Best 2951 quotes in «atheism quotes» category

The point is, being a Christian does not mean hating or belittling the non-Christians. Being a Muslim does not mean hating or belittling the non-Muslims. Being an Atheist does not mean hating or belittling the religious people. In a civilized society, diversity in religious orientation should be the reason for celebration, not the cause for hatred and differentiation.

The practice of mindfulness aims for a still and lucid engagement with the open field of contingent events in which one’s life is embedded. All events are ontologically equivalent: mind is not more “real” than matter, nor matter more “real” than mind.

[T]he present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original[.]

...the priests of all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation, that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply their immemorial role with less chance of interference.

The purpose of a democratic government is to protect the poor from the rich. The purpose of religion is to protect the rich from the poor.

The quickest way to solve the God problem is to ignore it.

There are no atheists in the foxhole.

There are plenty of atheists in foxholes. What I don't see are Christians in foxholes. If a Christian soldier takes a bullet to the knee, he will undoubtedly first call for a medic, not a priest. Reliance on god is typically only available when a problem can be ignored without discomfort or when the problem belongs to others (where it can be ignored without discomfort). When the chips are down, like when you have a serious illness or you've been shot or you’re at war, even the most devout Christians rely on humans (doctors or other soldiers) even though they'll swear up and down that it’s god helping them.

The reason I could never be an atheist is because when they get together they have literally nothing to talk about.

The reason why God doesn't show his face is because he stands behind a wall that can be broken.

Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis fails to become a Christian because of a lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with god.

There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not.

There is always a contradiction between religion and common sense.

There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity's original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly complete explanations for those big three. We know the origins of the universe, the physics of the big bang and how the basic chemical elements formed in supernovas. We know that life on this planet originated about 4 billion years ago, and we are all descendants of that original replicating molecule. Thanks to Darwin we know that natural selection is the only workable explanation for the design and variety of all life on this planet. Paleoanthropologists and geneticists have reconstructed much of the human tree of life. We are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are the most successful and last surviving African hominid. Every single person on this Earth, all 7 billion of us, arose 50,000 years ago from small bands of African hunter-gatherers, a total population of somewhere between 600 and 2,000 individuals.

There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause, there is no First Cause. … This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.

There is little question Islamist terrorists and molesting clergy have both played a role in the rise of atheism in our time. No atheist activist is nearly as effective in alienating people from God and religion as are evil ‘religious’ people.

there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints.

There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

There is no God for sure, else how could one justify terminal diseases in small kids?

[T]here is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and, consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject … [T]he predicates are not accidents, but express the essence of the subject … [T]he essence of religion … conceives and affirms a profoundly human relation as divine relations[.]

There is no evidence to suggest that God helps people. There is, however, ample evidence that people can help themselves and each other.

There is no "religious language" or "scientific language". There is rather the international notation of mathematics and logic; and English, French, Spanish and the like. In short, "religious discourse" and "scientific discourse" are part of the same overall conceptual structure. Moreover, in that conceptual structure there is a large amount of discourse, which is neither religious nor scientific, that is constantly being utilized by both the religious man and the scientist when they make religious and scientific claims. In short, they share a number of key categories.

There is nothing new under the sun but that of the Son. Man's rebellion against God has always been because he would rather fall in pride than rise in humility.

There is only one God and all atheists will learn that after their deaths

There is neither a Heaven for a Hell. Life after Death is an oxymoron. Life is just another word for existence, and Death is just another word for non-existence.

There is neither a Heaven nor a Hell. Life after Death is an oxymoron. Life is just another word for existence, and Death is just another word for non-existence.

There is no great religion without a great schism. All of them have it. And that's because you're dealing with something called faith. And faith is not something you can prove; faith is personal opinion. Uh, when you're dealing with something with certainty, like, y'know, science or logic, you don't have the--there's no wiggle room; that's why history is not filled with warring math cults, y'know, because you can settle the issue; you can prove something to be right or wrong, and that's the end of the argument: next case. Whereas, when you're dealing with faith, you can forever argue your point, or another point, because you're dealing with intangibles. Personally, I think, faith is what you ask of somebody when you don't have the goods to prove your point.

There is nothing behind the curtains of religions, people put there whatever their imaginations can fathom

There is nothing loving about encouraging fear. Nothing. Fear leads to darkness, depression, anger, irrationality, anxiety, consternation, unrest, and ultimately, destruction. Fear, as Yoda reminds us all, is the path to the Dark Side. Fear is a weapon, not a productive tool. Fear is a means of control. Fear should never be the basis for why anyone does anything regarding the health of the mind, body, and spirit.

There is one element in Christianity which was not borrowed from Paganism -- religious intolerance. Referring to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, a writer on China says: 'Between the followers of the three national religions there is not only a total absence of persecution and bitter feeling, but a very great indifference as to which of them a man may belong.... Among the politer classes, when strangers meet, the question is asked: 'To what sublime religion do you belong,' and each one pronounces a eulogium, not on his own religion, but on that professed by the others, and concludes with the oft-repeated formula 'Religions are many; reason is one; we are all brothers.

There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.

The remnant of the human species must understand that faith was the narcotic that fueled the insanity of religion. Conclusion: Invisible love is wasted. Invisible evidence is worthless. Invisible God is non-existent.

There is yet another class that, having found that their own religion not only prevents free thinking but that some of its philosophies are also against some basic social, economic and scientific concepts of life as required by the progressive society, comes to the illogical conclusion that all religions similarly thwart the growth of progressive societies... Such people fall easy prey to materialism and denounce all religions without having any definite idea of any religion at all.

There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by the evil-smelling effluvia of millions of other souls that have spun about a little under the sun and then burst…

The religious man will constantly look for the proof of Heaven and Hell; while the atheist man will constantly look to disprove Heaven and Hell. And they go on like that, locked-head in battle, both battling for beliefs that really cannot be proven. Neither the existence nor the non-existence of Heaven and Hell can be proven. And soon they will all be dead. And nobody will know where they go to, except they themselves who die. And so the battle continues, as it always has. And why should I join either side? If there is a God Almighty, I should imagine Him not needing human beings made out of carbon to believe in Him. What use to God would our species be? If He loves us, then He will love us because He chooses to love us. Never because He needs us to believe in Him. It wouldn't make any difference whatsoever, to an Almighty God, if carbon species breathing oxygen believed in Him or not. If He wanted to love the species then He just would. Regardless of their own persuasions. And if there is not an Almighty God, then it would not matter if I joined such a battle, either. Either way, why would I join such a cursed downward spiral? The truth that we do know for sure, is that it is our responsibility and it is in our best interest, to live our lives in such a way that creates Heaven on Earth and puts Hell on Earth far away.

The religion/ politics dichotomy is a false one. It isn't that politics has no role; it's that politics is simply inseparable from the Abrahamic religions. Religion is politics. That was the case during the Barbary confrontation in 1786, and it's the case with the Israel-Palestine conflict now. Throughout history, religion has simply been an excuse looking for a conflict.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

There was a pond right next to the house I grew up in. One afternoon while playing by the pond, I accidentally fell in it. There was nobody around at that time as it was afternoon and everybody was sleeping, and I was yet to learn swimming. So, I prayed to all the gods and goddesses like all the adult kids did in that culture. But no god or deity came to my rescue. So, I struggled under the murky water and finally managed to survive by pulling myself to the bank. Perhaps that was the first sign I received from Nature about the true helplessness of life. While you are drowning, no god is going to come to your rescue, so learn to swim my friend, because it is only you, the living god on earth, who can save yourself and nobody else. The only god there is, is your will to live - so, be aware of that Himalayan will and make it as conscientious as possible, for then only, can your godliness have any impact upon your life as well as the lives of others.

There was no hope on earth, and God seemed to have forgotten us. Some said they saw the Son of God; others did not see Him. If He had come, He would do some great things as He had done before. We doubted it because we had seen neither Him nor His works.

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

The sacralization of the party opened the way to the sacralization of Stalin when he became the supreme leader. After 1929, the political religion of Russia mainly concentrated on the deification of Stalin, who until his death in 1953 dominated the party and Soviet system like a tyrannical and merciless deity.

The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped us.

There was no plan for us. We are a misspelling being erased by Death in order for the story of total chaos to continue.

The science of this world, which has become a great power, has, especially in the last century, analysed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old. But they have only analysed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvellous. Yet the whole still stands steadfast before their eyes, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.... For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their in most being still follow the Christian ideal

These ordained atheists cultivate their egoism, the source of every atheist's activity, but they defile it and it becomes repulsive whereas the egoism of good atheists is a beautiful principle. They preach raging sermons not because they fear for the eternal damnation of their fold, but because they fear for the eternal damnation of their gold; before every sermon they feel their pockets to see if there's a hole, and if there is, they mend it with a sermon instead of a patch.

The seriousness of throwing over hell whilst still clinging to the Atonement is obvious. If there is no punishment for sin there can be no self-forgiveness for it. If Christ paid our score, and if there is no hell and therefore no chance of our getting into trouble by forgetting the obligation, then we can be as wicked as we like with impunity inside the secular law, even from self-reproach, which becomes mere ingratitude to the Savior. On the other hand, if Christ did not pay our score, it still stands against us; and such debts make us extremely uncomfortable. The drive of evolution, which we call conscience and honor, seizes on such slips, and shames us to the dust for being so low in the scale as to be capable of them. The 'saved' thief experiences an ecstatic happiness which can never come to the honest atheist: he is tempted to steal again to repeat the glorious sensation. But if the atheist steals he has no such happiness. He is a thief and knows that he is a thief. Nothing can rub that off him. He may try to sooth his shame by some sort of restitution or equivalent act of benevolence; but that does not alter the fact that he did steal; and his conscience will not be easy until he has conquered his will to steal and changed himself into an honest man... Now though the state of the believers in the atonement may thus be the happier, it is most certainly not more desirable from the point of view of the community. The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our hope lies now. Consequently, even if it were mentally possible for all of us to believe in the Atonement, we should have to cry off it, as we evidently have a right to do. Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.'

[T]hese days illusion only is scared, truth profane. … [S]acredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to highest degree of sacredness. Religion has disappeared, … for it has been substituted … the appearance of religion[.]

The sight of her made him understand why he'd lost his faith in God.

The study of Scripture I find to be quite like mastering an instrument. No one is so good that they cannot get any better; no one knows so much that they can know no more. A professional can spot an amateur or a lack of practice or experience a mile away. His technicality, his spiritual ear is razor-sharp. He is familiar with the common mistakes, the counter-arguments; and insofar as this, he can clearly distinguish the difference between honest critics of the Faith and mere fools who criticize that which they know nothing.