Quotes About Belief

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

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?

The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.

At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.

The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction...

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

A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

The majority of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all.

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. 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.

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

Life... It tends to respond to our outlook, to shape itself to meet our expectations.

The easiest thing to find on God's green earth is someone to tell you all the things you cannot do.

We need something to believe in. Doesn't matter what. God, Buddha, Elvis. We all need faith. That's what gives us hope, hope there's something better out there, something to strive for. Hope is what drives you. Hope gets you out of bed, hoping you're going to make that big sale at work, hoping you get to make love to your wife at night. - Paul Busch

Michael wondered if God really was a Yankees fan or whether he preferred the Red Sox;

That's how you get a performance - they put trust in you.

Sentences that begin with 'You' are probably not true. For instance, when I write: "You are a pet human named Morlock being disciplined by your master, a Beowulf cluster of FreeBSD 22.0 servers in the year 2052. Last week you tried to escape by digging a hole under the perimeter, which means this week you may be put to sleep for being a renegade human." That's not true, at least not yet.

We have lost our faith in the powers that brought us this far—the powers of will, imagination, effort, and community.