Quotes About Belief

Semi-educated people join cults whose whole purpose is to dull the pain of thought, or take medications that claim to abolish anxiety.

To believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

so much the greater is the triumph of faith in nevertheless believing.

If belief in a god has to proceed from the assumption that he exists, belief in revelation has first to proceed from the assumption that a god exists and then to go further to the assumption that he communicates his will to certain men. But both are mere assumptions. Neither is, in the present state of knowledge, at all capable of proof.

Thomas Paine was not wrong in saying that he could not believe in any religion that shocked the mind of a child.)

The latter, which honors Abraham's willingness to make a human sacrifice of his son, is common to all three monotheisms, and descends from their primitive ancestors.

The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how 'people of faith' possess moral advantages that others can only envy.

be dire not just for the "holy German Fatherland." As he wrote, at the eleventh hour, "today, not only in peasant homes but also in the city sky-scrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth or thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms…. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!")

To this day, religious people kill each other and kill each other's children for the right to exclusive property in this unidentifiable and unlocatable hole in a hill.

Christopher Hitchens

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 have a tendency to break religion's monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.

My challenge: Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever. I have since asked this question at every stop and haven't had a reply yet.

croire en un dieu est une façon d'exprimer une disposition à croire en n'importe quoi. Tandis que rejeter la croyance n'est d'aucune manière professer que l'on ne croit en rien.

And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it's hello darkness my old friend.

Tertullian, one of the many church fathers who found it difficult to give a persuasive account of paradise, was perhaps clever in going for the lowest possible common denominator and promising that one of the most intense pleasures of the afterlife would be endless contemplation of the tortures of the damned. He spoke more truly than he knew in evoking the man-made character of faith.

fueron capaces de señalar que si los triángulos tuvieran dioses, sus dioses tendrían tres lados

Hay días en que echo de menos mis antiguas convicciones como si se trataran de un miembro amputado. Pero, en términos generales, me siento mejor y no menos radical; y usted también se sentirá mejor, se lo garantizo, cuando abandone las doctrinas y permita que su mente, libre de cadenas, piense por sí misma.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than an atheist does.

It was never that difficult to see that religion was a cause of hatred and conflict, and that its maintenance depended upon ignorance and superstition

the strenuous and dogmatic is the moral enemy of the good.

Tertullian put it, either disarmingly or annoyingly according to your taste. I believe it because it is absurd. It is impossible to quarrel seriously with such a view. If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.

Pero, en términos generales, me siento mejor y no menos radical; y usted también se sentirá mejor, se lo garantizo, cuando abandone las doctrinas y permita que su mente, libre de cadenas, piense por sí misma.

No. Even now I can't altogether believe that any of this really happened...

Åžeytanlar? yok ediyorlarsa, polisler melek demektir, öyle deÄŸil mi? Eh, akla yatk?n. Polislerin melek olduÄŸu yer de ancak t?marhane olabilir.