Quotes About Belief

I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.

In George Bernard Shaw's words, '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.

Religion is a distraction from true education.

You can't get away with saying, 'If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals it violates my freedom of prejudice.' But you can get away with saying, 'It violates my freedom of religion.' What, when you think about it, is the difference? Yet again, religion trumps all.

We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.

I prefer to say that I believe in people, and people, when given the right encouragement to think for themselves about all the information now available, very often turn out not to believe in God and to lead fulfilled and satisfied—indeed, liberated—lives.

one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.

The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.

Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

I don't think faith is positive, because faith means belief without evidence, and you shouldn't believe anything without evidence. [The Daily Show 24 Sept 2013]

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.

The American comedian Cathy Ladman observes that 'All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad', 'psychotic' or 'delusional' . . . Clearly there is sanity in numbers.