I was not an atheist. Few people really are, for that means blind faith in the strange proposition that this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere.

The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and...

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was,...

Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal...

I suppose the spiritual trance is harder to break than the religious one because the delusion is more difficult to distinguish. You have a quasi-cloud of ideas that include wonderful concepts of openness and altruism...

If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.’s. Bless you.

What I admire about the modern atheist is not at all his logic, but rather his gift of imagination. There will always be the cartoon versions of Christianity further perpetuated by the extremist atheists who...

God loves atheists. The former ones make the most compelling theists because they’re so empirically familiar with how atheists think.

Religious people claim that it’s just the fundamentalists of each religion that cause problems. But there’s got to be something wrong with the religion itself if those who strictly adhere to its most fundamental principles...

It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

The more I read arguments for atheism, the more I am convinced it takes a very strong faith to be an atheist. And atheism seems to me the least reasonable of all faiths.

First the priests arrive. Then the conquistadores.

Religion as a philosophy is superior to religion as a practice.

Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith...

Religion was (is) always steps ahead of science; because religion lies and science can’t.

The only interesting thing about religion is how many people it’s slaughtered. Communism and Nazism are religions as well, make no mistake about it.

Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary...

The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or...

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

Who am I? What am I doing here? Who are these others? This trilogy of spiritual conundrums is as practical as it is philosophical. Mindful inquiry devoted to these three questions is as spiritual as...

In a society where women are truly equal to men, a kid bred by a theist mother and an atheist father is born an agnostic. In a patriarchal society, the kid is automatically an atheist.

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.

Every morning I wake up and thank God that I don’t believe in him.

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...

I believe a Christian muffler shop owner should have the same right to refuse service to a gay couple, as a gay lifeguard has to refuse service to a drowning Christian.

To an even moderately sophisticated and well-read person it should come as no surprise that any religion at all has its hidden as well as its obvious beauties and is capable of profound and impressive...

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.

Sometimes when I’m faced with an atheist, I am tempted to invite him to the greatest gourmet dinner that one could ever serve, and when we have finished eating that magnificent dinner, to ask him...

I regard teaching religion as purveying lies.

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...

The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is because vampires are allergic to bullshit.

The entire Jesus concept, that human sacrifice should be the substratum of a moral religion of love, strikes me as incongruous. God condemned us and Jesus saved us, and they are actually the same being?...

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an...

Speaking to a ‘non-theist’, ‘How do you what you don’t believe in if you have never read the Bible?'”.

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There`s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

Atheism is without God. It does not assert no God. The atheist does not say that there is no God, but he says ‘I know not what you mean by God. I am without the...

I don’t want to believe. I want to know.

What can I do? Pray? Would God allow such agony? Sure he would, they would say. To test your faith. She laughed. My heart is crumbling, she said. But I will not give my last...

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...

You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust;...

There may be some truth (atheists) do not need to believe in a god to be good, but then if they do not believe in a god, who do they believe gives the Universal Law...

As Peter Berger has noted, the strategy of apologizing for Christian faith by trying to demonstrate its social utility is always eventually self-liquidating. Sooner of later people realize that a great many of the supposedly...

Leave!’ Hazel Motes cried. ‘Go ahead and leave! The truth don’t matter to you. Listen,’ he said, pointing his finger at the rest of them, ‘the truth don’t matter to you. If Jesus had redeemed...

Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.

I pity the atheist, for he can never fully appreciate a sinful pleasure.

Countries with a high percentage of nonbelievers are among the freest, most stable, best-educated, and healthiest nations on earth. When nations are ranked according to a human-development index, which measures such factors as life expectancy,...

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage

As all men are touched by God’s love, so all are also touched by the desire for His intimacy. No one escapes this longing; we are all kings in exile, miserable without the Infinite. Those...

For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.

Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken,I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love themAnd to know...