Some foolish men declare that creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill advised and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before the creation? If you say he was transcendent then and needed no support, where is he now? How could God have made this...

Darkness can inspire light, and light can inspire darkness, its just a difference of distant of these two contrasting forces.

Let’s Look at Subjective Religious Experiences This Way:What if ten thousand people went up to a mountain top, saw something, and then they all disagreed with what they saw, even people who largely agreed with each other? Even with this best possible analogy to subjective religious experiences we would still have a reason to think...

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call “atheists,” and those who think they are facts are “religious.” Which group really gets the message?

It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith… these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I’m worried that our religious...

Spiritual”: religion without any rules. All the comfort of fictitious friends with none of their demands.

Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn’t come right out and say there’s nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism’s answer to theism is not atheism but...

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?

Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately.

Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to...

Devil’s Advocate,” in order to fast‐track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono.

I don’t profess any religion; I don’t think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.'[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by the evil-smelling effluvia of millions of other souls that have spun about a little under the sun and then burst…

Nothing in any religious teachings goes beyond Humanism, unless you add the supernatural…Make believe is the only difference between being human and being religious.

In his numerous historical and Scriptural works Bauer rejects all supernatural religion, and represents Christianity as a natural product of the mingling of the Stoic and Alexandrian philosophies…

It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.

Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one’s highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It’s a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the...

Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis–race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent...

Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn’t have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.

Jesus would pray to himself and cry. I often do the same.

You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say ‘God is love,’ they will claim that you are taking things out of context!

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.

There’s a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has...

denial circus” going decade after decade. We have, for too long, supported this tyranny of delusion. We have given the guru and the preacher the stage one too many times. It is time to wake up and replace the preacher with the human teacher—a human who is the intelligence of their whole organism.

He rejected traditional religious beliefs (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) not on the basis of any reasoned argument, nor even with an expression of emotional antipathy, for he loved to use religious expressions and metaphors, but simply by saying that they are naive.

Mange af mine egne tror – ligesom jeg – ikke på Gud. Men det er den samme Gud, vi ikke tror på. Det er meget vigtigt!

Religion is like drugs, it destroys the thinking mind.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary...

We’ve also evolved the ability to simply ‘pay it forward’: I help you, somebody else will help me. I remember hearing a parable when I was younger, about a father who lifts his young son onto his back to carry him across a flooding river. ‘When I am older,’ said the boy to his father,...

The difference between a theist and an atheist is the degree to which God has revealed himself to them.

The science of this world, which has become a great power, has, especially in the last century, analysed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old. But they have only analysed the parts and...

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest...

I’m a born-again atheist.

We must fight for the freedom of religion; because that is the only way we can stand against irrationality.

I am scared of the day, when they turn atheism into another religion for controlling masses.

The aim of this book is not to make atheism a popular belief or even to overcome its invisibility. My object is not utopian. It is merely to provide good reasons for being an atheist. … My object is to show that atheism is a rational position and that belief in God is not. I...

Atheism certainly promotes a low view of humanity- how much lower can you get than thinking yourself an accidental by-product of a series of even larger accidents!

What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn’t pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it’s as if he didn’t. My form of atheism, however, leads inevitably...

My lack of faith in God is not a dilapidated house.It does not need to be razed to the ground or burned down to cinders.I refuse to be the wounded woman on a crossthat you crucify with your disapproval like nails;I will only be the woman who believes in thunderstormsthe same way lightning loves the...

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we...

I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.

It is a challenge to love someone who does not see the divine as you do, and much harder still to date someone who considers your spirituality a design flaw in an otherwise worthwhile human being.

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.

Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.

…What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might.When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become...

A true friend is a gift from God. Since God doesn’t exist, guess what? Neither do true friends.

It is thus religion infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity and fanaticism: if he has a heated imagination it drives him on to fury; if he has activity, it makes him a madman, who is frequently as cruel to himself, as he is dangerous and incommodious to others: if, on the contrary,...

Let us account for all we see by the facts we know. If there are things for which we cannot account, let us wait for light. To account for anything by supernatural agencies is, in fact to say that we do not know. Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do...