But the question is, historically, part of the group that you’re a part of – whether it’s racial, gender, religious, whatever – how has your group fared historically? The groups that you’re a part of?...

If I say ‘there is no God’, I disrespect your belief; how when you say ‘there is a God’ you do not disrespect mine?

Being an atheist means you have to realise that when you die, that really is it. You’ve got to make the most of what you’ve got here and spread as much influence as you can....

God seemed to have become a brand, a packaging, and people purchase this trusted brand with such faith and devotion that they no longer care who the vendor is.

Take the Holocaust for example: Why did God allow Hitler to kill millions of innocent Jews? Because God didn’t want to step on Hitler’s toes and interfere with his free will? That’s a pretty lame...

But no sooner had morning broken than he took hold of his whip and ceremoniously stepped out to address his slaves. Each blow was liberating, it was like unshaking proof of the great lie of...

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?

It means that your birth, with all your particulars, is a wildly improbable event, and hence precious. You won the sweepstakes by being born at all. Think of all the wallflower sperm and egg cells....

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...

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...

Atheists determine there is no God based on their own intellect. I’ve determined there is a God based on His intellect.

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!

…for my master, bad as I have thought him, is not half so bad as this woman.–To be sure she must be an atheist!

If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our...

good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the ‘minimal view’ is that in trying to be...

If a faithful account was rendered of man’s ideas upon the Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word Gods has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown...

Upon the shadowy shore of death the sea of trouble casts no wave. Eyes that have been curtained by the everlasting dark, will never know again the burning touch of tears. Lips touched by eternal...

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...

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter...

Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution.

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still...

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

Where human knowledge ends the imagined God begins.

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...

In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of...

Now, I don’t believe that a god exists. I think that gods are creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand...

Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.

We all know that any emotional bias — irrespective of truth or falsity — can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely...

The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and...

Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion.

I do not believe in any religion, I will have nothing to do with immortality. We are miserable enough in this life without speculating upon another.

It was about that time [415 BCE] that the poet Diagoras of Melos was proscribed for atheism, he having declared that the non-punishment of a certain act of iniquity proved that there were no gods....

Sometimes people who adamantly assert an opinion or view don’t even hold it themselves.

I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

…The existence or non-existence of an undefined ‘god’ are quite pointless.[From ‘Why I am a Secular Humanist’]

A man without reason is no better than a mad dog, and mad dogs must be put down for the good of everyone.

The survival of religion is on the basis of torture and punishment; end of torture is end of religion.

I think we have underestimated their Gods; they have made millions stupid, and we are even not able to get one out of that stupidity.

I was lost a long time, without knowing it. Without the Faith, one is free, and that is a pleasant feeling at first. There are no questions of conscience, no constraints, except the constraints of...

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....

People will say,”there’s heaven and hell”, and they take it so serious that they look so sorrowful with penitence. I would rather ask them to show me the route that leads to heaven or hell.

When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to...

I often asked Laplace what he thought of God. He owned that he was an atheist.

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,...

It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various...

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...

I am not religious in any sense; in fact, I consider myself an atheist.

Atheist’s denial of God’s existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist’s claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God’s existence.

It’s not arrogant to say that you can’t figure out the answers to the universe with your internal faith. It’s not arrogant to know that there’s no omniscient, omnipotent prime mover in the universe who...