Quotes from Greta Christina

Our beliefs affect our behavior towards others. And that makes ourbeliefs, not just a personal question, but an ethical one.

If you don't think you're close-minded for not believing in Zeus, then please don't accuse atheists of being close-minded for not believing in your god.

Atheists' anger doesn't prove that we're selfish, or joyless, or miserable. It shows that we have compassion, and a sense of justice. We're angry because we see terrible harm all around us, and we feel desperately motivated to stop it.

Religion is a belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check. And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self-correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality… and extreme, grotesque immorality.

The human mind's capacity to persuade itself of things it wants to believe is damn near limitless.

Let's say that Person 1 thinks their hair dryer is telling them to shoot every redhead who gets on the 9:04 train. And let's say Person 2 thinks their hair dryer is telling them to volunteer twice a week at a homeless shelter. Is it better to volunteer at a homeless shelter than it is to shoot every redhead who gets on the 9:04 train? Of course it is. But you still have a basic problem — which is that you think your hair dryer is talking to you.

if people believe in infinite bliss in the afterlife, they'll be more willing to accept an appalling degree of oppression and injustice in this life. From anybody. Oddly, this is often framed as a plus. "Religion gives people hope in hardship." It gets presented as a feature, not a bug.

I'm with Christopher Hitchens on this one. Heaven sounds like North Korea — an eternity of mindless conformity spent singing the praises of a powerful tyrant.

The idea that each one of us was astronomically lucky to have been born at all, and that complaining that our lives aren't infinite is like winning a million dollars in the lottery and complaining that we didn't win a hundred billion, or indeed all the money in the world.

the best way to deal with difficult and painful emotions is to stop trying to fix them and just let myself feel them. When I let myself actually feel my emotions, they tend to pass.

86. I get angry when believers unhesitatingly attribute every good thing in the world to God — and then respond to bad things by saying, "God works in mysterious ways." If God's ways are so mysterious, and we can't begin to understand his thinking behind tsunamis and drought and pediatric cancer, then what makes you think you understand his intentions when it comes to pretty sunsets or cute puppies or helping you find the peanut butter?

The idea that death is part of God's plan, for instance, is comforting to some — but for many, this idea either makes them angry at God, or guilt-ridden about what they or their loved ones did wrong to bring on his wrath.

And every time we hear people talk about Heaven or angels or past lives or their loved ones being in a better place and looking down on them right now, we're reminded: "Oh, yeah. We don't think that. We think that when we die, we die forever. We don't think our dead loved ones are with God. We think that they're fucking dead." We have to face death a little bit, every day of our lives. It's like an inoculation.

Death sucks — and it should. Life is precious, and we should treasure it, and mourn its loss.

But when I compare the idea that "Yeah, sometimes life sucks, and I have to deal with it as best I can" with the idea that "An immensely powerful being is screwing with me on purpose and won't tell me why" — I, for one, find the first idea much more comforting. I don't have to torture myself with guilt over how I must have angered my god or screwed up my karma, with that guilt piling onto the trauma I'm already going through.

For many grieving non-believers, the "comforts" of religion and religious views of death present a terrible choice: Either pretend to agree with ideas they reject and in many cases actively oppose — or open up about their non-belief, and start a potentially divisive argument at a time when they most need connection and comfort.

religious ideas about death can be profoundly upsetting to people who don't believe them. Sentiments that many believers find comforting — such as Heaven and Hell, or God's plan for life and death — are, for many non-believers, more than just ideas they don't agree with. They are ideas they find distressing, hurtful, and repugnant.

We need to care about reality more than we care about what we want to be true about it.

People who are most strongly attached to a belief in an afterlife are more likely to try to delay death when it's clearly imminent. That doesn't make any logical sense. If people believe in a blissful afterlife, then logically, you'd think they'd accept their death gracefully, and would even welcome it. But it makes perfect sense when you think of religion, not as a way of genuinely coping with the fear of death, but as a way of putting it on the back burner.

When I'm struggling with the fear of my own death, or with grief over the death of someone I love, what comforts me most isn't philosophies or ideas. It's the presence of someone who loves me just sitting with me silently, letting me feel what I have to feel, not trying to fix it or make it go away but simply being with me while I feel

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote: "The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism." Having no cognitive dissonance in my philosophy of death is a profound comfort. This might not be true for everybody: some people do seem better able to live with cognitive dissonance than others. But it's certainly true for me. And it seems to be true for many other people.

the monstrous notion of being so blissed-out in Heaven you won't notice your loved ones shrieking for mercy in Hell — this is put forward by many Christian theologians, including the supposedly respectable William Lane Craig, in response to direct questions from believers who find this whole "not knowing or caring if our loved ones are in agony" thing rather hard to swallow.