Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
He didn't like religion, hadn't liked it for years, but he adored churches, loved them like old scientific instruments whose time is long past but are nevertheless fascinating and strange.
I do admit to mocking atheists, because mockery is a legitimate form of debate according to my rule Book. God Himself mocks evil men who refuse His moral government (see Proverbs 1:26-27).
A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers-including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.
I'm probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.
I don't have any real spirituality in my life - I'm kind of an atheist - but when music can take me to the highest heights, it's almost like a spiritual feeling. It fills that void for me.
I don't think there is prejudice against atheists the same way there is prejudice against fat people. I don't think people hate or contemn atheists; I think people feel sorry for atheists.
Atheists in our midst are proof that all consciences can be accommodated here, even those that have no ground for holding that conscience is sacred, inalienable, and prior to civil society.
The notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true, and therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense.
For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists, but between oppressors and oppressed, between those who want to keep this unjust society and those who want to struggle for justice.
As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
The existence of a world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all of his perfection, creating imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell.
Atheist n. A person to be pitied in that he is unable to believe things for which there is no evidence, and who has thus deprived himself of a convenient means of feeling superior to others.
There is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship
Father was an atheist; he had even joined the Skeleton Army - a club of men who went about in masks or black faces, with ribald placards and a brass band, to make war upon the Salvation Army.
According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I'm looking at God. Whenever I'm listening to something I'm listening to God.
Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. We will one day understand what causes it, and then cease to call it divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.
I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
The Atheist waits for proof of God. Till that proof comes he remains, as his name implies, without God. His mind is open to every new truth, after it has passed the warder Reason at the gate.
O Reader! hast thou eer stood to see The Holly-tree? The eye that contemplates it well perceies Its glossy leaes Ordered by an Intelligence so wise As might confound the Atheist's sophistries.
In two senses: One is that you cannot go on the street and shout that you are an atheist, the other is that you are never given the intellectual framework for calling your faith into question.
It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.
The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
...if you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed not to believe in, and I've never seen an explanation.
"Agnostic" is a much more recent word than "atheist", coined by Thomas Huxley in 1869 to mean "without knowledge of God" and acquiring the usage of "being doubtful about the existence of God."
According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes, I'm looking at God. Whenever I'm listening to something, I'm listening to God.
Atheism is an effect of that knowledge [a poll showed atheists knew more about religion than anyone else], not a lack of knowledge. I gave a bible to my daughter. That is how you make atheists.
The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.
Atheist is really ʺa thoroughly honest, unambiguous term,ʺ it admits of no paltering and of no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear - cut issues and unambiguous speech.
Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing.
I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.
For me, equal citizenship for Muslims, Christians, Jews, Atheists and Agnostics is an indisputable principle. Whoever you are, you should get the same rights with no discussion and no compromise.
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
My studies in Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and science are all summed up in the image of a mouse called man running in and out of every hole in the Cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.
I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.
Atheists have just as much civil right to teach atheism as Christians have to teach Christianity; agnostics have just as much right to teach agnosticism as Christians have to teach their religion.
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?
Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.
No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.
It just seems like atheists are not included in the basket of diversity in America, which is odd because we are the biggest minority. That is a bigger minority than any other minority you can name.
I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
If you divide Christians into denominations, agnostics and atheists come in third, behind Catholics and Baptists. That's interesting when you contrast it with the lack of influence of nonbelievers.
In his book Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson referred to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as the three devils of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Nietzshean dogma influenced each of them.
We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways. To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs.
Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.
Atheist isn't really the right word because they tended to believe in some sort of Enlightenment, capital 'N' Nature kind of god. But these were people who in their times were criticized as infidels.
If there are atheists, who is to be blamed if not the mercenary tyrants of souls who, in revolting us against their swindles, compel some feeble spirits to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?
I consider myself a person who comes from a Muslim culture. In any case, I would not say that I'm an atheist. So I'm a Muslim who associates historical and cultural identification with this religion.
He is an atheist who does not believe in himself. The old religions said that he was an atheist who did not believe in God. The new religion says that he is an atheist who does not believe in himself.