Atheism quotes. Do you have any good ones?

Question

Here are a few.

(This is one of my favorites!)
"Surely the first *** that invented religion ought to be the first *** damned"
Mark Twain

"Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for atheism ever concieved."
Isaac Asimov

"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 charge with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A mans ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, edication, and social ties and needs: no religious basis in necessary. MAn would be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
Albert Enstein

"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies."
Benjamin Franklin.........(I know....he was a diest!)

I have alot more...but I am running out of room.

Answer 1

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
- Carl Sagan

Answer 2

It's not the parts of the bible I can't understand that worry me, it's the parts I do understand. - Mark Twain

Believer to non-believer: "You remind me of a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat."
Non-believer to believer: "Well, you remind me of a blind man in a dark room looking for a black that was never there in the first place."

And My favorite;


Can there really be a unified theory of everything? Or are we just chasing a mirage? There seem to be three possibilities:

• There really is a complete unified theory, which we will someday discover if we are smart enough.

• There is no ultimate theory of the universe, just an infinite sequence of theories that describe the universe more and more accurately.

• There is no theory of the universe. Events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent but occur in a random and arbitrary manner.

Some would argue for the third possibility on the grounds that if there were complete set of laws, that would infringe on God’s freedom to change His mind and to intervene in the world. It’s a bit like the old paradox: Can God make a stone so heavy that He can’t lift it? But the idea that God might want to change His example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time. Time is a property only of the universe that God created. Presumably, He knew what He intended when He set it up. With the advent of quantum mechanics, we have come to realize that events cannot be predicted with complete accuracy but that there is always a degree of uncertainty. If one liked, one could ascribe this randomness to the intervention of God. But it would be a very strange kind of intervention. There is no evidence that it is directed toward any purpose. Indeed, if it were, it wouldn’t be random. In modern times, we have effectively removed the third possibility by redefining the goal of science. Our aim is to formulate a set of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limit set by the uncertainty principle.
The second possibility, that there is an infinite sequence of more and more refined theories, is in agreement with all our experience so far. On many occasions, we have increased the sensitivity of our measurements or made a new class of observations only to discover new phenomena that were not predicted by the existing theory. To account for these, we have had to develop a more advanced theory. It would therefore not be very surprising if we find that our present grand unified theories break down when we test them on bigger and more powerful particle accelerators. Indeed, if we didn’t expect them to break down, there wouldn’t be much point in spending all that money on building more powerful machines.
However, it seems that gravity may provide a limit to this sequence of “boxes within boxes.” If one had a particle with an energy above what is called the Planck energy, 1019 GeV, its mass would be so concentrated that it would cut itself off from the rest of the universe and form a little black hole. Thus, it does seem that the sequence of more and more refined theories should have some limit as we go to higher and higher energies. There should be some ultimate theory of the universe. Of course, the Planck energy is a very long way from the energies of around a GeV, which are the most that we can produce in the laboratory at the present time. To bridge that gap would require a particle accelerator that was bigger than the solar system. Such an accelerator would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.
However, the very early stages of the universe are an arena where such energies must have occurred. I think that there is a good chance that the study of the early universe and the requirements of mathematical consistency will lead us to a complete unified theory by the end of the century—always presuming we don’t blow ourselves up first. What would it mean if we actually did discover the ultimate theory of the universe? It would bring to an end a long and glorious chapter in the history of our struggle to understand the universe. But it would also revolutionize the ordinary person’s understanding of the laws that govern the universe. In Newton’s time it was possible for an educated person to have a grasp of the whole of human knowledge, at least in outline. But ever since then, the pace of development of science has made this impossible. Theories were always being changed to account for new observations. They were never properly digested or simplified so that ordinary people could understand them. You had to be a specialist, and even then you could only hope to have a proper grasp of a small proportional of the scientific theories. - Steven Hawking

Answer 3

G. K. Chesterton

"If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong."

Atheist Antony Flew has said that the "onus of proof must lie upon the theist." Unless compelling reasons for God’s existence can be given, there is the "presumption of atheism." Another atheist, Michael Scriven, considers the lack of evidence for God’s existence and the lack of evidence for Santa Claus on the same level. However, the presumption of atheism actually turns out to be presumptuousness. The Christian must remember that the atheist also shares the burden of proof.

Answer 4

"It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through a canon of religious of political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn"

-The Walking Drum by Louis, L'Amour.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.

H. L. Mencken, Minority Report (1956)

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."

Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991)
Free Inquiry (autumn, 1992)

"The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization."

Robert A. Wilson, Right Where You Are Sitting Now

Answer 5

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams

"If god wanted people to believe in him, why did he invent logic then?" - David Feherty

"Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement."
-- Federico Fellini

"Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence."
-- Camille Flammarion

And, probably the best one:

"You cannot ... transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word "God" to be its grammatical subject."
-- Antony Flew

Answer 6

Dennis McKinsey:
If God kills, lies, cheats, discriminates, and otherwise behaves in a manner that puts the Mafia to shame, that's okay, he's God. He can do whatever he wants. Anyone who adheres to this philosophy has had his sense of morality, decency, justice and humaneness warped beyond recognition by the very book that is supposedly preaching the opposite.

Don Hirschberg:
Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.

Emma Goldman:
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.

Edmond de Goncourt
If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

Answer 7

"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ***; he is actually ill."
H.L. Mencken

"The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history."
Robert Heinlein

Answer 8

I actually heard this on Oprah- a comment made by an atheist- "I wish I could believe in God, so I would have someone to thank for all the good things that have happened in my life".

Answer 9

"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


Christianity has done a great deal for love by making it a sin. - not sure who said it

Answer 10

"Thank God I'm an Atheist" -- A couple of the R&S Regulars