Quotes About Belief

Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality – saying something like: 'It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.' Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true.

A consciência de que temos apenas uma vida deveria torná-la ainda mais preciosa. A visão ateísta reafirma e melhora a vida, e ao mesmo tempo nunca é afetada pela auto-ilusão, pelo excesso de otimismo ou pela autopiedade chorosa daqueles que acham que a vida lhes deve alguma coisa.

Il?ml? dinin öÄŸretileri, kendileri a??r?c? olmamalar?na raÄŸmen, a??r?c?l??a aç?k bir davetiyedirler.

Irrationality is woven into the fabric of modern life we unthinkingly indulge unscientific delusion (Enemies of Reason).

Eu me divirto com a estratégia, quando me perguntam se sou ateu, de lembrar que o autor da pergunta também é ateu no que diz respeito a Zeus, Apolo, Amon Rá, Mithra, Baal, Thor, Wotan, o Bezerro de Outro e o Monstro de Espaguete Voador. Eu só fui um deus além.

When people say they are atheists they don't mean they can prove that there are no gods. Strictly speaking, it's impossible to prove that something does not exist. We don't positively know there are no gods

Um dos efeitos verdadeiramente ruins da religião é que ela nos ensina que é uma virtude estar satisfeito em não compreender.

Richard E Simmons III

No society has ever survived or will ever survive without morality, and no morality has ever survived without a transcendent source."19

wanted to believe the Darwinian idea. I chose to believe it not because I think there was enormous evidence for it, nor because it had the full authority to give interpretation to my origins, but I chose to believe it because it delivered me from trying to find meaning and freed me to my own erotic passions.

I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue.

Dorrigo Evans hated virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves. And the more he was accused of virtue as he grew older, the more he hated it. He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.

But what reality was ever made by realists?

He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will

They felt their own judgements absolute and the judgements of others idiocy or wickedness deserving the worst punishment. It was as if everyone had to believe their own story—any story, really—because if they stopped believing there would only be reality left to deal with. No one doubted, or was unsure; every individual was infallible because it was their truth, and so there could be no truth and the world was wrong.

He did not believe he was unique or that he had some sort of destiny. In his own heart he felt all such ideas were a complete nonsense, and that death could find him at any moment, as it was now finding so many others. Life wasn't about ideas. Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.

He had the sense that the gods was just another name for time, but he felt that it would be as stupid to say such a thing as it would be to suggest that against the gods we can never prevail.

Because courage, survival, love—all these things didn't live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.

My only idea ever, Dorrigo had confessed, is to advance forward and charge the windmill. Taylor had laughed, but Dorrigo had meant it. It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It's believing in reality that does us in every time. He

She always preferred strong lies to weak truths

a belief in each other, a belief that they cleave to only more strongly when death comes. For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter. The fact of their own survival somehow demands that they are one, now and forever.

he understood the measure of his life now to be his capacity to believe in something - anything - other than what was happening in front of him. So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know.