Top 100 Quotes About Atheism
#1. Let's drop the whole 'atheist evangelism' thing and call out bullshit questions like 'what does atheism have to offer?' for just what they are: Bullshit. I mean, what does knowing that the Earth goes around the Sun have to offer? Who cares? It just is.
Rebecca Watson
#2. Pantheism is a self-defeating concept, because the concept of a God presupposes a world different from him as an essential correlate. If, on the other hand, the world is supposed to take over his role, then an absolute world without God remains; hence pantheism is only an euphemism for atheism.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#3. Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.
Slavoj Zizek
#4. I feel the gods are pretty dead, though I suppose I ought to know that however, to be somewhat more philosophical in the matter, if atheism means simply not being a theist, then of course I'm an atheist.
[Letter to Max Otto]
John Dewey
#5. Sadly, I have found that even evolution's most staunch believers are afraid to debate, because they know that their case for atheism and evolution is less than extremely weak.
Ray Comfort
#6. Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.
Emma Goldman
#7. Science itself is steadily nailing the lid on atheism's coffin.
Lee Strobel
#8. But my lazy lack of faith, my in-vogue atheism, has taken away the safety net hanging beneath our children's lives.
Rosamund Lupton
#9. There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who, when danger is pressing in, will not acknowledge the divine power.
Plato
#10. Mark, therefore, the ordinary theory of practical religion, what it leads to. Charity is great, but the moment you say it is all, you run the risk of running into materialism. It is not religion. It is no better than atheism - a little less.
Swami Vivekananda
#13. My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
Richard Dawkins
#14. But if we admit that any event may come into existence by chance, and without a cause, the existence of the world may be accounted for in this same way; and atheism is established. - Mr.
Jonathan Edwards
#15. Hawking has violated the unspoken rules of atheism. He isn't supposed to use words like 'create' or even 'made.' They necessitate a Creator and a Maker. Neither are you supposed to let out that the essence of atheism is to believe that nothing created everything, because it's unthinking.
Ray Comfort
#16. Unfortunately, the average guy on the street believes that studying evolution leads to atheism.
Greg Graffin
#17. When he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing - not nothing, but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.
David Foster Wallace
#18. The world of atheism was cracking apart for me, just as once the world of Catholic faith had cracked apart. I was losing my faith in the nonexistence of God.
Anne Rice
#19. I am scared of the day, when they turn atheism into another religion for controlling masses.
M.F. Moonzajer
#20. Satre found atheism 'cruel', Camus 'dreadful', and Nietzsche 'maddening'. Atheists who consistently try to live without God tend to commit suicide or go insane. Those who are inconsistent live on the ethical or aesthetic shadow of Christian truth while they deny the reality that made the shadow.
Norman Geisler
#21. Atheism is a religion like abstinence is a sex position.
Bill Maher
#22. Humanism or atheism is a wonderful philosophy of life as long as you are big, strong, and between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. But watch out if you are in a lifeboat and there are others who are younger, bigger, or smarter.
William Murray, 1st Earl Of Mansfield
#23. One of the most celebrated victims of this theocratic policy was Shelley (1792-1811) who was expelled from University College, Oxford, for writing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism.
Christopher Hitchens
#24. With reason did the Athenians adjudge Diagoras guilty of atheism, in that he not only divulged the Orphic doctrine, and published the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Hercules to boil his turnips, but openly declared that there were no gods at all.
Athenagoras Of Athens
#25. Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.
Voltaire
#26. Because morality is a social necessity, the moment faith in god is banished, man's gaze turns from god to man and he becomes socially conscious. Religious belief prevented the growth of a sense of realism. But atheism at once makes man realistic and alive to the needs of morality.
Goparaju Ramachandra Rao
#27. Atheism in not simply beyond reason, it is contrary to reason.
Dave Hunt
#28. There are many gods which Christians reject. I just believe in one less god then they do. The reasons that you might give for your atheism toward the Roman gods are likely the same reasons I would give for not believing in Jesus.
Dan Barker
#29. Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#30. No mainstream philosopher has developed the kind of systematic, comprehensive, original, and influential exposition of atheism that is to be found in Antony Flew's fifty years of antitheological writings.
Antony Flew
#31. True philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one's own hopes or conceptual limitations.
David Bentley Hart
#32. The Tezumen were happy. When no amount of worshipping caused the Luggage to come back and trample their enemies they poisoned all their priests and tried enlightened atheism instead, which still meant they could kill as many people as they liked but didn't have to get up so early to do it.
Terry Pratchett
#33. Atheism is cheap on people, because it snobbishly says nine out of ten people through history have been wrong about God and have had a lie at the core of their hearts.
Peter Kreeft
#34. To Ishmael, the whale's indefinite whiteness' shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation. [It's] a color-less, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.
Herman Melville
#35. Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.
Simon Critchley
#36. Atheism is the lack of belief in a god (or gods). It makes no claim. It merely rejects the claim that a god (or gods) exists. Nothing more.
Ricky Gervais
#38. Organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.
Richard Rohr
#39. My answer would be definite yes! Destructive atheism, in my view and the view of the Church, is part of a much larger picture - cosmic warfare, that is, between God and Evil, between God and Satan.
Gerard Verschuuren
#40. If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt.
Leslie Stephen
#41. What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.54
Richard Dawkins
#42. It is not the Head but the Heart that is the Seat of Atheism.
Mary Astell
#43. The word "ungodly and word-group" in Jude...It describes, not theoretical atheism, but practical godlessness.
Richard Bauckham
#44. The use or abuse of Christianity in contradiction to the very message of the gospel reveals not the gospel for what it is, but the heart of man. That is why atheism is so bankrupt as a view of life, for it miserably fails to deal with the human condition as it really is.
Ravi Zacharias
#45. The problem when arguing with those who believe in atheistic evolution is that they move goal posts by redefining atheism or evolution or the word 'species.'
Ray Comfort
#46. The Psalmist believed in a personal God, and knew nothing of that modern pantheism which is nothing more than atheism wearing a fig leaf.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#47. According to some liberation theologians atheism is not the cause of the conflict between Christianity and Marxism, but is rather the link between them.
Ernesto Cardenal
#49. The struggle against atheism is foremost and of necessity a struggle against the inadequacy of our own theism.
Karl Rahner
#50. From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hinduism religion.
Swami Vivekananda
#51. I think comics is a really good way to talk about skepticism and atheism and things like that ... it was easy to tell those stories and, I think, helpful to some people to tell them in comic form. Using visuals makes it easier to break stuff down and makes it somewhat easier to understand.
Box Brown
#52. If you have a sloppy religion you get a sloppy atheism.
Ronald Knox
#53. Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.
Blaise Pascal
#54. Atheism deprives superstition of its stand ground, and compels Theism to reason for its existence.
George Holyoake
#55. One does not become an atheist out of a desire for hassle-free Sunday mornings. People come to atheism because they have a problem with organized religion - usually a problem they consider to be of moral urgency.
Lynn Coady
#56. Atheism has been on the rise for years now, and the Bible of the atheists is 'The Origin of Species.'
Kirk Cameron
#57. There is at least one more atheism left; it is by its very nature a belligerent form that wants to spread far and wide by propagating itself though books, TV, and other media.
Gerard Verschuuren
#58. Atheists have just as much civil right to teach atheism as Christians have to teach Christianity; agnostics have just as much right to teach agnosticism as Christians have to teach their religion.
William Jennings Bryan
#59. Atheism and traditional institutions of the Church are the polar sides of the same marasmus: either of them is badly lacking the truth.
Sahara Sanders
#60. The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health and power.
Charles Caleb Colton
#61. Repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when there is nothing else to be said of them.
Plato
#62. Despair is the only genuine atheism.
Jean Paul
#63. I'm an atheist, but I'm very relaxed about it. I don't preach my atheism, but I have a huge amount of respect for people like Richard Dawkins who do.
Daniel Radcliffe
#64. It turns out that the word atheism means much less than I had thought. It is merely the lack of theism.
Dan Barker
#65. I was asked something about the economic problem of Communism. I answered, citing Dostoyevsky: The problem of Communism is not an economic problem. The problem of Communism is the problem of atheism.
Whittaker Chambers
#66. I think the neoatheists have set atheism back a few decades. And I'm a self-described atheist.
Matt Stone
#67. Enthusiasm is contagious - so is a lack of it. Joyless Christians are a greater assault on the gospel than atheism.
Mark Hart
#68. As a better knowledge of Nature was obtained, the sky was shown to be an illusionBut this did not take place without resistance. At first, the public, and particularly its religious portion, denounced the rising doubts as atheism.
John William Draper
#69. The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their mouths and walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.
Jefferson Bethke
#70. I'm now a bit anti-Jewish since my last visit to the synagogue, but my atheism does not necessarily reject religion.
Jack Steinberger
#71. Atheism, a religion dedicated to its own sense of smug superiority.
Stephen Colbert
#72. Monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more God and become atheism
Ibn Warraq
#73. Religion glorifies the dogma of a despotic, mythical God. Atheism ennobles the interests of free and progressive Man. Religion is superstition. Atheism is sanity. Religion is medieval. Atheism is modern.
E. Haldeman-Julius
#74. Faith is blind belief. Atheism is blind disbelief. No one has all the information needed to take up such fixed positions.
Stewart Stafford
#75. I love how people walk around with crucifixes, skullcaps, pointy hats, funny beards and then say 'you should keep your atheism to yourself.'
Ricky Gervais
#76. Atheism is humanism mediated by the suppression of religion, communism is humanism mediated by
the suppression of private property.
Albert Camus
#77. The freethinker has the same right to discredit the beliefs of Christians that the Orthodox Christians enjoy in destroying reverence, respect, and confidence in Mohammedanism, Mormonism, Christian Science, or Atheism.
Theodore Schroeder
#78. I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#79. This atheism concerning the gods of men pertains hereafter to any possible faith
Paul Ricoeur
#80. They poisoned all their priests and tried enlightened atheism instead, which still meant they could kill as many people as they liked but didn't have to get up so early to do it. The
Terry Pratchett
#81. Davy's work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution.
Mark Kurlansky
#82. Religion is defined as belief in and worship of a controlling power and atheism is precisely not that.
Bill Maher
#83. Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain.
Alister E. McGrath
#84. At age fourteen I was asking questions. When the answers failed to satisfy me, I searched elsewhere for different answers and found wisdom in atheism. And I am far from alone in that experience.
Hemant Mehta
#85. The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism, and other burning issues by burning the ismist, which is fine proof that there is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God.
Ben Lindsey
#86. Most atheists bristle at the thought that atheism has anything to do with faith, but not Penn Jillette.
Ray Comfort
#87. Atheism: the religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority.
Stephen Colbert
#88. It is not scientific doubt, not atheism, not pantheism, not agnosticism, that in our day and in this land is likely to quench the light of the gospel. It is a proud, sensuous, selfish, luxurious, church going, hollow-hearted prosperity.5
Francis Chan
#89. There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life.
G.K. Chesterton
#90. Every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of god.
Thomas Jefferson
#91. The more I read arguments for atheism, the more I am convinced it takes a very strong faith to be an atheist. And atheism seems to me the least reasonable of all faiths.
Corrado Ghinamo
#92. My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana
#93. If atheism spread, it would become a religion as intolerable as the ancient ones.
Gustave Le Bon
#94. Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness.
Madame De Stael
#95. If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.
John C. Wright
#96. WHAT WE NEED IN AMERICA TODAY IS A VIGOROUS RETURN TO THE GOD OF OUR FATHERS AND A MOST VIGOROUS DEFENSE AGAINST THE MINION OF GODLESSNESS AND ATHEISM.
J. Edgar Hoover
#97. Thank Heaven, the female heart is untenantable by atheism.
Horace Mann
#98. Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning ...
C.S. Lewis
#99. Atheism is not a matter of the mind; it is a matter of the heart.
Dillon Burroughs
#100. Philosophy may serve as the bridge between theology and science. All atheism is a philosophy, but not all philosophy is atheism. Philosophy ('love of wisdom') is simply a tool depending on how one uses it, and in some cases, logically understanding the nature of God and existence.
Criss Jami
