Atheists From The United States

"I shall never cease to marvel at the clarity of stars when viewed from midocean, each as sharp and bright as the laser pointer God uses when lecturing the angels on evolution."

"“It’s an old story, perhaps the oldest on earth,” Joan said. “The sky rumbles, the clouds congeal, the sun spasms. Is that a saint I see on high? An angel? The Lord God Jehovah himself? Now a holy voice booms down, instructing the poor prophet to grab a sword and thrust it into a fellow human, or perhaps a hundred fellow humans, or even a million if the cause is sufficiently sacred. The prophet never talks back. The tradition existed before me. It flourishes to this day. The sword, the blood, the freshly created corpses littering the battlefield, exuding the stink of epiphany.”"

"Many are the consolations of literature, and not the least such solace occurs when an annoyingly virtuous hero succumbs to carnal temptation."

"Recent biblical exegesis by Anthem’s newest organization, Hermeneutics Unlimited, had established beyond doubt that Jesus Christ was adamantly opposed to universal health-care insurance, class-action lawsuits, and corporate whistleblowers. Several prominent postrationalist theologians had successfully exposed public education for the misguided Marxist boondoggle it was, while a majority in Congress now advocated replacing the secular school system with private academies committed to sparing children the bad news that Charles Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands."

"Is there anything quite so ludicrous as two intellectuals grappling in a philosophy-department parking lot? Each of us wanted to pummel the other to a pulp, but neither knew how to go about it."

"Neither Dexter nor I knew the first thing about running a small business. We were entrepreneurs the way Abbott and Costello were watercolorists. And so naturally it came to pass that Pieces of Mind was a hands-down, thumbs-up, flat-out success."

"The undergraduates lamented the high price of textbooks and the equally outrageous fact that they were expected to read them."

"Those who can kill themselves do, and those who can’t, teach philosophy."

"Fair are the daughters of men, and fairest are those who read. Is there any creature more desirable than a damsel in intellectual distress?"

"“If Western Europe and the United States committed seven billion dollars annually to the cause of clean drinking water worldwide, that investment would save four thousand lives a day”... “Seven billion dollars. That’s less than what Europeans spend each year for perfume and Americans for cosmetic surgery. Before he went to the gallows, Enoch Anthem spoke often about Christ turning water into wine, but he never once implored Christendom to turn perfume into water.”"

"What really got under Londa’s skin, I soon learned, was not the Messiah’s sermon per se but the discontinuity between its sublime directives and the ignominious course of Western history, a spectacle that, the more we thought about it, increasingly struck Londa and me as largely a fancy-dress danse macabre, Titus Andronicus on a hemispheric and ultimately global scale, though I hastened to point out that the chronicles of other civilizations were likewise awash in blood. What had gone wrong? She wanted to know. When and why had the teachings of Jesus Christ become an optional component of Christianity?"

"“Which alternative is worse, I wonder?” she said. “To deny death and thus risk never being wholly alive, or to face oblivion squarely and risk paralysis by dread?” “Nobody knows,” I said. “It’s ambiguous.” “If I ever get to be God,” she said, unleashing the grin of the person who’d invented Largesse, “my first act will be to make ambiguity illegal.”"

"“Ah, yes, the spiritual realm.” In those days “spiritual” was my least favorite word. It still is."

"I know the God hypothesis has its partisans, but, oh, what a boring idea. Where did the universe come from? He did it. How do we account for rivers and rocks and ring-tailed lemurs? He made them. Ho-hum."

"“Your disciples will expect something even grander from you. They’ll want you to become a deity.” She snickered and said, “I’m not ruling out that possibility.” “What sort of deity? A hamadryad? Plato’s demiurge? The Creator God of Judeo-Christian revelation?” “That job’s already taken,” she said. “But you could do it better,” I said. “When it comes to the physics, no, but in other areas—you’re right.”"

"My spirits rose: I could see the photon at the end of the tunnel."

"As Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us, in the case of human beings this metaphysic is reversed: a person’s existence precedes his essence—he is a subject among objects. The danger, says Sartre, following Heidegger, is that he will “fall” into the world of objects, becoming ever after the prisoner of arbitrary strictures masquerading as universal principles."

"Dexter Padula, a member of that ubiquitous academic breed, the professional graduate student, forever revising his dissertation while eyeing external reality with the anxious demeanor of a nursing infant struggling to imagine life beyond the tit."

"Bitterness is not a philosophy, friend. Outrage is not an ethic. Stop counting corpses and reach a truce with the universe, or you’ll be stuck on the dung heap forever."

"“God was guilty. The best defense is the Manichaean heresy, which isn’t a defense at all, it’s—” “Never mind about that.” “—an indictment.”"

"Much as I hate to admit it, humanity will get along perfectly well without me. Any species that could invent the twentieth century entirely on its own doesn’t need a Prince of Darkness."

"“You aspired to be God’s advocate, you got the job, you performed admirably. But God’s advocate was ipso facto my advocate. Theodicy’s a sucker’s game, Professor. When Yahweh was operational, humanity’s obligation wasn’t to worship Him, for chrissakes. It was to celebrate His creativity and stand forevermore opposed to His malice. And anybody such as yourself, anybody who sought to shoehorn an omnibenevolent God into the same universe as Auschwitz...that person, Dr. Gregory Francis Lovett—that person did the Devil’s work for him.”"

"To close the gap between jurisprudence and justice would require a canon of a hundred million laws."

"Do you really think your terrestrial counterpart is living in the best of all possible worlds? Where I come from, an eighth grader would be ashamed to enter planet Earth in a junior high school science fair."

"With a rush of joy, I realized that this Darwinist stance would appeal neither to secular Marxists, for whom moral lessons lay exclusively within history’s brute curriculum, nor to evangelical Christians, for whom a naturalist ethics was a contradiction in terms, nor to middle-class mystics, who detested any argument smacking of biological determinism. A philosophical position that could simultaneously antagonize the collectivist left, the God-besotted right, and the Aquarian fringe must, I decided, have a lot going for it."

"“I am what I am. I am Christ and Antichrist, God and Satan, Heaven and Hiroshima, Arcadia and Auschwitz.” Smiling devilishly, Sarkos lumbered up to Lovett. “Get it, fat boy? God is a duality. Dr. Jehovah and Mr. Hyde.” He lobbed the bottle cap into his mouth and chewed. “Allow me to tell you a bedtime story. It’s called ‘The Day the Gas Chambers Malfunctioned at Auschwitz.’ On second thought, why bother? You know the plot—the title gives it away—I’m surprised Braverman and Kelvin left it out of their overblown epic. Can you imagine how it feels to be a seven-year-old Jewish child, standing in line with hundreds of other Jewish children, waiting your turn to be thrown alive onto an open fire?” Swallowing the bottle cap, Sarkos swerved toward Martin. “Don’t you see? It’s the only solution that can possibly work. No other theory comes close. Of course God has a dark side. Not just dark—evil. Radically, radically evil.”"

"If nothing else, their adventure had proved that God was not about to put science out of business."

"“Origen cut off his own balls,” Martin informed Randall. “Prostate cancer?” “Faith.”"

"“How’re you feeling?” “I highly recommend cancer. It’s worth it just for the drugs.”"

"Although covetousness is not my only flaw, it seems to cause me more pain than all my other sins combined."

"Late in my senior year, I went through a crisis of doubt when my provisional girlfriend, a willowy physics major named Morgan Piziks, informed me at the end of our fourth date that anybody seriously in the question “Why?” should look not to philosophy but to the physical sciences—to cosmology, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, and the periodic table of the elements. My mind went blank. Try as I might, I could contrive no riposte. I felt instinctively that Morgan’s claim enjoyed the nontrivial virtue of being true."

"“I’ve always wondered: are snake handlers in it for the religious ecstasy or merely for the ritualized masturbation?” asked Funkeldune."

"“The state flower of New Jersey is the common violet,” she explained, smirking, “the state bird is the eastern goldfinch, and the state fragrance is unrefined petroleum.”"

"“I cannot respect any theory of evil that so neatly immunizes itself against empirical disconfirmation,” said Gordon. “All theodicies requiring belief in an afterlife are manifestly begging the question.”"

"“When an upright citizen hears his neighbor has met with an earthquake or a hurricane, he doesn’t stop to ask, ‘Is there a hidden harmony here?’ He rolls up his sleeves and tries to help.” “Exactly.” With an athleticism that defied his years, Noah regained his feet and climbed onto the long, taut mooring line. “If I learned one thing from the Deluge, Your Grace, it is this: a man who seals up his ark for the sake of a greater good is a man who has ceded his soul to chaos.” Slowly, cautiously, he tightrope-walked toward the rudderless vessel. “The hidden harmony defense is pornography, Bishop Augustine—pornography for priests!”"

"“It doesn’t derive from any sort of biology,” snapped Augustine. “It derives from sound reasoning and the Book of Genesis. ‘In Adam’s Fall, we sinned all.’” “Through Adam’s shlong, our race went wrong,” replied Saperstein, jeering. “I’m sorry, Your Grace, but it just won’t wash, either scientifically or theologically.”"

"Don’t get testy with me, sir. I am Augustine of Hippo Regius, discoverer of concupiscence. Between my legs hangs the axis on which will turn the brave new world of Christian antieroticism."

"For many citizens of the Western world, this situation proved, as you might imagine, troubling—especially in the United States, where reality has never enjoyed a great deal of prestige."

"I said my standard grace—“Dear Lord, we know You have good reasons for allowing thousands of children to starve in various undeveloped nations, and we thank You for concomitantly supplying our own table with these grossly superfluous portions, amen”—after which we all dug in."

"I stand before you today not as your hypothetical descendant but as the ambassador of my kind. The statistics, as you may know, are appalling: two of us sloughed off for every six who make it into the world. In all of history, there was never a more prolific abortionist than God Almighty. Make sure the tribunal learns that fact."

"You should be talking to a doctor of theology, not a Father of Lies. The distinction is subtle but real."

"“And what are you?” “Me? I knew God was dead even before the corpse showed up.”"

"“God is out of the loop,” said Martin...“He’s left the scene”—he grimaced, realizing what he was about to say—“of His crimes.”"

"He set down the paddle, lowered his head, and, as tears squirted from his eyes, began pondering the curious fact that in the entire Book of Job the sufferer never once lamented the loss of his children."

"That night Martin read the Book of Job for the first time in thirty years, discovering to his surprise it was a kind of courtroom drama, with the perverse twist that the Accused also functioned as Judge and Jury. Equally disturbing was the fact that when God went to make His case, He completely ignored Job’s main concern—justice—opting instead to intimidate him with the majesty of Creation: lions, whales, horses, hail, stars, and, ultimately, the unknowable monsters Behemoth and Leviathan. A rigged proceeding, yes, and yet Martin found it gripping. He was moved by both the force of Job’s bitterness and the caliber of his blasphemy."

"Never underestimate the value of a falsehood, friends. Never doubt the power of a lie. Blessed are the mendacious, for they shall grow wealthy beyond their wildest dreams."

"I am the Father of Lies. Over the years, my children have done me proud. I shouldn’t play favorites, but I am especially pleased with “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Likewise, I shall always retain a soft spot in my heart for “Every cloud has a silver lining.” As for “Time heals all wounds” and “Whenever God closes a door, He opens a window”—they, too, make me gloat unconscionably."

"As usual, He underestimated the human potential for self-deception."

"In my protracted sojourn on this planet, Mr. Candle, I have come to value three commodities above all others: good books, decent claret, and worthy opponents."

"“I knew this guy one, a demac on the Amoco Cádiz, dying of bone cancer. You know what he said? ‘When they give you morphine like there’s no tomorrow, there isn’t.’”"