Quotes

Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?

My mother was Southern Irish, and I was brought up as a devout Catholic. In fact, at one point I thought I’d become a priest, but I’d have made an appalling priest anyway… At 16, I asked all these monks some serious questions and they didn’t come up with the answers, and I just decided I didn’t believe in God.

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

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

No Gods – No Masters.

“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.”

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

If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine – but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you’ve been bad or good – and CARES about any of it – to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.

I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.

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

Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It’s about power.

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

I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.

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

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

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty.

A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if no one believes it.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.

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.