Quotes

This Page is a work in progress.

Main source, A-Z Quotes.

Choose a name:

From Seth Andrews

“Theirs was the snot-nosed, sticky-fingered world of peanut butter sandwiches and cartoons, playgrounds and superhero pajamas, crayons and pop-up books, booster chairs and midday naps. Their world existed no farther than the reach of their tiny arms. They were new. Innocent. Vulnerable. Yet they were somehow able to take personal and public responsibility for a hard-wired sin nature, implored to pledge allegiance to an invisible overlord they could not see, and charged to prevent their own torture in a nasty, horrible place that the Vacation Bible School teachers called Hell.”
― Seth Andrews, Deconverted: a Journey from Religion to Reason

“I would rather live a harder reality than a happy fantasy. It is actually more satisfying, even despite the difficulties, to be outside of the faith.”

From Dan Barker

“I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.” ~ Dan Barker

“Asking, ‘If there is no God, what is the purpose of life?’ is like asking, ‘If there is no master, whose slave will I be?’ If your purpose of life is to submit as a slave, then your meaning comes from flattering the ego of a person whom you should detest.” ~ Dan Barker

“I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil—you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself.” ~ Dan Barker

“Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing “Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!” If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.” ~ Dan Barker

“There is no evidence for a god, no coherent definition of a god, no good argument for a god, good positive arguments against a god, no agreement among believers about the nature or moral principles of a god, and no need for a god. We can live happy, moral, productive lives without such belief, and we can do it better.” ~ Dan Barker

“The very concept of sin comes from the Bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?” ~ Dan Barker

“Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples’ hallucinations are real.” ~ Dan Barker

“All you have to do is walk into any children’s hospital and you know there is no God. Prayer doesn’t make any difference. Those people pray for their beloved children to live and they die.” ~ Dan Barker

“There is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, during his entire lifetime. This does not disprove his existence, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who was supposedly widely known to have made a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed.” ~ Dan Barker

“People are always asking, “What’s the purpose of life?” That’s easy. Relieve suffering. Create beauty. Make gardens.” ~ Dan Barker

“If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true ‘by faith,’ and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.” ~ Dan Barker

“Not thinking critically, I assumed that the successful prayers were proof that God answers prayer while the failures were proof that there was something wrong with me.” ~ Dan Barker

“Some theists, observing that all ‘effects’ need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.” ~ Dan Barker

“I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.” ~ Dan Barker

“Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.” ~ Dan Barker

“Isn’t atheism just another religion?’ No, it isn’t. Atheism has no creeds, rituals, holy book, absolute moral code, origin myth, sacred spaces or shrines. It has no sin, divine judgment, forbidden words, prayer, worship, prophecy, group privileges, or anointed ‘holy’ leaders. Atheists don’t believe in a transcendent world or supernatural afterlife. Most important, there is no orthodoxy in atheism.” ~ Dan Barker

“If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?” ~ Dan Barker

“You believe in a book that has sticks turning into snakes, and you say we are the ones that need help?” ~ Dan Barker

“It’s not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.” ~ Dan Barker

“You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say “God is love” they will claim that you are taking things out of context!” ~ Dan Barker

“It turns out that the word atheism means much less than I had thought. It is merely the lack of theism.” ~ Dan Barker

“I’m proud to be an atheist – it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.” ~ Dan Barker

From Richard Dawkins

“Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that’s also the definition of delusion.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“The less you think, the more you believe.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don’t see you jumping out of buildings.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Offense is what people take when they can’t take argument.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they are never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, out number the sand grains in the Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. The number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist… we are privileged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“‘Take offense at the drop of a hat’ is the unwritten eleventh commandment.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop, sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Religion is the root of quite a lot of evil.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Science is the poetry of reality.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Being dead will be no different from being unborn — I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Myths are fun, as long as you don’t confuse them with the truth.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“I do believe that nice religious people make the world safe for extremists by teaching us […] that faith is a virtue, teaching us that there’s something good about holding beliefs without any substantiating evidence. Once you buy into that, […] then the door is opened to extremists who defend their extremism by saying, ‘Oh well, it’s my faith, you can’t touch it, you can’t criticise my faith, I don’t even need to defend it because faith is faith.'” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“If you don’t understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured?” ~ Richard Dawkins

“It’s a truly disgusting idea that the creator of the universe – capable of inventing the laws of physics and designing the evolutionary process – that this protégé of supernatural intellect couldn’t think of a better way to forgive our sins than to have himself tortured to death.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“There is great variation in brain power all the way from Einstien on one hand to Sarah Palin on the other.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“It’s a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn’t think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“I shall not make an argument ad hominem. My argument is ad bullshitem.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism – as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” ~ Richard Dawkins

From Daniel Dennett

“There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.” ~ Daniel Dennett

“The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.” ~ Daniel Dennett

“The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.” ~ Daniel Dennett

From Matt Dillahunty

“I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible.” ~ Matt Dillahunty

“A god that does not manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist.” ~ Matt Dillahunty

From Josh Groban

“I did not practice hours a day for eighteen years to have my success attributed to a myth.” ~ Josh Groban

From Sam Harris

“Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.” ~ Sam Harris

“The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.” ~ Sam Harris

From Christopher Hitchens

“Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge. Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us – waking and sleeping – who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, thought crime, just for what we think, who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick, as apparently we are – and then order us, on pain of eternal torture to be well again.
To demand this, to wish this to be true is to wish to live as an abject slave.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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 affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“If I could do just one thing, it would be to dissociate faith from virtue, now and for good, and to expose it for what it is, a servile weakness, a refuge in cowardice, and a willingness to follow, with credulity, people who are in the highest degree unscrupulous.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The gods that we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Shepherds don’t look after sheep because they love them – although I do think some shepherds like their sheep too much. They look after their sheep so they can, first, fleece them and second, turn them into meat. That’s much more like the priesthood as I know it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“People are frightened of death, and the central lie of all religion is that there’s a cure for this and an exception we’ve made in your own case: an eternal life offered if you make the right propitiations and the right abjections. Well, I’m sorry. I think that it’s the height of immorality to lie to people like that. That’s why [religion] survives.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“[Religion] attacks us in our deepest integrity – the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we would not know an evil, wicked act from a decent human act without divine permission, without divine authority or without, even worse, either the fear of a divine punishment or the hope of a divine reward. It strips us of the right to make our own determination, as all humans always have, about what is and what is not a right human action.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Here is my challenge. Name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first – I have been asking it for some time – awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

From Steven Pinker

“I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn “x” (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn’t vn kn whr th vwls r)” ~ Steven Pinker

“We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.” ~ Steven Pinker

“All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless” ~ Steven Pinker

“In our society, the best predictor of a man’s wealth is his wife’s looks, and the best predictor of a woman’s looks is her husband’s wealth.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don’t need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you’ve already lost the argument, because you’re using reason to make your case. … We don’t “believe” in reason.” ~ Steven Pinker

“We’re living in primate heaven. We’re warm, dry, we’re not hungry, we don’t have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?” ~ Steven Pinker

“Morality comes from a commitment to treat other as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe.” ~ Steven Pinker

“The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people’s interests into account, who’s dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.” ~ Steven Pinker

“Dear White Fella When I am born I’m black When I grow up I’m black When I am sick I’m black When I go out ina sun I’m black When I git cold I’m black When I git scared I’m black And when I die I’m still black. But you white fella When you’re born you’re pink When you grow up you’re white When you git sick you’re green When you go out ina sun you go red When you git cold you go blue When you git scared you’re yellow And when you die you’re grey And you got the cheek to call me coloured?” ~ Steven Pinker

“In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not only on the books as a crime, but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.” ~ Steven Pinker

From Aron Ra

“No god worthy of worship would be associated with such character flaws as vanity, jealousy, vengeance, or wrath. God should be above such deadly sins and would not be encumbered by them.”
― Aron Ra, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

“Most reject the more repugnant or indefensible dogmas while still holding onto some core belief. Many believers will proudly describe themselves as “reasonable” or “rational” based on how little of their religion they still embrace versus how much they now reject. I think it’s funny when people realize that the less you believe the more reasonable you are, but they stop before they reach the logical conclusion.”

“Christians think they’re oppressed when they’re not allowed to oppress others.”

“Religion demands complete conviction, but science advises against that. It demands understanding instead of belief, so it must be based on verifiable evidence; it must explain related observations with a measurable degree of accuracy; it must withstand continuous critical analysis in peer review; and it must be falsifiable too. If it doesn’t fulfill all these conditions at once, then it isn’t science. If it meets none of them, it could be religion.”
― Aron Ra, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

“We are born atheist and we remain so until someone lies to us.”

“If there really was one true god, it should be a singular composite of every religion’s gods, an uber-galactic super-genius, and the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it. And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that.”
― Aron Ra, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

“God can supposedly make everything humans can’t make but he can’t make anything humans can make.”

From Michael Shermer

“In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We’re only one God away from total agreement.” ~ Michael Shermer

“Science is not a thing. It’s a verb. It’s a way of thinking about things. It’s a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.” ~ Michael Shermer

“Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” ~ Michael Shermer

“I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.” ~ Michael Shermer

“Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.” ~ Michael Shermer

“Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.” ~ Michael Shermer

“There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God.” ~ Michael Shermer

“Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life–birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it.” ~ Michael Shermer

“Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.” ~ Michael Shermer

“Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.” ~ Michael Shermer

From Allan Watts

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” ~ Alan Watts

“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.” ~ Alan Watts

“By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.” ~ Alan Watts

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.” ~ Alan Watts

“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” ~ Alan Watts

“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be” ~ Alan Watts

“Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.” ~ Alan Watts

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.” ~ Alan Watts

“You are the universe experiencing itself.” ~ Alan Watts

“By going out of your mind, you come to your senses” ~ Alan Watts

“The future is a concept, it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.” ~ Alan Watts

“People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.” ~ Alan Watts

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.” ~ Alan Watts

“All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.” ~ Alan Watts

“Truly great companies are built on ideals, not just deals.” ~ Alan Watts

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” ~ Alan Watts

“When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.” ~ Alan Watts

“Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.” ~ Alan Watts

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” ~ Alan Watts

“We see what we believe rather than what we see.” ~ Alan Watts

“Chaos is always losing, but never defeated” ~ Alan Watts

“We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see it’s like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that…Also, watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence…you wait till later to find out what the sentence means…The present is always changing the past.” ~ Alan Watts

“To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.” ~ Alan Watts

“The sound of the rain needs no translation.” ~ Alan Watts

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.” ~ Alan Watts