Atheism QuotesThis page is somewhere to gather all the quotes I thought might be interesting or relevant during discussions regarding my atheism. I have already been surprised when an unlearned Christian actually enlisted the help of Thomas Jefferson to advertise his cause. Which is hilarious, given what Jefferson has said about Christianity. Enough context! On with the quotes. Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man. I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature. I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astounding universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy. Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. We will one day understand what causes it, and then cease to call it divine. And so it is with everything in the universe. If lightening is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees. It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science. If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities. I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. Faith means not wanting to know what is true. I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul ... No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life – our desire to go on living ... our dread of coming to an end." It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma. Religion is a byproduct 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? Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. Religion is based ... mainly on fear ... fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. ... 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. This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there was no religion in it. By simple common sense, I don't believe in god. Despite George Washington and the cherry tree, we no longer have a society especially consecrated to truth. The culture produces an infinity of TV shows and movies depicting the importance of honesty. But they're really talking only about the importance of being honest about your feelings. Sharing feelings is not the same thing as telling the truth. We've become a country of situationalists. Only sheep need a shepherd. With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. History teaches us that no other cause has brought more death than the word of god. I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. I contend that we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. I refuse to believe in a god who is the primary cause of conflict in the world, preaches racism, sexism, homophobia and ignorance, then then sends me to hell if I'm 'bad'". …I was on a two-hour [radio] show. For the first hour, I discussed the origin of life, development through chance of nucleic acid molecules, of evolution by natural selection, etc., etc., etc. In the second hour, the listeners phoned in questions, and some of them were from Fundamentalists who were simply furious with me. They quoted from the Bible and denounced me as someone who would steal the beauty of the universe – as though the conceptions of evolution and the long history of the stars were not infinitely more beautiful than the story of a petulant God making and destroying a pint-sized basketball of a world. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites 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 may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies? What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment. The divinity of Jesus has made a convenient cover for absurdity. No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. 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. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo, "did you tell me?" Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies. So there you are. I stand four-square for reason, and object to what seems to me to be irrationality, whatever the source. If you are on my side in this, I must warn you that the army of the night has the advantage of overwhelming numbers, and, by its very nature, is immune to reason, so that it is entirely unlikely that you and I can win out. We will always remain a tiny and probably hopeless minority, but let us never tire of presenting our view, and of fighting the good fight for the right. Atheism is nothing more than the noises people make when in the presence of religious dogma. If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people. The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born. In Christianity, neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if no one believes it. Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. We will one day understand what causes it, and then cease to call it divine. And so it is with everything in the universe. My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy. |