The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, isn't it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.
To you, I'm an atheist.
To God, I'm the loyal opposition.
I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time.
She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic.
The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.
The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.
I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry.
It’s possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?
My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
There is in every village a torch- the schoolteacher; and an extinguisher: the priest.
I tried to believe that there is a God, who created each of us in His own image and likeness, loves us very much, and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize, something is fucked up.
The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is because vampires are allergic to bullshit.
Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-seeing Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood of believing in God.
Who knew that the devil had a factory where he made millions of fossils, which his minions distributed throughout the earth, in order to confuse my tiny brain?
So. You get handed a holy sword by an archangel, told to go fight the forces of evil, and you somehow remain an atheist. Is that what you're saying?
A true friend is a gift from God. Since God doesn't exist, guess what? Neither do true friends.
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.
All thinking men are atheists.
Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.
I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.
In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
belief is the death of intelligence.
A cult is a religion with no political power.
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage
A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.
God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.
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.
Leaving your religion and having to invent your own system of values is a big deal, after all.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...
Nobody can tell what is right and what is wrong; what is righteous and what is evil. Even if there is a god and I had his teachings right before me, I would think it through and decide if that was right or wrong myself.
Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich
But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.
Blessed are the doubters: for they shall not be easily fooled.
Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed - in view of the overall shortage of time - by patience.
If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
I have seem even those who have long since abjured God die in grace. . . . Atheists don't use their drying to bargain for a better seat at the table; indeed they may not even believe supper is being served. They are not storing up 'merit.'; They just smile because their heart is ripe. They are kind for no particular reason; they just love.
I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it.
They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.
How I suffered when I had to preach to you those pious lies that I detest in my heart. What remorse your credulity caused me! A thousand times I was on the point of breaking out publicly and opening your eyes, but a fear stronger than myself held me back, and forced me to keep silence until my death.
Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but...
Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." (p. 129)
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?
I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.
Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live.
To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.
Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?
We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
[Letter to William Bradford Jr. April 1 1774]
How do you know when you're God?" "When I pray to him I find I am talking to myself.
I am now convinced that children should not be subjected to the frightfulness of the Christian religion [...]. If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admiration, what types of human behavior can be presented to them as reprehensible?
Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.
By Hays' reasoning, penetrating a rectum with a penis is a violation of how God meant humans to function. However, penetrating a human body with a sword, a common way to kill people in biblical times, is acceptable. Apparently human bodies were designed to be penetrated by metal implements, but not by flesh.
Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?
There's a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god.
Even now, there are still days so beautiful, I almost believe in God.
I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did.
"If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.
I have always considered "Pascal's Wager" a questionable bet to place, since any God worth believing in would prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.
It is straightforward - and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.
And why does this same God tell me how to raise my children when he had to drown his?
And fragile is thy tenure of this world
Still haunted by the monstrous ghost of God.
("To Science")
All men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'
"Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
I don't believe in angels and I have trouble with the whole God thing. I don't want to say I don't believe in God but I don't think I do. But I believe in people who do.
God is a book I can no longer read.
The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God.
The more a nation gets into darkness, the more it's going to hate the light. The more it's going to run from the light. And we have a generation of people who have given themselves to darkness, and they've embraced atheism, because it gets them away from moral responsibility to God.
If there is a Creator-God, it has used methods of creation that are indistinguishable from nature, it has declined to make itself known for all of recorded history, it doesn't intervene in affairs on earth, and has made itself impossible to observe. Even if you believe in that God... why would you think it would want to be worshiped?
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon - because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.
Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.
All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.
It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.
Go ahead, God, you fat, filthy motherfucker, lightning-bolt my ass into oblivion if you're so tough!
There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.
To say that atheism is not a religion is the equivalent of saying anarchy is not really a political creed
The human brain has the unique ability to doubt the reality presented to itself. To comprehend the dissonance between ideas and the truth of the surrounding world. God knows this, and it infuriates him. It terrifies him.
There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not.
Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.
The sight of her made him understand why he'd lost his faith in God.
Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.
After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, "When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, 'That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us.
The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.
Atheism is a religion of egoism....they hate the name "God" so much that they INSIST that whatever CAUSED BigBang should not be called anything else except Bigbang.
I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct - if God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal.