Atheists From The United States

"Today's secularists too often have very little accurate knowledge about religion, and even less desire to learn. This is problematic insofar as their sense of self is constructed in opposition to religion. Above all, the secularist is not a Jew, is not a Christian, not a Muslim, and so on. But is it intellectually responsible to define one's identity against something that one does not understand?"

"I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there are no gods. We arise from nature—and nature is not a moral entity."

"The Hebrew Bible, as a document, displays an astonishing lack of textual self-consciousness. It alleges to know what God thinks, but it does not know itself. It is not aware that it is called the Hebrew Bible. … Jews and Christians have venerated an unself-conscious artifact, one whose embarrassing gaps in self-knowledge have always had to be filled in by later interpreters."

"That God is quoted verbatim, that God is said to be speaking (when, in fact, he is being spoken for) points to either the remarkable arrogance of the biblical contributors or their unshakeable conviction that their access to the deity was total. The fateful, and perhaps even unwitting, manipulation performed by the Hebrew Bible is to have convinced its readers that what stands in front of them is not a hodgepodge of texts worked over by countless men position across time and motivated by mundane political and theological interests. Instead, it presents itself as a self-evident treasury of the actual words, though, actions, political opinions, and future aspirations of Yahweh. From early on, apparently, interpreters wholly swallowed this argument."

"Because let’s be honest about this — is there any law New Atheists can point to that has been their political output? That has changed due to their activism? What has it done? It sells books, it makes for great polemics, it keeps journalists busy, but there has been no political accomplishment."

"Meaning is a choice, not a lost object."

"We have not answered the free will-determinism question, but we have decided to come down on the side of personal freedom, to assert it whether or not it exists. Just as we make our own meaning, we make our own freedom. If this is a cosmic joke, then let us be the ones laughing."

"It is simply not true that atheists, because of their convictions and their worldview, are as a group more depressed than believers."

"We may feel blue because we see clearly, and what we see saddens us. We see that the amount of intelligence displayed by most people may not be intelligence enough for the challenges faced by our species."

"The smarter, braver part of you knows that a tradition is only of value if it is of value."

"As atheists we have the opportunity to be more honest about the blues that we experience...We get to honestly look at the thing itself and not shift the issue to our relationship to some nonexistent god."

"To nominate yourself as the hero of your own story is to step outside society, not with the intention of turning your back on it but with the intention of not allowing it to dictate to you."

"This individual is regularly nominated not only by himself but by others as well: by the ordinary townsfolk who beg him to save their town, their world, or their galaxy because they see that he has the strength and integrity that they lack."

"“I nominate myself” means “I won’t follow.” This isn’t hubris: it is simply the fruit of your decision to live on your own terms."

"Human beings have always had the potential to know meaninglessness. Modern times activated that potential."

"To define what we are is to reduce and distort what we are: to say that we are nothing but our desires or nothing but our self-interest is to misrepresent us."

"Before you can make meaning, an odd kind of election process must occur. You must nominate yourself as the meaning-maker in your life and as the hero of your own story. Then you must consciously elect yourself to that position."

"These doubts must be met in the following way. You announce that meaning does not exist until you make it, and then you don the mantle of meaning-maker. The minute you do this, all previous belief systems, both those that told you what to believe and those that told you that there was nothing to believe, vanish. You suddenly enact the paradigm shift that I believe we are now ready to embrace: the shift from seeking meaning to making meaning. You let go of wondering what the universe wants of you, … and you announce that you will make life mean exactly what you intend it to mean. This is an amazing, glorious, and triumphant announcement. The instant you realize that meaning is not provided (as traditional belief systems teach) and that it is not absent (as nihilists feel), a new world of potential opens up for you."

"You nominate yourself to be the one who will courageously do what you think ought to be done, even if everyone is pressing you to do something else."

"There are no gods (including God). Like all species, ours is a product of nature. This is not something either to celebrate or to mourn. But it can prove a transformational and mind-opening experience to put all gods, religions and supernatural enthusiasms aside and to explore the world from the point of view of a human being who lives, dies, and is as natural as a tiger or a dove."

"You and you alone are the sole arbiter of the meaning in your life. The second you turn to someone and say, “What does life mean?” or, “What should my life mean?” you have slipped into a mind-set that courts inauthenticity and depression. The second you agree with someone simply because of her position or reputation, whether that someone is a guru, author, cleric, parent, politician, general, or elder, you fall from the path of personal meaning-maker."

"Few people actually nominate themselves in this way. Most defer to the meaning-making apparatus of their culture, taking comfort in the fact that others have built a meaning nest for them. This built-in cover allows them to avoid taking responsibility and at the same time causes them to grow grandiose, narcissistic, and egotistical. As soon as you put on the robes of your culture and add gravity to your mere humanness by wearing the badge of your profession, your club, your gang, or your clan, you … refuse to engage in the process of personal meaning-making, with its requirements of honesty and self-awareness."

"The rose’s fragrance, the garden’s lushness, and the night sky’s grandeur affect us because we are built to appreciate beauty and to experience awe. To leap to a supernatural source for these powerful but ordinary feelings is to indulge in wishful thinking, romantic embellishment, and metaphoric fantasizing."

"On religion, many are destined to reason wrongly; others not to reason at all; and others to persecute those who do reason."

"Every time that we say that God is the author of some phenomenon, that signifies that we are ignorant of how such a phenomenon was caused by the forces of nature."

"Let others find themselves alike, My will is obstinately I. My winter blinds are wide to winds And long, in cold, My curtains fly."

"As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect."

"We are on the threshold of understanding a shining idea: that each life can have meaning, even if the universe has none."

"We need atheism to grow as a movement because we need to remove the god card from the hands of the selfishly self-interested."

"Religion is excellent cover for the unscrupulous; it is much harder to think than it is to pray."

"They are alive, but they are not engaged in the project of their own lives. No one has ever taught them otherwise. Why aren’t we offered any existential training? Because one of society’s unacknowledged goals is to minimize existential thought. A company making widgets doesn’t want you to wonder about the meaningfulness of its widget. It wants you to be attracted by the widget’s design and to buy two of them."

"There are so many believers with good hearts! But that doesn’t make their belief systems any less faulty or, ultimately, dangerous."

"The god religions, the river religions, and the world of supernatural enthusiasms do not serve you. They force you to rein in your intelligence, they make claims that you do not honestly believe, they smell of illegitimate shortcut, and they hurt your chances of taking a fearless inventory of your beliefs and charting a course that will make you proud."

"You are free to cut off contact with toxic people and to eliminate toxic beliefs from your system."

"That is what is in our hearts when we conclude that the universe is meaningless. We don’t doubt that it has order, but we recognize that it is not our parent, our sponsor, or our caretaker."

"Any modern person, believer or atheist, can feel this way (i. e., that the universe is meaningless). The believer, to take some comfort and to find some solace, allows his brain to perpetrate a trick that it is quite willing to play: to conjure a god and a more pleasant universe. So he turns to religion, even if to find that solace he must ignore his religion’s monstrous contradictions, swallow his doubts, smile at ludicrous claims and accept that he has transformed a metaphor into a pseudo-reality. Before the advent of modern science and the last four hundred years of increased knowledge, believers may have believed in some seamless way, uninterrupted by doubts. Now every sensible, educated, modern believer knows in a corner of consciousness that she is buying her solace on the cheap—she knows that the pope is not infallible, that god did not give the Jews a piece of land, that there is nothing like nirvana, and so on. So she bites her tongue and tries to get as much out of her religion as she can, covering her eyes to all the rest—and not really dealing with the central issue of cosmic indifference."

"It requires your constant analyses because all meaning is subjective: the only way you can opt for settled meaning, objective meaning, or received meaning is by giving away your freedom."

"The atheist’s way is your way. You will take your journey, and it will not be identical to my journey."

"Not only is the atheist way more accurate and more truthful than the god-talk way, but it also confers great advantages. The first is that you feel very free. You are free to think your own thoughts and to have your own feelings. If a passing pastor accuses you of sinning, you feel free to rebuke or ignore him. You know that he has no special knowledge and that he is only betraying your common humanity by quoting gods. You know that no one has any special knowledge about the purpose or lack of purpose of the universe, that there is only scientific knowledge, with its limitations; the speculations of consciousness, with its limitations; and some amount of mystery, shared by us all and quite likely to remain unexplained until the end of time."

"Every argument for the objectivity of meaning is merely someone’s attempt to elevate her subjective experience and her opinions above yours and mine."

"FM's vision stretches beyond infinity. He continues to inspire even the most complacent of minds by revving-up the volume on imagination. His unique way of putting together ideas about the future has been a catalytic force."

"The exhilarating voice of a new, nonmystical consciousness ... FM dares us to step outside our encaged historical selves and leap to a new stage of evolution."

"I am a 21st Century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future."

"People will belong to no specific families or factions, classes or sects, races or nationalities. We will free flow across the planet and beyond. Highly universal, yet individual."

"That maxim, it’s not an argument against atheism—it’s an argument against foxholes."

"Say “rationalist” to the average New Age chucklehead, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. Phooey. A rationalist could experience awe as readily as a shaman. But it had to be quality awe, Oliver believed, awe without illusions—the sort of awe he’d felt upon intuiting the size of the universe, or sensing the unlikeliness of his birth."

"“I don’t see you at Mass anymore.” “It’s like fucking, Father. You gotta be up for it.”"

"There’s nothing quite so pernicious as wishful thinking."

"Life’s meaning doesn’t come from God! Life’s meaning comes from life!"

"She had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the affectations with which radical feminists liked to impoverish their minds—crystal therapy, neo-paganism, Wicca—her skepticism placed her emphatically in a minority."