“In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him.”
“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
“I don t want to believe. I want to know.”
“Sex has become more and more attractive because of its condemnation by priests”
“Love and respect all people. Hate and destroy all faith.”
“I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying I refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture” The Plague”
“The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.”
“I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time. She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic.”
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
“Religion has actually convinced people that there s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can t handle money!”
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.”
“If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he s an underachiever.”
“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”
“I don t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me Well, you haven t been there, have you? You haven t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid - then I can t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we d got, and we ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.”
“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.”
“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”