#agnosticism

"Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There`s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning."

"The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies."

"Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism."

"Are there any religions on your list that include the slaughter of noblemen as a holy duty?"

"In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not..."

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."

"I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time."

"What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives."

"When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do."

"We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins."

"We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence."

"Interviewer: Didn't Sagan want to believe?Druyan: he didn't want to believe. he wanted to know."

"The whole war between the atheist and the theist comes down to this: the atheist believes a 'what' created the universe; the theist believes a 'who' created the universe."

"Even now, there are still days so beautiful, I almost believe in God."

"There was a time when skepticism was an act of rebellion. Since to a degree I both believe in evolution and have faith, I can only conclude that, as prophesied, to have faith will someday be an act of rebellion."

"If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world."

"What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons."

"Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?""I give.""You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog."

"Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both."

"I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did."