If God’s love encompasses the whole world and if everyone who does not believe in him will perish, then surely this question needs to be asked: When, after two thousand years, does God’s plan kick...

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend’s...

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and...

We do not have bodies—we are bodies! What could possibly be wrong with that form of consciousness? It is all energy anyways.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

If god created man in his own image, how come I’m not invisible?

Atheism is not synonymous with anti-theism and not all atheists are ‘active.’ There are many non-believers who aren’t activists, who don’t oppose religion at all, or who are simply not all are interested in discussing...

Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.

Epicurus’s old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and...

Atheism is partly the result of bad theology, an unpaid bill resulting from failures in depicting God. It is not surprising that many have rejected God when there has been so little to attract them...

Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world...

Go ahead, God, you fat, filthy motherfucker, lightning-bolt my ass into oblivion if you’re so tough!

Leaving one religion for the sake of another one is like breaking with a rapist for the sake of dating a misogynist.

[Jürgen Habermas’ obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title ‘Wild Orchids and Trotsky.’ In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside...

At one time,’ Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, ‘at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in...

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with ‘winning or...

How convinced are you that man was created in the image of God when you can’t see the image of God?

Our assholes will be clean but we must never wash our hands. Our immune systems will be strengthened by our being dirty. Not filthy. Just mildly grimy. Filthy fingernails have always been a favorite fashion...

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

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

Intellect, at its best, can make you agnostic. Being theist or atheist is still a matter of choice.

Today evolution of human intelligence has advanced us to the stage where most of us are too smart to invent new gods but are reluctant to give up the old ones.

There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as...

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight,...

I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: “But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God...

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...

Well it’s fairly straightforward: there isn’t one [a god]. And there’s no evidence for one, no reason to believe that there is one, and so I don’t believe that there is one. And I think...

Like the most of you, I was raised among people who knew – who were certain. They did not reason or investigate. They had no doubts. They knew that they had the truth. In their...

In the Christian religion, though perhaps not in any other, we frequently find a conception of god that is selfcontradictory and therefore corresponds to nothing. That is the conception formed by the following three propositions...

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of...

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense

I am so sorry to hear of Asher’s passing. I will miss his scientific insight and advice, but even more his humor and stubborn integrity. I remember when one of his colleagues complained about Asher’s...

My religious friends – and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox – were convinced that God had a “plan” for us, and since...

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other...

This is why I respect those who are curious about God, but I beware of those who claim to find Him.

In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the...

We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The...

(Marlowe’s) Faustus stubbornly reverts to his atheistic beliefs and continues his elementary pagan re-education ~ the inferno to him is a ‘place’ invented by men.

In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when...

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.

norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist...

Euripides long ago said, ‘who dares not speak his free thought is a slave.’ I nominated myself as an ‘infidel’ as a challenge to thought for those who are asleep.

Nothing draws people more quickly away from religion than an open mind.

I don’t know if there’s a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn’t the kind of thing you can know. It isn’t a knowable item.) But...

I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.(from Who’s Who in Hell)

The vulgar modern argument used against religion, and lately against common decency, would be absolutely fatal to any idea of liberty. It is perpetually said that because there are a hundred religions claiming to be...

Many of the innovations in science and philosophy have come from unbelievers, some of whom died for their ‘unbeliefs.’ Without unbelief, we might well be living in the Dark Ages or at least in the...

It’s perfectly clear to me that religion is a myth. It’s something we have invented to explain the inexplicable. My religion and the spiritual side of my life come from a sense of connection to...

There is no doubt that we have defeated too many dictators; but we must not forget that the religion is still out there.