Atheism quotations

Page 3

◆ There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

- Richard Dawkins99

◆ Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

- Napoleon99

◆ Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

- Isaac Asimov99

◆ I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

- Albert Camus99

◆ To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?

- Christopher Hitchens99

◆ Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

- George Carlin99

◆ If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.

- Woody Allen99

◆ The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

- Mark Twain99

◆ belief is the death of intelligence.

- Robert Anton Wilson99

◆ One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.

- Aleister Crowley99

◆ I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.

- Douglas Adams99

◆ Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

- David Foster Wallace99

◆ The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

- Ayaan Hirsi Ali99

◆ Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

- Christopher Hitchens99

◆ Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

- Friedrich Nietzsche99