Quotes About Atheism

He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organised religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist. In his ethics he thought the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.

America's mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism, and popular deism is just atheism adapted to the limitations of the common understanding of things. To say that the United States is "one nation under God" is to conceal behind a euphemism the fact that it is and always has been one nation under nature. Whatever else we pretend to believe, we are in practice mostly atheists now--and for that we should be grateful." p 426

Philip Livingston, too, alludes to the virtuous atheist in his magazine from the 1750s: "It is an Opinion too generally received, that Man is led into all the Crimes and Extravagancies he commits, thro' Unbelief. And no Wonder this Doctrine, false as it is, should be so vigorously inculcated by Men whose Interest consists in a Depression of rational Faculties."174

Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us.

The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?

God. That bastard, he doesn't exist. —Samuel Beckett

We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get smarter, they turn away from God.85

Both of my parents would say they were atheists, so where I inherited my connection to God I don't know. But it's natural. No Bible, no Torah, just the love religion.

There are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don't know, what God they serve.

el modo de vida americano» (lo que tanto en Truman como en su sucesor, Eisenhower, aparece ligado a la religión; el enemigo es «el comunismo ateo»),

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

The absence of theistic belief... { Defining the word 'atheism' }

All thinking men are atheists.

It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were. ...Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.

Our creed [atheism] is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were.

My uncle Ernie didn't believe in God. At least that's what he said. But he always Went to church on Christmas. Which I thought Seriously compromised his atheism.

I'm an atheist. I don't have a religion.

I do not have, and never had, any interest in either the Bible or religion.

No, I'm not religious. At all. I'm an atheist.

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.