Quotes About Belief

Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

You will see, as time goes by," said Ibn Rushd, "that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God's worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God's truth.

In the home of this music, alas, religious fanatics have lately started killing the musicians. They think the music is an insult to god, who gave us voices but does not wish us to sing, who gave us free will, rai, but prefers us not to be free.

The old man has always believed in the mutability of things; has known that no matter how solid the ground beneath your feet may seem, it can, at any moment, turn into quicksand and suck you down. Always be prepared.

And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.

Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What's worse is that he is now running amok.

Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there?...And the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble'.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.

one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

It is hard for a person of no faith like myself to comprehend the moment when faith dies in the human heart. The kneeling believer who suddenly understands that there is no reason to pray because nobody's listening.

This is our tragedy....our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

If you walk away from God you should probably try to stay in the good books of Luck.

Being God's postman is no fun, yar. Butbutbut: God isn't in this picture. God knows whose postman I've been.

to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn't understand it wasn't real.

Systems of thought, and their antitheses as well, are merely codifications of what we think we know. When we begin to abandon them, we open ourselves to the immensity of the universe, and therefore also to immense possibilities, including the possibility of the impossible.

man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

He wanted, for example, to investigate why one should hold fast to a religion not because it was true but because it was the faith of one's fathers. Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors?

When ninety-nine percent of people thought the world was flat," Evel said, "it didn't make the world flat. The world didn't need people to believe it was round to be round. Right now, ninety-nine percent of people are happily having a picnic on a railway track. Which doesn't mean there isn't a train coming down the line, traveling pretty fast. The railway train doesn't need people to believe it's coming, because it's coming.

Burn the books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say.

I don't want to be elite. Am I elite?" "You need to work on it. You need to become post-factual." "Is that the same as fictional?" "Fiction's elite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It's what people want.