Best 1717 quotes in «atheist quotes» category

Yes an atheist priest can perfectly minister to a believing congregation and miracles can happen in that congregation. Miracles depend on the faith of the believer, not that of the officiant. A bartender who never takes alcohol can serve alcohol to his clients. What is necessary is that the priest believes he is doing the good work. The congregation needs faith and it helps them. It would be evil to deny them such a service in the name of his lack of faith. - Bangambiki Habyarimana

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot apply a definitive conclusion to the favorable outcomes of random chance without also applying a definitive conclusion to the unfavorable outcomes of random chance. If you are not fair in both instances, it means you have just committed a variation of what is known as special pleading.

You can repeat lies of others without hesitation Because, you don’t have to give justification But, saying truth you have to be fearless and courageous Because, you have to defend your views You can not say truth without hurting sentiments of many people

You live in a society, that always demands you to have a label to define yourself. Now it's up to you, whether you choose man-made labels like 'religious' and 'atheist', or your innate natural label gifted by Mother Nature, i.e. 'human'.

You need a body to preserve your soul, not a set of abstract principles.

Absence of proof isn't proof of absence.

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomenon.

Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.

A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.

Absolutists frighten me. During all the endless discussions on my blog about evolution, intelligent design, God, and the afterworld, numbering altogether thousands of comments, I have never named my beliefs, although readers have freely informed me that I am an atheist, and agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist - which I am.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

According to "matter-ism," matter is all that exists. The only things that are real are physical things in motion governed by natural law. That story starts, "In the beginning were the particles," or, as one famous person put it, "The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be." No God. No souls. No Heaven or Hell. No miracles. No transcendent morality. Just molecules in motion following the patterns of natural law. This is the story that most atheists, most "skeptics," most humanists, and most Marxists believe is true.

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.

According to the teaching of our Lord, what is wrong with the world is precisely that it does not believe in God. Yet it is clear that the unbelief which he so bitterly deplored was not an intellectual persuasion of God's non-existence. Those whom he rebuked for their lack of faith were not men who denied God with the top of their minds, but men who, while apparently incapable of doubting him with the top of their minds, lived as though he did not exist.

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.

A "communist/socialist/progressive" is an oxymoron, like an "atheist/evangelical Christian/Muslim.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

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

Actually I'm pretty adamant about, you know, the whole God thing and it seems that skeptics are by and large atheists or something approaching that, which I strongly identify with. So it turned out to be a good thing and I have become enthusiastically part of it.

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.

A disbelief in God does not result in a belief in nothing; disbelief in God usuallyresults in a belief in anything.

Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

After a few days in hospital, I was thinking, Oh, gee - I raised in a church, Protestant upbringing which I'd rejected as an adult - I'm lying in bed thinking, Hmmm, maybe I ought to pray. They always say there are no atheists in a foxhole... and I thought, Here I am in a pretty good-sized foxhole... and I thought Naahhh. I wouldn't respect any God who would listen to me after I'd rejected him so vociferously.

A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, "When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, 'That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us.

A god that does not manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist.

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.

Agnostics cannot understand Christ for the same reason a thief find a policeman -they don't want to.

Again, I hear almost everyday from atheists who write off religion as primitive, premodern nonsense. I summon Aquinas, Augustine, Paul [of Tarsus], Teresa of Avila, Joseph Ratzinger, and Edith Stein-in all their intellectual rigor-as allies in the the struggle against this dismissive atheism.

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!

A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol.

"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.

A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.

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.

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency - issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights - the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.

Ah, the bitter, hopeless heart-hunger of godlessness none but an atheist can understand!

All manners of freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of conscious, freedom of thought...it accepts tolerance. But it is not an atheist society. Religion is the private affair of an individual...be present in the public domain, but state has to be clearly separated from religion. When I'm speaking, I'm speaking only for myself. At the same time, I know that these ideas have wide support among the Iranian population.

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.

All human beings are moral beings. So, certainly there are alliances. We are in the countries, that are secular states, and we obey its laws. I think we must recognize that common moral base. But in alliances we must always be careful just of what level the alliance is perceived. I will go and lecture to an atheist society, for example, but I will not lecture for them, because I am not an atheist. You see the difference.

A little philosophy makes a man an Atheist: a great deal converts him to religion

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

All religions are pieced together out of elements which seem so at odds with reason that any intelligence laughs at them.