Atheist Quotes - Page 22

Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

The best reply to an atheist is to give him a good dinner and ask him if he believes there is a cook.

A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.

Religion is a group of scam artists that sell the calming idea that your body is a temple of God, while your mind belongs to them.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue.

I am an atheist. I have a very different take on who God is. Man invented God because he needed him. God is us.

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.

Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.

Atheists themselves used to be very comfortable in maintaining that the universe is eternal and uncaused. The problem is that they can no longer hold that position because modern evidence that the universe started with the Big Bang. So they can't legitimately object when I make the same claim about God - he is eternal and he is uncaused.

The atheist is cheating whenever he makes a moral judgment, acting as though it has an objective reference, when his philosophy in fact precludes it.

As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.

Even Helen Keller, who was born blind and deaf, could see God. No doubt, in her silent darkness, every fragrant flower, every ray of the warm sun, every taste that touched her tongue told her that there was a God who created all things. Jodie Foster shouldn't therefore be surprised that people are surprised that she's an atheist.

The atheist risk everything for the present and the future, on the basis of a belief that we are uncaused by any intelligent being. We just happen to be here. That one is willing to live and die in that belief is a very high price to pay for conjecture.

Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.

I have I guess 3 passions. One is the Constitution. The other is jazz and the other is being an atheist prolifer which, of course, gets me in a lot of trouble - all of which combines into free expression.

We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.

If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.

Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

The word 'Christianity' is already a misunderstanding - in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.

From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.