Atheism Quotes - Page 28

I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it's art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I'd like to add a little to that goodness.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.

If, unable to solve the mysteries of Providence, we plunge into Atheism, we only increase a thousand fold the darkness by which we are surrounded

As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.

The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.

However far back we may be able to trace the - so to speak - internal history of the Universe, there can be no question of arguing that this or that external origin is either probable or improbable. We do not have, and we necessarily could not have, experience of other Universes to tell us that Universes, or Universes with these particular features, are the work of Gods, or of Gods of this or that particular sort.

Many argue that Christianity is "different" from other religions - that it is primarily about love of one's fellow man. The Crusades, The Inquisition, Calvin's Geneva all prove that this is not the case. These events were pre-eminently about obedience to authority.

To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.

I am certain and have always stressed that the destination of mankind is to become more and more humane. The ideal of humanity has to be revived.

In this world him who does not abandon himself the Almighty will not desert. Him who helps himself will the Almighty always also help; He will show him the way by which he can gain his rights, his freedom, and therefore his future.

The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.

The battle over the validity of evolution has been publicly posed as a scientific one. However, you will find little sign of it in scientific journals, where such quarrels as exist are over details, not the basic concept... Evolution has proved so useful as a paradigm for the origin and structure of life that it constitutes the foundation of the sciences of biology and medicine.

It was not that I thought I was smarter. I had simply explored science and found what seemed to me a far more powerful authority. And, I did not steal or murder because I thought they were wrong, not because I feared damnation.

In a Jewish theological seminar there was an hours-long discussion about proofs of the existence of God. After some hours, one rabbi got up and said, "God is so great, he does not even need to exist."

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.

I am anxious to see the doctrine of one god commenced in our state. But the population of my neighborhood is too slender, and is too much divided into other sects to maintain any one preacher well. I must therefore be contented to be an Unitarian by myself, although I know there are many around me who would become so, if once they could hear the questions fairly stated.

I trust there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.

It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason.

No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute Knowledge of Fact.

Communism is what happens when atheism meets bureaucracy.

I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute ... it may be the most important contribution that we can make.

God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.

The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know.

Strange but true: those who have loved God most have loved men least.