Atheism

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Atheism is the state of being without theistic beliefs and alternatively the disbelief in the existence of deities. [1]

• God is an imaginary friend for adults, and religion is the playground. Calling an atheist a fool is no different from calling a child who has real friends instead of imaginary ones a loner.

— Anonymous atheist; screen name: Nitrous Titanide, 2006

• "There are no atheists in foxholes."

— Lt-Col. William J. Clear (1942)

• "'There are no atheists in foxholes' isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.

— James Morrow

• "Atheists in foxholes, some say they are myths,
  Creations of the mind who just don't exist.
  Yet, they answered the call to defend, with great pride.
  With reason their watchword, they bled and they died."
  

— Alice Shiver, "Atheists-in-Foxholes" monument, dedicated on July 4, 1999

• "Dog is Man's best friend. Doesnt that make 'dog' spelled backwards Man's worst enemy?"

— An anonymous atheist known as TriggerXIII in a conversation with a friend, May 27 2006

• "ATHEISM: A godless religion that retains all the dogmatic posturing of the faiths it so confidently denies, with few of the consolations."

— Rick Bayan, The Cynic's Dictionary

• "The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts:
  Those with brains, but no religion,
  And those with religion, but no brains."
  

— Abu'l-`Ala' al-Ma`arri (Arabic: أبو العلا المعري) d. 1057, poet of Ma`arra, quoted in Amin Maalouf's history The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.

• I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.

— Katharine Hepburn Ladies' Home Journal (October 1991)

• "I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in Nature."

— Albert Einstein

• "Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

— Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science," New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930, pp. 1–4. Note well that by "religion", Einstein means faith in the rational.

• "It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. ... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

— Albert Einstein, Religion and Science, New York Times Magazine (9 November 1930); also used in the obituary in New York Times (19 April 1955)

• In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views. ~ Albert Einstein (Calaprice, ibid., 214 / Said to German anti-Nazi diplomat and author Hubertus zu Lowenstein around 1941. Quoted in his book, Towards the Further Shore, London, 1968, 156)

• "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

— Albert Einstein, in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press, 1981. See also positiveatheism.org's Einstein quotations.

• "I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending."

— Isaac Asimov

• "Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted."
• "Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!"
• "Along with Islam and Christianity, [Judaism] does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensible condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing."
• "I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case."

— Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

• "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof."

— Christopher Hitchens, "Less than Miraculous," Free Inquiry magazine, February-March 2004, Volume 24.

• "There is no need for that hypothesis."

— Laplace, in response to Napoleon's objection that Laplace had omitted God from Celestial Mechanics (Boyer 1968, p. 538)

• "One who doesn't believe in himself believes in God"

— Aravind Chandrasekaran

• "God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out."

— Richard Feynman, quoted by P.C.W. Davies and J. Brown in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything, p. 208.

• "The universe could have evolved from absolutely nothing in a manner consistent with all known conservation laws."
• "The question of the origin of the matter in the universe is no longer thought to be beyond the range of science ... everything can be created from nothing ... it is fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch."

— Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins

• "Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

— Richard Dawkins (1986), The Blind Watchmaker. See also the entry on evolution and atheism at the talk.origins archive.

• "The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion. If a physicist says God is another name for Planck's constant, or God is a superstring, we should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the nature of superstrings or the value of Planck's constant is a profound mystery. It has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable of forgiving sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about whether or not the Sabbath begins at 5pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil or have a bit of arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable of imposing a death penalty on His son to expiate the sins of the world before and after he was born." From a lecture by Richard Dawkins extracted from The Nullifidian (Dec 94)

• "It is often said, mainly by the 'no-contests', that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. 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?"

— Richard Dawkins, from www.world-of-dawkins.com

• "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
• "Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not."

— Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, pp. 257-258. See also positiveatheism.org's Weinberg quotations.

• "It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true."

— Bertrand Russell

• "This is one of the great social functions of science -- to free people from superstition."
• "Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion."
• "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

— Steven Weinberg, Freethought Today, April, 2000

• "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
• "It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."
• "'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true."

— Mark Twain

• "Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account ... It is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic, and to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived."

— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 18

• "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God"

— Psalm 14:1

• "Whoever saith, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire"

— Jesus, Matthew 5:22 ("Preacher turned atheist" Dan Barker's retort)

• "The fool says in his heart: 'There is no God.' The Wise Man says it to the world."

— Troy Witte

• "Religions are all alike—founded upon fables and mythologies."
• "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government."

— Thomas Jefferson

• "The legitimate powers of government extend to only such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg."

— Thomas Jefferson, Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, p. 254

• "In no instance have ... the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people."

— James Madison

• "The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity."

— John Adams

• "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
• "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."

— Benjamin Franklin

• "It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to Infidelity."

— Abraham Lincoln, Manford's Magazine, quoted from The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents by Franklin Steiner, p. 144.

• "Now let it be written in history and on Mr. Lincoln's tombstone: `He died an unbeliever.'"

— William H. Herndon, Abraham Lincoln's law partner in Springfield since 1844, Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, 1896. Quoted in Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby, 2004.

• Robert Sherman: "Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?"
  Bush: "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

— President George H. W. Bush, August 27 1987; see Free Inquiry magazine, Fall 1988, Volume 8, Number 4, page 16.

• "I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will then say that you're not equally as patriotic if you're not a religious person. ... I've never said that. I've never acted like that. I think that's just the way it is."

— President George W. Bush, Washington Times, 12 January 2005

• "I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men."

— Atatürk, quoted in Andrew Mango's Biography of Atatürk

• "In that management [ruling] religion or its like is an indispensible intrument. Religion makes men faithful to the gods, and hence to the men the gods recommend. ... Only when rulers see or sense that men obey themselves in obeying necessity can human necessity appear as as the foundation of human freedom."

— Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue

• "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

— Denis Diderot

• "The saddest thing about religion is what is lost. Religion, or more accurately, I suppose, the appropriators and exploiters of religion, have taken our purest impulses of solidarity, compassion, celebration of the wonder and mystery of our lives, and turned them against us. This, most of all, is why I reject religion: so that I can reclaim these impulses for the causes they deserve... love and justice." - Propagandhi, Canadian Punk Band

• "If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded—or even if it suspects—that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe."
• "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."

— Irving Kristol, quoted by Ronald Bailey in Reason magazine

• "I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."

— Isaac Asimov, Free Inquiry, Vol. 2, Spring 1982, p.9.

• "Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived."
• "Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism."

— Isaac Asimov.

• "How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?"

• "To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition."

— Woody Allen

• I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up -- they have no holidays. ~ Henny Youngman

• "If I thought the Jews killed God, I'd worship the Jews."

— Bill Hicks

• Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

• Atheism, a religion dedicated to its own sense of smug superiority.

— Stephen Colbert from The Daily Show

• "If you do not believe in a personal God the question: ‘What is the purpose of life?’ is unaskable and unanswerable."

— J.R.R. Tolkien

• "Thank God I'm an atheist."

— Luis Buñuel

• "I'm an atheist and I thank God for it."

— George Bernard Shaw

• "I do not believe in God, but as I sat there in the damaged [balloon] capsule, hopelessly vulnerable to the slightest shift in weather or mechanical fault, I could not believe my eyes."

— Richard Branson - in his autobiography, Losing My Virginity (p.239)

• "... [Penn & Teller] are pro-science, and when you're pro-science, that means you're an atheist, by definition, ..."

— Penn Jillette

• "Here's what happens when you die--you sit in a box and get eaten by worms. I guarantee you that when you die, nothing cool happens."

— Howard Stern

• "We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers."

— Carl Sagan in Cosmos (1980)

• "By night an atheist half believes in God"

— Edward Young in Night Thoughts, (Night Two, p.292.)

• "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philsophy bringeth men's minds about to religion"

— Sir Francis Bacon in Essays, (16, Of Atheism)

• "An atheist is a person with no invisible means of support"

— John Buchan (1875 - 1940)

• "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

— Stephen Roberts

• "And God Said: Let there be Satan, so people don't blame everything on me, and let there be lawyers, so people don't blame everything on Satan"

— John Wing

• "The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window."

— Stephen King

• "Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.... Morality is then surrendered to the groundless arbitrariness of religion."

— Ludwig Feuerbach

• "Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not, but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men."

— Sir Francis Bacon

• "The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation."
• "Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partly with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself."
• "Atheism ... in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power."
• "I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made."

— Emma Goldman

• "Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds."
• "An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated."
• "But people ... don't even know what atheism is. It's not a negation of anything. You don't have to negate what no one can prove exists. No, atheism is a very positive affirmation of man's ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems. I'm thrilled to feel that I can rely on myself totally and absolutely; that my children are being brought up so that when they meet a problem they can't cop out by foisting it off on God. Madalyn Murray's going to solve her own problems, and nobody's going to intervene. It's about time the world got up off its knees and looked at itself in the mirror and said: "Well, we are men. Let's start acting like it."

— Madalyn Murray O'Hair

• "My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests."

— George Santayana

• "Why am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don't find them believable. As for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the other foot. Atheists don't claim to know anything with certainty -- it's the believers who know it all."

— Barbara Smoker

• "Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people."

— Voltaire in Philosophical Dictionary

• "Which is more dangerous: fanaticism or atheism? Fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more deadly; for atheism inspires no bloody passion whereas fanaticism does; atheism is opposed to crime and fanaticism causes crimes to be committed."

— Voltaire

• "If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color."

— Mark Schnitzius, on Usenet (1993)

• "Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."

— Don Hirschberg, in a letter to Ann Landers

• "He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve."

— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris And London

• "You show me a communist and I will show you someone who will be upset if I eat his sandwich. You show me an anarchist and I will show you someone who calls the cops when he finds me rooting through his fridge at 3am. You show me an athiest and I will show you someone begging for Gods forgiveness when they taste thier own mortality."

— J. P. Chilensky

• "I really don't think this is the time to be making new enemies."

— Voltaire on his deathbed, after being asked by a preist to renounce Satan

• "An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the god question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question."

— John McCarthy

• "I'm a born-again atheist."

— Gore Vidal (1925 - )

• Atheism is justified.

1. If God exists, everything that exists is part of God's plan.
2. Atheists exist.
3. Atheists are part of God's plan.
4. Therefore, God wants atheists to exist.

• "Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."

— Thomas Jefferson

• "The moths & atheists are doubly divine" - Jim Morrison, An American Prayer

• [Worshipping God] is like fellating someone who intermittently stubs fags out on your head for no good reason. And we all know how unsatisfying that can be.

— Charlie Brooker, "Supposing... there were fun illnesses", The Guardian, December 18 2005

• "Gods like atheists; it gives them something to aim at."

— Terry Pratchett

• Atheism is a non-prophet organization. - George Carlin

• I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley, Essays on Controversial Questions

• "The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, then walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable." - Brennan Manning

See also

• God
• Religion
• Life
• Death
• Agnosticism

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bs:Ateist

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