even an atheist can recognize and appreciate.
As an atheist evolving to agnosticism, and seeking answers to whether or not belief in God is potentially rational, my life was turned upside down 35 years ago by reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
It is atheism to pray and not wait on hope.
Though a man declares himself an atheist, it in no way alters his obligations.
I believe life is a parenthesis between two nothings. I’m an atheist. I believe in a personal God, which is conscience, and that’s what we must be accountable to every day.
…the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any.
Man can be an atheist only in theory, not in practice, because the universe is too frightening and too chaotic to be too independent!
Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
I am a born-again atheist, so there isn’t going to be a funeral. I will be buried in a linen wrap in a cardboard coffin in my forest with an oak tree planted on my head.
There are relatively few atheists among neurologists and brain surgeons and astrophysicists, but many among psychologists, sociologists, and historians. The reason seems obvious: the first study divine design, the second study human undesign.
What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God. Which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.
I think that if you are a resolute, unswerving atheist, you have that sense that you are conscious of the God-shaped hole that has been left in the wake of any religious belief, and in a way, one is much more drawn to articulate why it is that certain places, or certain experiences, have a kind of power.
The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn’t been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake.
You don’t see too many atheists on the deathbed. They all start cramming then.
This crusade to separate church and state is only one expression of my raison d’ГЄtre. I’m an atheist, but I’m also an anarchist, and a feminist, and an integrationist.
I haven’t seen much socially redeeming about religion. I’m an atheist. I don’t here want to get into the Hitchens- or Dawkins-style attack on religion. I was raised on that. It’s boring.
I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis. I am not an enemy of the Catholics, as I am not an enemy of the tuberculars, the myopic or the paralytics; you cannot be an enemy of the sick, only their good friend in order to help them cure themselves.
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature.
Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, “materialism” would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of looking at it.
Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
Here is book called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, written by a couple of Christian apologists, which is essentially saying I don’t pretend enough to know things I don’t know to be an atheist.
The atheist must abandon his defensive positions, take up the cudgels and go forward, rather than into the retreat of apathy.
Evolution has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator – an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin’s work.
In a city a man may feel second to none. But alone in the immensity of the universe, among all the creatures that preceded man and built up the human species, even a most fervent atheist will wonder if Darwin found the visible road but not the invisible mechanism.
Our English language really says if you’re not a theist, the only alternative is to be an atheist. What I’m trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism.
I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.
Why isn’t there a book about someone losing their faith and it being a beautiful experience?
We are a nation conceived, born and nurtured by faith… Our faith is declared in our Constitution, on our currency and in our lives.
I don’t have enough faith to be an Atheist.
A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism.
I can’t take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an Atheist. We have separation of church and state in the United States of America.
But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.
And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic.
I’m an atheist and a humanist, so I have no desire to evangelize anyone.
If you believe in Odin and Thor, people laugh themselves to death. While it’s okay to believe in a man who turned water into wine, and walked on water
I’m basically a ‘do unto others’ type person. I don’t have any religious feelings because I’m an atheist, but I live my life like there’s a God. And if there was he’d probably love me.
Thank you God for making me an atheist.
Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.
The New Atheists are not open or willing to go where the evidence leads, unless that evidence sustains their own naturalistic assumptions. They have covertly reduced all philosophical thought and deduction to– ironically-fait h!
When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness…. No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
I’m an atheist how unfortunate it is to assign responsibility to the higher up for justice amongst people.
If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods.
In God We Trust. I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true.
God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?
I used to be an atheist, until I realized I had nothing to shout during blowjobs. Oh Random Chance! Oh Random Chance! just doesn’t cut it….
Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere “opiate of the people” have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor.
If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.
As an atheist and lapsed Catholic, I feel the absence of faith in my own life quite acutely.
The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance…logic can be happily tossed out the window.
There are no atheist in foxholes.
The Omen is one of my favorites. Even though I’m an atheist now, I was brought up Catholic and can remember thinking that it could actually be real! The first Dawn of the Dead is a great one. We had a TV serial in Britain called Day of the Triffids and that was always really terrifying for me as well.
The family that prays together…is brainwashing their children.
The atheist barista (who’s obsessed with astrology) asked me, “So what’s your sign?” I responded, “The sign of the cross.” I think she spit in my coffee.
We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don’t understand it.
…being an atheist required discipline very like that of being Catholic. One could never yield to the idea of a supernatural authority, no matter how often one might be tempted. To think that a personal God had made the world was to yield to a demonic and superstitious and destructive belief.
We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.
The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
Atheism is rather in the lip, than in the heart of man.
If it turns out that there is a God…the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.
All thinking men are atheists.
Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.
How do I define God? I don’t…. People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don’t.
One of the great things about America is that we have the freedom to worship or not worship as we please. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Christian, Jew, Muslim. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an evangelical or a Catholic or a moderate Jew. You’re entitled to worship – or an agnostic or atheist.
I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for people.
Christians must understand the nature of the change that has occurred in our culture. No longer do the secularists just mock Christians from afar. They are now actively campaigning to indoctrinate children in an anti-God philosophy–to teach them to be secularists and atheists.
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
If they are good workmen, they may be from Asia, Africa or Europe; they may be Mahometans, Jews or Christians of any sect, or they may be Atheists.
The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.
It is easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.
Most people past college age are not atheists. It’s too hard to be in society, for one thing. Because you don’t get any days off. And if you’re an agnostic you don’t know whether you get them off or not.
If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
Tolerance is thin gruel compared to the rapture of absolute truths. It’s not surprising that religious people are often better protected by atheists and agnostics than each other.
I had abandoned Catholicism, but even during my short militant atheist period I maintained an interest in western religious art and music.
There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.
I don’t know if anybody from my tribe of atheists ever thanked [Barack Obama] for giving us a shout-out at your first inaugural, but you did mention non-believers. We appreciate it. Because we do feel like untouchables to a degree.
I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it.
A traveler amid the scenery of the Alps, surrounded by the sublimest demonstration of God’s power, had the hardihood to write against his name, in an album kept for visitors, “An atheist.” Another who followed, shocked and indignant at the inscription, wrote beneath it, If an atheist, a fool; if not, a liar!
I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.
I made the mistake of saying I was an atheist at one point, when I was doing ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’
It’s just as much a stretch to believe in God as it is to be an Atheist
If this is your God, he’s not very impressive. He has so many psychological problems; he’s so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He’s a pretty poor excuse for a Supreme Being.
Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.
A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid.
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
I can’t tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.
A true friend is a gift from God. Since God doesn’t exist, guess what? Neither do true friends.
They had…finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.
Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.
It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.
I just wish this social institution [religion] wasnt based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isnt true.
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.
Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the Christian majority’s” private liking.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
