#atheism

"To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid."

"If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

"Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation."

"I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so."

"Nobody can tell what is right and what is wrong; what is righteous and what is evil. Even if there is a god and I had his teachings right before me, I would think it through and decide if that was right or wrong myself."

"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."

"Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought."

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.[Letter to William Bradford Jr. April 1 1774]"

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

"God is a book I can no longer read."

"We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists"

"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 God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated."(Notebooks)"

"Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with."

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

"I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world."

"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage"

"I studied every page of this book, and I didn't find enough love to fill a salt shaker. God is not love in the Bible; God is vengeance, from Alpha to Omega."

"Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature."

"Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods."