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...

I was perplexed by the failure of teachers at school to address what seemed the most urgent matter of all: the bewildering, stomach-churning insecurity of being alive. The standard subjects of history, geography, mathematics, and English seemed perversely designed to ignore the questions that really mattered. As soon as I had some inkling of what...

I was brought up Catholic. I’m lapsed. From the age of three I was with the nuns. Now I’m an atheist.

Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn’t irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it...

Not only is this not love; I think it is the most diabolical unfairness that was ever taught or devised.

A cult is a religion with no political power.

In Gilead, the narrator’s friend’s son describes himself not as an atheist but in “state of categorical unbelief.” He says, “I don’t even believe God doesn’t exist, if you see what I mean.” I pointed this passage out to Mom and said it closely matched my own views–I just didn’t think about religion.

For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements gives us organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.

Archaeology digs the Bible’s grave.

Lies don’t make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.

Science discovered long ago that carbon is a source of life. The ashes of my faith have prepared the ground for the planting of seeds that have produced new forms of truth, morality and meaning on my own terms, not according to the dogma laid down by religious ruffians or a vengeful God. If, as...

What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, ‘atheism’ is a term that should not even exist. No one needs to identify himself as a ‘non-astrologer’ or a ‘non-alchemist.’ We do not have words for people who doubt that...

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...

We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.

One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not–that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine...

moral” energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide.

The only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society.

Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.

In God We Trust?” How can I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help me God? Answer: I can’t. It’s a real problem. Don’t get me wrong – I’d like to believe in God. I wish I did, especially if He was the kind of God that thought America was #1. But...

No, not at all. I’m an atheist. You could say that I’m agnostic, but that’s just a certain kind of atheist (laughs). An atheist is someone who lacks a belief in a supernatural, and that’s me. I can’t say with absolute certainty that there is nothing beyond the material world, but there’s no reason for...

I am also atheist or agnostic (I don’t even know the difference). I’ve never been to church and prefer to think for myself.

If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man’s logic and no man’s ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that of God’s slave; no, not his slave even, but just a match which is aimlessly struck and then blown out...

Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much towards the taming of the asocial instincts. But not enough. It has ruled human society for many thousands of years and has had time to show what it can achieve. If it had succeeded in making the majority of mankind happy, in...

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.

Injustice upon earth renders the justice of of heaven impossible.

The hands that help are better far than lips that pray.

My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?We have found that man must depend on himself. He must clear the land; he must build the home; he must plow and plant; he must invent; he must work with hand and brain; he must overcome the difficulties and obstructions; he must conquer and enslave the...

Atheism … goes back to the Ancient Greek (a — a negative prefix, theos — god), evidencing the antiquity of the outlook of those who saw no presence of God (or gods) in their everyday lives, or who even denied the very existence of God (or gods). There are different types of atheism, but atheism...

A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.

Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new...

1) There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.2) An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater...

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....

Reasonableness is a matter of degree. Beliefs can be very reasonable (Japan exists), fairly reasonable (quarks exist), not unreasonable (there’s intelligent life on other planets) or downright unreasonable (fairies exist).There’s a scale of reasonableness, if you like, with very reasonable beliefs near the top and deeply unreasonable ones towards the bottom. Notice a belief can...

The path of life on our planet and maybe many others does not need a divinity to thrive, it needs no excuse to live, owes no debt to the universe because it is a part of the universe, no driving force other than the primal forces of physics and chemistry are needed, those two sets...

Number three: Stay away from the church. In the battle over science vs. religion, science offers credible evidence for all the serious claims it makes. The church says, ‘Oh, it’s right here in this book, see? The one written by people who thought the sun was magic?’ I for one would like to see some...

O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pieO Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,gimme a break before I die:grant me wisdom, will, & wit,purity, probity, pluck, & grit.Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind,gimme great abs & a steel-trap mind,and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice—these little blessings would sufficeto beget an earthly paradise:make the bad people good—and the good people...

This is the only real revelation — that God is only a trick with mirrors, our dark reflection in a glass.

HEAVEN: The big apartheid in the sky.

Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of...

God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.

Love and respect all people. Hate and destroy all faith.

The surname of an atheist is compound unfortunate plus being, therefore unfortunate-beings, making all atheists unfortunate beings because human beings are created by God and not products of big bang atoms undergoing evolution.

…there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity...

When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it...

It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle...

Dragons and Afterlife .. I don’t see any difference between both of them, we didn’t see neither the dragons nor afterlife, we just heard about them and both of them are superstitions with no scientific or logical evidence .. But the only reason you believe in afterlife unlike dragons is that you’ve been taught to...

No worries, Bro, let’s do this! Game over!

A long time ago I learned that an atheist and a believer trying to have a discussion about God and religion is like shooting the breeze and having it shoot back.