Atheism Quotes - Page 80

I felt like a loser. I was unhappy as a child most of the time. We were terribly poor and I hated my size.

Atheism is not a matter of the mind; it is a matter of the heart.

Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.

The opinion formulated by the Church has more value in my eyes than human reasons, whatever they may be.

It is raining bombs on the house of the Lord. I go in fear and trembling lest one of these terrible bombers gets into difficulties.

Gentleness and peacefulness regulate our proceedings; theirs are dictated by fury. We employ reason, they accumulate faggots. They preach nothing but love, and breathe nothing but blood. Their words are humane, but their hearts are cruel.

I can't believe it. Maybe there is a God after all. Herbal supplement sales only grew 1 percent last year. The years before, it was 17 percent, 12 percent, 18 percent.

The religious hypothesis, therefore, must be considered only as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe: but no just reasoner will ever presume to infer from it any single fact, and alter or add to the phenomena, in any single particular.

One does not have to prove a negative. One should assume a negative.

In the absence of evidence, the scientist says, 'I don't know,' but the religionist says, 'I believe.'

Religion is not so bad, unless you believe it.

It is true that a great deal of the rhetoric of the new atheism is often just the confessional rote of materialist fundamentalism (which, like all fundamentalisms, imagines that in fact it represents the side of reason and truth); but it is also true that the new atheism has sprung up in a garden of contending fundamentalisms.

Atheism in not simply beyond reason, it is contrary to reason.

All creeds are fallible and uncertain evidences of evangelical piety.

God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.

I waver between a cop-out agnostic and principled atheism

You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time, but I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime.

Any well-established village in New England or the northern Middle West could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

I don't want them (religious followers) trying to inflict their belief on me.

But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.

The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.