Atheism Quotes - Page 72

I'm constantly reading books on God or the absence of God and atheism.

If life can emerge just from naturalistic circumstances, then God is out of a job.

There is no way you can harmonize neo-Darwinism and Christianity.

A man convinced against his will is not convinced.

Atheism has been on the rise for years now, and the Bible of the atheists is The Origin of Species.

I am nothing and should be everything.

Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

It wouldn't matter if every single President since Washington had been a Bible-toting, evangelical Christian. They weren't, of course, but even if they had been, it still would not change the secular foundation of our republic. Christians like to quote various Presidents or Supreme Court Justices who (quite incorrectly) have referred to our "Christian nation." But what do those quotes prove? I could quote Richard Nixon, but would that prove that ours was intended to be a nation of crooks?

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.

A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts - a "bundle of facts." Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the "law" because they act in that way.

The absence of theistic belief...

Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the power.

It might be said that religious freedom in the American sense, incorporating the separation of church and state, has been the pivotal concept of the national development of the United States of America.

My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can't.

The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.

One would fancy that the zealots in atheism would be exempt from the single fault which seems to grow out of the imprudent fervor of religion. But so it is, that irreligion is propagated with as much fierceness and contention, wrath and indignation, as if the safety of mankind depended upon it.

Supposing all the great points of atheism were formed into a kind of creed, I would fain ask whether it would not require an infinite greater measure of faith than any set of articles which they so violently oppose.

In a liberal scientific society, to claim that you are above error is the height of irresponsibility.

So great was the preference given to sacred over profane learning that Christianity had been in existence fifteen hundred years, and had not produced a single astronomer.

How is it that the Church produced no geometer in her autocratic reign of twelve hundred years?

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.

He must be able to hear them [the counter arguments] from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

Every established fact which is too bad to admit of any other defence is always presented to us as an injunction of religion.

The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind.