Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
We do not want an official state church. If ninety-nine percent of the population were Catholics, I would still be opposed to it. I do not want civil power combined with religious power. I want to make it clear that I am committed as a matter of deep personal conviction to separation.
The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.
But the lack of faith could just as well be a crutch for non-believers, allowing them to live their lives without any concept of accountability and giving them some sort of false confidence. The different is that while Catholicism has an abundance of intellectual underpinnings to support its arguments, anti-Catholicism and atheist have few if any.
Even though I don't personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though He was watching.
I had NO interest in being a theologian, especially not a Christian, as I had been raised by progressive atheists. We bowed down every morning to the golden calf of the New York Times, Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt. I tried to get my parents to respect and nourish me, let alone delight in me, so even though I secretly loved and believed in the Divine Something - Goodness, Good Orderly Direction, Gift of Desperation, the Cosmic Muffin - I wasn't ready yet to commit myself to the study of a higher power.
When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned
Being an atheist means you have to realise that when you die, that really is it. You've got to make the most of what you've got here and spread as much influence as you can. I believe that you only live through the influence that you spread, whether that means having a kid or making music.
It doesn't have to be the Grand Canyon, it could be a city street, it could be the face of another human being - Everything is full of wonder.
Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.
It's important to understand that an atheist is someone who believes the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything. Some fundamental atheists will deny this by trying to redefine 'nothing' as being 'something,' because such a thought makes them look like a fool, which is precisely what the Bible says that they are
Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.
I grew up in a mixed religious household. And it was volatile. My dad's atheist, my mom's agnostic. Just constant fighting. There's no God! There might be!
I think only an idiot can be an atheist.
Maybe there are only atheists in foxholes. If the faithful truly and fully believe in a protective deity, why would they dive into a foxhole to protect themselves from the bullets whizzing by ? A part of their brain knows damn well that if they do not protect themselves, the bullets will hardly discriminate between those who claim faith and those who reject it.
Atheists have an excellent longevity record because we have no place to go after we die, so we take good care of ourselves and our world while we are here.
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time. She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic.
When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?