Quotes About Atheism

Atheist's denial of God's existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist's claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God's existence.

The atheist philosopher of science Michael Ruse says that Dawkins's arguments are so bad that he's embarrassed to call himself an atheist.10

Notice how atheists who believe in real right and wrong make a massive intellectual leap of faith. They believe that somehow moral facts were eternally part of the "furniture" of reality but that from impersonal and valueless slime, human persons possessing rights, dignity, worth, and duties were eventually produced.

Johnson noted that Bishop Brown not only wrote such books for adults but he also wrote books for children in order to indoctrinate them in atheism. Said Johnson, "He also issued antireligious material for children. … When I was a member of the Communist Party, the Communist Party paid special attention to the indoctrination of the youth. They in fact issued special bulletins instructing leaders and teachers with regard to the type of training for the youth.

People say there are no atheists in foxholes. A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it's a much better argument against foxholes.

I had abandoned Catholicism, but even during my short militant atheist period I maintained an interest in western religious art and music.

I liked making people laugh, and I decided I was an atheist early on. My Dad was all right with that. We argued about it all the time, but it was good-natured. He was the most open-minded human being I've ever known.

Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.

The advent of militant atheism marks a reaction—a lurid but natural reaction—to the violence of the Islamic world.

This is reality in a universe without God: there is no hope; there is no purpose. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot's haunting lines: This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. What is true of mankind as a whole is true of each of us individually: we are here to no purpose. If there is no God, then our life is not fundamentally different from that of a dog.

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

I can well imagine an athiest's last words: White, white! L-L-Love! My God! - and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain, and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.

Atheism is not proper to man by nature, but develops at a later stage of life, on the ground of philosophical reflection; like scepticism, it is an intellectual and ethical abnormality, which only confirms the rule. By nature every man believes in God.

He believed neither in the antecedent animal nor the surviving spirit of man. Desplein had no doubts; he was positive. His bold and unqualified atheism was like that of many scientific men, the best men in the world, but invincible atheists — atheists such as religious people declare to be impossible.

We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways. To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.

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.

I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.

I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.

She believed in nothing. Only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that.

All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many.

We are the first atheistic and global, all-embracing civilization. You cannot tell whether you are sitting at an airport in Hong Kong or in a hotel in Alaska. Everything is instrumentalized, subjected to a short-term purpose. It is quite possible that in such a situation any sense of a deeper meaning gets lost."