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.

Unlike humanity, my mind isn’t so frail as to simply climb under gravity and submit to God.

I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.

The intellectual support for UNBELIEF is about as stable as the stock market.

They had…finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.

Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will. Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and...

Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.

There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

[From a New York Times biography from May 27, 2010 entitled Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’]Beauvoir herself was as devout an atheist as she had once been a Catholic, and she dismisses...

Christianity also stands in opposition to intellectual, as well as physical, health. To doubt becomes sin. ‘Faith means not wanting to know what it true’ a description that strikes me as stunning and quite exact.

Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites...

The biblical account of the origin of the cosmos in Genesis, for example, posits that a god created the physical universe particularly with human beings in mind, and so unsurprisingly placed the Earth at the...

Yes, and Duchamp too, when he was asked what he thought about God, said, ‘Let’s not talk about that. That’s man’s stupidest idea.’ — Nikša Gligo (1972)

A few years ago the Deists denied the inspiration of the Bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time they worshiped what they were pleased to call the God of Nature. Now we...

So much enthusiasm about the non-existence of God is somewhat bewildering, as no one appears to be nearly as excited about a similar absence of belief in unicorns, vampires, werewolves, astrology, nation-building, or the Labor...

I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural...

He didn’t like religion, hadn’t liked it for years, but he adored churches, loved them like old scientific instruments whose time is long past but are nevertheless fascinating and strange.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade…

ATHEIST is really a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term, it admits of no paltering and no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear-cut issues and unambiguous speech.

Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.Looked...

Consideremos la larga historia de las actividades inspiradas por el fervor moral: los sacrificios humanos, las persecuciones de herejes, las cazas de brujas, los pogroms, hasta que se llega al exterminio en gran escala por...

Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing “Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come...

To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days...

self” physically from the world (as an unseen entity) alienates the human being from the facts of a sensual world and its realities. In order to have a self, you must provide a story for...

Don’t creationists ever wonder about the fact that the paleontologists found ape-like skulls with the ‘human leg and foot bones,’ rather than the other way around, i.e., human skulls with ‘ape leg and foot bones?’...

For those who talks about the perfection of god in making human…..Its his success after billion years of experiments out of millions of other useless creatures

If you can’t believe in God, chances are your God is too small.

If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god –...

To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.