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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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!

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the trouble with people who do not believe in God is not that they then believe in nothing. It is that they will believe in anything. And the biggest anything...

I have a firm belief in such things as, you know, the water, the Earth, the trees and sky. And I’m wondering, it is increasingly difficult to find those elements in nature, because it’s nature...

we believe in god because we are afraid of life. we need someone to obey. we need to believe in something to get anything done.atheists are free from these shackles.

Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than...

The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us,...

Love has no value in the absence of truth.

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)

One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—’may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn...

At some level, it is even tempting to think that since strict materialism is among the most incoherent of superstitions – one that has never really asked the question of the being of things in...

I had to wonder what sadistic pleasure and entertainment human suffering must provide to the divine game players who decided the fate of their pawns in a board game they made of life.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

What we fail to realize is we often become like Pharisees in our ruthless attempts to identify Pharisees (and impostors). While indeed some people use the old laws of religious pride to tear down men...

There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity’s original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly...

To believe that there is no God takes infinitely more faith than to believe God exists, because all the evidence must be ignored. Atheism is the epitome of blind faith.

You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at...

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman… I have been traveling over the old world during the last...

I’m now a bit anti-Jewish since my last visit to the synagogue, but my atheism does not necessarily reject religion.

For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. If people need religion, ignore them and maybe they will ignore you, and you can go on with your life. It...

If we had spent our time on our children education rather than praying; we would have had a three times more educated people than the whole world’s population.

Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child’s emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself...