Quotes About Belief

Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.

wrong. Religious opinion is wrong by definition. We can't avoid

The various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful. —EDWARD GIBBON, DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death.

In this respect, religion is not unlike racism. One version of it inspires and provokes the other.

The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been Christians, since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would ever found a church on their master's announcements. (There is scarcely a word in any of the later-assembled Gospels to suggest that Jesus wanted to be the founder of a church, either.)

Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Even if god is or was an Arab (an unsafe assumption), how could he expect to "reveal" himself by way of an illiterate person who in turn could not possibly hope to pass on the unaltered (let alone unalterable) words?

The argument that religious belief improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case.

Estamos seguros de que se puede vivir una vida ética sin religión. Y de hecho sabemos que el reverso es cierto: que la religión ha ocasionado que innumerables personas no solo no se comporten mejor que otras, sino que se concedan licencias para comportarse de formas que dejarían estupefacto al regente de un burdel o a un genocida.

In point of fact, we do not have the option of choosing absolute truth, or faith. We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive - or to intimidate - others.

Which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god?

The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion's monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.

Religion was our first attempt at philosophy, just as alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and astrology our first attempt to make sense of the movements of the heavens.

If god really wanted people to be free of such thoughts, he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

Many people who belong to no church, and who are even hostile to organized faith, profess a belief in God because, in the usual phrase, it gives their life meaning. (This is of course subject to the same grand regress as the creationist argument: just as we have to ask who then created the Creator, so we're bound to ask if God's life has meaning and, if so, from what deity He or She derives it.)

If someone publicly charges that 'Mormonism is a cult,' it is impossible to say that the claim by itself is mistaken or untrue. However, if the speaker says that heaven is a real place but that you will not get there if you are Jewish, or that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion but that other churches and faiths are the genuine article, then you know that the bigot has spoken.

Christopher Hitchens

it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity

Christopher Hitchens

Sei que não sou o único que não se importa nem um pouco se ilusões religiosas forem ridicularizadas, mas se fosse o único, ainda assim não daria a mínima.

You don't become an atheist so much as you find out that's what you are.

A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It's not moral to lie to children. It's not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It's immoral.

The faithful stand acquitted on that charge: we no longer have any need of a god to explain what is no longer mysterious. What believers will do, now that their faith is optional and private and irrelevant, is a matter for them. We should not care, as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion.