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.

Either god exists or it doesn’t exist. If a god does exist, it either interacts with the universe in some detectable way or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, that god is indistinguishable from a non-existent...

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...

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was...

Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue...

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...

the Christian majority’s” private liking.

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.

A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.

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...

Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely...

Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself...

That name was a kind of joke, and not a very good one. An author, Leon Lederman, wanted to call it ‘that goddamn particle’ because it was clear it was going to be a tough...

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...

I am born here among the monsters; if I have to survive I must act like one of them.

Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring.” (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)

If the creation of the Universe was left up to a atheist, we would still have nothing.

Given the level of understanding and the fact that they believed already in a set of myths and superstitions, it was the easiest and fastest way to proceed.

Whether you say that a god does exist, or that none do, it is a claimto know (or at least believe in) something. Once you claim to knowsomething, you can’t call that a lack of...

The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there’s any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.

Napoleon, when hearing about Laplace’s latest book, said, ‘M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator.’Laplace responds, ‘Je n’avais...

I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all....

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...

There is no higher authority.

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

It is possible to conceive, Anselm said, of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even an atheist can conceive of such a superlative being, though he would deny its existence in the...

For those in love with an illusion often refuse to accept reality

God must have a weird sense of values, and if there’s a Judgment Day, as some folks think, He’s going to have a lot to answer for.

It’s a strange myth that atheists have nothing to live for. It’s the opposite. We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for.

You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by...

Injustice upon earth renders the justice of of heaven impossible.