Quotes

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will – and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.

To YOU I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.

I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Hast thou reason? I have.
Why then dost not thou use it?
For if this does its own work,
what else dost thou wish?

Scientific research confirms that humans are a link in the evolutionary life chain. There is no credible evidence for the existence of an immortal supernatural element. Our only life is here and now. Make it worthy of a moral person.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Religion is against women’s rights and women’s freedom. In all societies women are oppressed by all religions.

At a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.

Hast thou reason? I have.
Why then dost not thou use it?
For if this does its own work,
what else dost thou wish?

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

The Bible and Church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women’s emancipation.

My neurologist once told me that people with temporal lobe epilepsy are very often intensely religious. Certainly just before I have a grand mal fit I have a ‘vision’ of such peace, joy and significance that I can only call it God. What does this say about the whole nature of religious vision? Certain episodes in the lives of the saints have acquired a new meaning for me. When Theresa of Avila had her three-day vision of hell, was she simply having a temporal lobe attack? The horrors she saw are similar to those I have experienced, but in her case informed by the religious imagery of her time. Like other saints who have ‘seen’ hell she describes an appalling stench, which is part of an epileptic aura. Is it possible that the feeling I have had all my life that something – God, perhaps? – is just over the horizon, something unimaginable but almost tangibly present, is simply the result of an electrical irregularity in my brain? It is a question that can’t yet be answered, unless it be that God, if He exists, could have created us with that capacity for Him, glimpsed at only when the brain is convulsed. What I can say, however, is that if my ‘visions’ have sometimes let me into ‘Hell’ they have also given me possible intimations of a Heaven which I would not have been without.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

No Gods – No Masters.

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.

Religion is against women’s rights and women’s freedom. In all societies women are oppressed by all religions.

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.

Hast thou reason? I have.
Why then dost not thou use it?
For if this does its own work,
what else dost thou wish?

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

ATHEISM = Liberation through Reason and Knowledge.

I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.

I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will – and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.

Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.