Atheism Quotes - Page 39

Faith can remove a mountain, but doubt can put it back in place again

Mark, therefore, the ordinary theory of practical religion, what it leads to. Charity is great, but the moment you say it is all, you run the risk of running into materialism. It is not religion. It is no better than atheism - a little less.

Witches admitted their relations with the devil. Our blood boils - how could they be forced to admit this when there is no devil. But reason tells us this is not true. The devil does exist and was in fact the inquisitor.

What do I believe? I believe in God, if he exists.

Puritans should wear fig leaves on their eyes.

Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic.

... All questions concerning the rise of Christianity are one: How was it done? How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization? Although this is the only question, it requires many answers - no one thing led to the triumph of Christianity.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?

But honest men do not pretend to know; they are candid and sincere; they love the truth; they admit their ignorance, and they say, We do not know.

I turned to speak to God About the world's despair But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn't there.

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak.

The only thing particularly new about the "new atheism" is its nastiness.

Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby.

I love how people walk around with crucifixes, skullcaps, pointy hats, funny beards and then say 'you should keep your atheism to yourself.'

Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth.

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.