atheism

"If we discover that religious morality was a result of historical misunderstanding, then we will need to free this morality from the prison of human virtue."

"No doubts life cannot be limited to narrow concepts nor to religious and divine norms; it is extended to the depths of nature and begins first by unveiling what we ignore."

"In the countries affected by the Arab Spring, the Americans have put their money on the Muslim Brotherhood. They believe it will be the dominant power of tomorrow, and they are adjusting to that fact."

"Life and liberty are parts of each other and they are linked to our capacity of awareness."

"The militarization of the uprising has provided a cover and a space for everyone-whether they are fighting to topple Assad, fighting for a free country, fighting a holy war in the name of God or fighting for a state that implements Islamic law."

"Despite people's claims to the contrary, I think that a proper application of skepticism when viewing religious claims does necessarily lead to atheism. -Matt Dillahunty"

"Existence is a temporal condition. -Matt Dillahunty"

"You are better than your god. You are better than your religion. So am I, so is damn near everybody on the planet. I wish you people would wake up and see this. Stop apologizing for this! [holds up The Bible] It's not the Good Book, there's nothing good about it. All it does is poison minds. All it does is make you sacrifice your humanity— the only thing that you have that is of any value— in order to sit around in deference to your gods. -Matt Dillahunty"

"So basically what you're saying is you believe this to be true despite the fact that you have no evidence to support that (statement) -Matt Dillahunty"

"I don't think it's an accurate definition of morality. -Matt Dillahunty"

"Your position is ... one where there is a god who has an important message for mankind, and somehow he only reveals it to certain individuals who then write this down and thousands of years after this initial revelation, we have to rely on copies of copies of translations of copies by anonymous authors with no originals, and the textual testimony to a miracle, for example the loaves and fishes; there’s no amount of reports - anecdotal testimonial reports - that could be sufficient to justify that this event actually happened as reported. No amount. And anything that would qualify as a god would clearly understand this, and if it wanted to convey this information to people in a way that was believable, would not be relying on text to do so, and this for me is the nail in the coffin for Christianity. The god that Christians believe in is amazingly stupid if it wants to actually achieve its goal of spreading this information to humanity by relying on text; by relying on languages that die out; by relying on anecdotal testimony. That's not a pathway to truth! And anything that would qualify for a god should know this, which means either that God doesn’t exist or it doesn't care enough about those people who understand the nature of evidence to actually present it. Now which of those possibilities do you think is accurate?" ... "Why would you believe anything on faith? Faith isn't a pathway to truth. Every religion has some sort of faith, people take things on, you know, - if faith is your pathway, you can't distinguish between Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, any of these others. How is it that you use reason as a path to truth in every endeavor of your life, and then when it comes to the ‘ultimate truth’ - the most important truth - you're saying that faith is required. And how does that reflect on a god (who supposedly exists and wants you to have this information); what kind of god requires faith instead of evidence? ... I have reasonable expectations based on evidence. I have trust that has been earned. I will grant trust tentatively. I don't have faith. Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have evidence. -Matt Dillahunty"

"Is there anything that one couldn't believe based on faith? -Matt Dillahunty"

"A god that does not manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist. -Matt Dillahunty"

"Evidently god stupidly created a system where the devil wins by default. Okay, I'm gonna set up this game with you and I'm gonna give you all the chips and the chips have to voluntarily choose to come over to my side of the table. Who sets up a game like that?! -Matt Dillahunty"

"Faith is a permission slip to let you believe anything you want without having a good reason, because as soon as you have a good reason, there's no more need of faith. -Matt Dillahunty"

"A god that rewards credulity, a god that sanctions slavery, is unworthy of any kind of reverence or respect or devotion. -Matt Dillahunty"

"Your god isn't real. He's not moral. The Bible isn't moral. Islam isn't moral. None of these religious systems— anything that deteriorates the value of human beings, anything that hangs on to Bronze Age ideals about genocide and slavery and murder and deference to higher powers. None of those things are moral. We've graduated beyond that, and I'm sorry that we've had to drag religions kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but some of you gotta let this stuff go. You're not gonna get anywhere until you realize that it's OK not to be afraid. It's OK to say, "you know, I think slavery is wrong. I think slavery was probably always wrong. I think that you're a good person, and yeah it does sound like a crappy system." -Matt Dillahunty"

"And yet people ask what's the harm of religion - and we cite all these different problems with religion: the global gag-rules and things like that , the oppression of different people - but there's a bigger harm with religion, and it's the reason why I'm outspoken about it, and that's because the average feel-good Johnny-in-the-pew person who is decent and kind and loving and good to their family and generally a good person to be around has polluted their mind to the point where they are unable to take credit for their accomplishments and responsibility for their actions. They are unable to interact on an interpersonal level with the people around them, to build a community in this cooperative society where that is absolutely essential. They have got this mentality that they are worthless without God. -Matt Dillahunty"

"God is a useless label. It's ill defined, it has no explanatory power, it doesn't fit into any model that actually describes the universe at all. It's a waste of time, a non-answer and you definitely can't demonstrate it. -Matt Dillahunty"

"I made a list of things that I might consider sin if the concept of sin were valid:Number 1: Credulity, gullibility. I'd say that's a sin.Voluntary willful ignorance. I'd say that's a sin.Letting fear prevent you from understanding reality. I'd call that a sin.Limiting the rights and freedoms of others in order to make them abide by your standards. That's a sin.Sacrificing the mental, emotional and physical well-being of a child in deference to your religion. That's a sin.Wasting the one and only life that you know you're going to have, worrying about and working for an afterlife that somebody told you might be there. That's a sin. -Matt Dillahunty"

"The police [enforcement institution] is a necessary organization and [in the cases where it is corrupt and/or abusive] it’s worth reforming. The Catholic Church is not a necessary organization. It is a nonsensical organization; a bunch of fat lazy do-nothings who have been living off the public dole for centuries. The fact that they can do good, is a testament to the fact that there are good people who will do good. But the organization is corrupt, it is poison to its core and it serves no essential good purpose – no true purpose. It’s lie after lie, promoting harm to real people and you can sit there and engage in histrionics and yelling at yourself [while] on-hold all you want, but the Catholic Church is not a force for good and fuck you for saying so. -Matt Dillahunty"

"There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God."

"That is why St. John of the Cross calls faith a night. With those who have received a Christian education, the lower parts of the soul become attached to these mysteries when they have no right at all to do so. That is why such people need a purification of which St. John of the Cross describes the stages. Atheism and incredulity constitute an equivalent of such a purification."

"Maurras, with perfect logic, is an atheist. The Cardinal [Richelieu], in postulating something whose whole reality is confined to this world as an absolute value, committed the sin of idolatry. … The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State."

"Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province … A poet must be able to claim … freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry … And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. … My work as a poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth."

"Wrongly or rightly you think that I have a right to the name of Christian. I assure you that when in speaking of my childhood and youth I use the words vocation, obedience, spirit of poverty, purity, acceptance, love of one's neighbor, and other expressions of the same kind, I am giving them the exact signification they have for me now. Yet I was brought up by my parents and my brother in a complete agnosticism, and I never made the slightest effort to depart from it; I never had the slightest desire to do so, quite rightly, I think. In spite of that, ever since my birth, so to speak, not one of my faults, not one of my imperfections really had the excuse of ignorance. I shall have to answer for everything on that day when the Lamb shall come in anger. You can take my word for it too that Greece, Egypt, ancient India, and ancient China, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflections of this beauty in art and science, what I have seen of the inner recesses of human hearts where religious belief is unknown, all these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ's hands as his captive. I think I might even say more. The love of these things that are outside visible Christianity keeps me outside the Church... But it also seems to me that when one speaks to you of unbelievers who are in affliction and accept their affliction as a part of the order of the world, it does not impress you in the same way as if it were a question of Christians and of submission to the will of God. Yet it is the same thing."

"Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong."

"You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood more rigorously, the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price."

"It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work. … We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament."

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves but does not speak."

"Honesty compels serious men, on examination of their consciences, to admit that the old faith is no longer compelling. It is the very peak of Christian virtue that demands the sacrifice of Christianity."

"Given that only the religion of pervasive kenosis can be truly universal, no single historical individual can exhaust its fullness by virtue of his redemptive acts, and no religious institution can grasp and articulate its meaning by means of dogmatic or doctrinal teachings. In the last resort, it is in the name of religious universalism that Simone Weil calls for a reversion of historical Christianity to its origins as a religion of kenosis."

"In point of fact there are two kinds sorts of mysticism, differing from one another as the ranting of drunkards from the language of illumined spirits. There is the muddled, stammering mysticism, and there is the mysticism luminous with truly ultimate ideas. On the one hand there are the empty dimness and darkness, the barren, chilling sentimentalism and mental debauchery, the foolishly grimacing but rigid phantasms of the Cabbala, of occultism, mysteriosophy and theosophy. We cannot draw too sharp a dividing line between these and the brightness, the simple sincerity, and healthy, rejuvenating strength of genuine mysticism, which takes the most precious gems from philosophy's treasure chest and displays them in the beauty of its own setting. Mysticism is in complete accord with the result, with the sum of philosophy. In fact, mysticism is precisely the sum and the soul of philosophy, in the form of that rapturous, passionate outpouring of love.... We are concerned with an understanding of this serious mysticism, and its meaning could be stated in three words... godlessness... freedom from the world... blessedness of soul."

"No suffering can be foreign to a Christian, not even the anguish that comes with the loss of God."

"Contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture from the past. If this is impossible, it has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation."

"Can the Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge the mythical world picture as true? To do so would be both pointless and impossible. It would be pointless because there is nothing specifically Christian about the mythical world picture, which is simply the world picture of a time now past which was not yet formed by scientific thinking. It would be impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture by sheer resolve, since it is already given with one’s historical situation."

"Thomas is not a Wordsworthian poet, and his “nature” is not Wordsworth’s; it is history, rather than divinity, which he responds to most, in the bleak beauty of Wales. In Christian terms, Thomas is not a poet of the transfiguration, of the resurrection, of human holiness … He is a poet of the cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness."

""Will to truth" does not mean "I do not want to let myself be deceived" but—there is no alternative—"I will not deceive, not even myself"; and with that we stand on moral ground. . . . You will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine."

"If Protestant theology has reached the point where it is closed to the challenge of atheism, then it has ceased to be the intellectual vanguard of Christianity."

"I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. My German-American ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves "Freethinkers," which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut wrote, for example, "If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?" I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.""

"In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled — that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist."

"No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater — unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters."

"God is the most noble of beings. Now it is impossible for a body to be the most noble of beings; for a body must be either animate or inanimate; and an animate body is manifestly nobler than any inanimate body. But an animate body is not animate precisely as body; otherwise all bodies would be animate. Therefore its animation depends upon some other thing, as our body depends for its animation on the soul. Hence that by which a body becomes animated must be nobler than the body. Therefore it is impossible that God should be a body."

"Christ, with whom the multitude could not deal other than by making him into God Himself, thus enabling itself to venerate as God him whom they had loathed as man."

"I call, I cling, I want … and there is no One to answer … no One on Whom I can cling … no, No One. Alone … Where is my Faith … even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness … My God … how painful is this unknown pain … I have no Faith … I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart … & make me suffer untold agony. So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them … because of the blasphemy … If there be God … please forgive me … When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me … and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul."

"Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun."

"God can stand being told by Professor Ayer and Marghanita Laski that He does not exist."

"And when you said: O Moses, we will not believe in thee till we see God directly, so the punishment overtook you while you looked on. Then We raised you up after your stupor that you might give thanks."

"The believer in God has to account for one thing, the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist, however, has to account for the existence of everything else."

"Atheists put on a false courage and alacrity in the midst of their darkness and apprehensions, like children who, when they fear to go in the dark, will sing for fear."