Best 2951 quotes in «atheism quotes» category

Real morality is possible when the sanctions for morality are also tangible and real. Therefore, atheism shifts the basis of morality from faith in god to obligations of social living. Moral conduct is not a passport to heaven; it is social necessity.

Real morality is possible when the sanctions for morality are also tangible and real.

Reason bases its decisions on evidence available to everyone, and allows people to disagree when evidence is lacking. Religion will never do that.

Reason can never prove the existence of God.

... reason accepts no commandments.

Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.

Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.

Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ.

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.

Regardless of whether or not you belong to a majority religion, in the United States you may not impose your theology on civil law.

[Regarding] the convention that clergymen are more virtuous than other men. Any average selection of mankind, set apart and told that it excels the rest in virtue, must tend to sink below the average.

Relativity. Gravity. Quantum. Electrodynamics. Evolution. Each of these theories is true, whether or not you believe in them.

Religion and liberty are inseparable. Religion is voluntary, and cannot, and ought not to be forced. This is a fundamental article of the American creed, without distinction of sect or party. Liberty, both civil and religious, is an American instinct. Such liberty is impossible on the basis of a union of church and state, where the one of necessity restricts or controls the other. It requires a friendly separation, where each power is entirely independent in its own sphere.

Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning.

Religion is like a virus that affects the behaviour of its host in such a way as to propagate itself further.

Religion and science, then, in my analysis are the two great sister forces which have pulled, and are still pulling, mankind onward and upward.

Religion cannot and should not be replaced by atheism. Religion needs to go away and not be replaced by anything. Atheism is not a religion. It's the absence of religion, and that's a wonderful thing.

Religion glorifies the dogma of a despotic, mythical God. Atheism ennobles the interests of free and progressive Man. Religion is superstition. Atheism is sanity. Religion is medieval. Atheism is modern.

Religion hides many mischiefs from suspicion.

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith ; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.

Religion is defined as belief in and worship of a controlling power and atheism is precisely not that.

Religion is insanity by consensus.

Religion is not a nice thing. It is potentially a very dangerous thing because it involves a heady complex of emotions, desires, yearnings and fears.

Religion can no longer rest its claims on a dogmatic supernaturalism, because any dogma that is irreconcilable with tested knowledge must be rejected... One sentence ... sums up the dark and deadly pages of Chistian history: "If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.

Religion is a collective insanity.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

Religion cannot sink lower than when somehow it is raised to a state religion ... It becomes then an avowed mistress.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

Religion converts despair, which destroys, into resignation, which submits.

Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there.

Religion is based upon blind faith supported by no evidence. Science is based upon confidence that results from evidence - and that confidence can be modified and/or reversed by further observations and experimentation. Science approaches truth, closer and closer, by hard dedicated work. Religion already has it all decided, and it's in the book. It's dogma, unchangeable, and unaffected by reality and whatever facts we come upon in the real world.

Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.

Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the open. Both have their proper sphere and they should realize that they are allies.

Religion is ... the most pernicious single influence in human society, without one redeeming feature.

Religions have a strong binding function and a cohesive element. They emphasize the primacy of the community as opposed to the individual, and they also help set one community apart from another that doesn't share their beliefs.

Religions have been universal in the sense that all the people we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless.... The older apologists for Christianity seem to have been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor, as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment.

Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing.

Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.

Religious belief is not a precondition either of ethical conduct or of happiness.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

Religion is the venereal disease of mankind.

Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics.

Religious freedom in an open society has the best prospects of flourishing to the extent that it expresses itself as freedom of religious inquiry.

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place - service - social service - the ants creed, the bees creed.