Quotes On Agnosticism And Atheism

#1. America's freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, offers every wisdom tradition an opportunity to address our soul-deep needs: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, secular humanism, agnosticism and atheism among others.

Parker Palmer

#2. I oscillate between agnosticism and atheism.

Brad Pitt

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

Mark Twain

#4. He didn't like religion, hadn't liked it for years, but he adored churches, loved them like old scientific instruments whose time is long past but are nevertheless fascinating and strange.

Bruce Robinson

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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.

Sam Harris

#8. Whether you say that a god does exist, or that none do, it is a claim
to know (or at least believe in) something. Once you claim to know
something, you can't call that a lack of belief in the opposite view
and then say it's the place that you started.

Lewis N. Roe

#9. Robert Ingersoll came to [a small Midwest town] to speak ... , and after he had gone the question of the divinity of Christ for months occupied the minds of the citizens.

Sherwood Anderson

#10. 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.

Criss Jami

#11. In any modern society encouraging your child to cut himself is an unthinkable act, but only with religious belief becomes part of the culture, and demands respect.

Sean S. Kamali

#12. 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.

Sam Harris

#13. The human brain has the unique ability to doubt the reality presented to itself. To comprehend the dissonance between ideas and the truth of the surrounding world. God knows this, and it infuriates him. It terrifies him.

Autumn Christian

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. Let's say I have a mystical soul and a rational brain, and, like Montaigne, I am incapable of choosing between them. I don't know if I believe in God, but I am often tempted to believe.

Francois Mitterrand

#17. The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor-bicycle and golf course.

A.A. Milne

#18. The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.

Sam Harris

#19. All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.

H.L. Mencken

#20. I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself.

Steve Wozniak

#21. 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.

Criss Jami

#22. You are believing not in your god but in yourself if your god knows no better than you do ... and yet, in this alone, I am afraid, you have already been fooling yourself.

Criss Jami

#23. I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

Orson Welles

#24. A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.

Peter L. Berger

#25. Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

Sam Harris

#26. 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.

Andy Rooney

#27. We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.

Sam Harris

#28. I was brought up Christian, then I was agnostic and then I realized I was atheist ... This movie [Agora] is about fundamentalism and hate.

Alejandro Amenabar

#29. And the cause of everything is that which we call God.

Leo Tolstoy

#30. There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by the evil-smelling effluvia of millions of other souls that have spun about a little under the sun and then burst ...

Vladimir Nabokov

#31. We are all born agnostics. Atheism and theism is sold to us.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#32. He had remained steadfast in agnosticism and therefore, as Mabel took comfort in remarking, 'he never denied God.' Neither did he affirm God.

Robert V. Bruce

#33. Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.

Bede Griffiths

#34. As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.

Diogenes Laertius

#35. If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

Mark Twain

#36. For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.

Sean S. Kamali

#37. 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

#38. Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.

Cesar Nascimento