Positive Atheism's Big List of Quotations
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Byron Danelius
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Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938)
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means. I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose. Excerpt: Passage: If there is a soul, what is it, and where did it come from, and where does it go? Can anyone who is guided by his reason possibly imagine a soul independent of a body, or the place of its residence, or the character of it, or anything concerning it? If man is justified in any belief or disbelief on any subject, he is warranted in the disbelief in a soul. Not one scrap of evidence exists to prove any such impossible thing. Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt!
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more had I been understood. I feel as I always have, that the earth is the home and the only home of man, and I am convinced that whatever he is to get out of his existence he must get while he is here. I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil. Excerpt: Passage:
A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.
Clarence Darrow On a Bust Darrow 2 (unpublished)
Haldemann-Julius: Bryan Made a Monkey of Himself As he was pummeled into one tight spot after another, emerging each time breathless and in amazed chagrin, Bryan flushed, with spots of anger in his cheeks. His whole body sagged. Before our very eyes, he became a beaten man. |
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Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) • Check our Big List of Charles Darwin Quotations
I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture. It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science. I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations. It is like confessing to a murder. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. |
| Robertson Davies (1913-1995) Canadian novelist, essayist, and playwright
Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision. |
Derek Davis
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Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) • Check our Big List of Richard Dawkins Quotations
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. 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. I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution. Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once. Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists.
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Joseph Martin Dawson (1879-1973)
The sole function of the American state, in respect to religion, is to recognize its existence and protect its liberty. |
David J DeLaura The loss of religious faith in such representative early Victorian aginostics as F W Newman (John Henry Newman's brother), J A Froude (brother of Newman's close friend, Hurrell Froude), and George Eliot was not due, in the first place, to the usually suggested reasons -- the rise of evolutionary theory in geology and biology and the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Indeed, in each life the dominant factor was a growing repugnance toward the ethical implications of what each had been taught to believe as essential Christianity -- especially the set of interrelated doctrines: Original Sin, Reprobation, Baptismal Regeneration, Vicarious Atonement, Eternal Punishment. [In St Paul and Protestantism, Matthew Arnold] contemptuously rejects the "monstrous" vision of a capricious God who deals in election and predestination and cruelly emphasizes the crass commercial quality of the Puritan catchwords, "covenant," "ransom," "redeem," "purchase," and "bargain." |
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Vine Victor Deloria, Jr. (b. 1933)
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Daniel Dennett
The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight -- that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether. I recently took part in a conference in Seattle that brought together leading scientists, artists and authors to talk candidly and informally about their lives to a group of very smart high school students. Toward the end of my allotted 15 minutes, I tried a little experiment. I came out as a bright [a person with a world-view that is naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic]. The evidence of evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy (Darwin's chief sources), but from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences. To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant -- inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write. Doubts about the power of Darwin's idea of natural selection to explain this evolutionary process are still intellectually respectable, however, although the burden of proof for such skepticism has become immense. Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored. More than a century after Darwin, there are still serious debates among biologists (and even more so among philosophers of biology) about how to define species. Shouldn't scientists define their terms? Yes, of course, but only up to a point. It turns out that there are different species concepts with different uses in biology -- what works for paleontologists is not much use to ecologists, for instance -- and no clean way of uniting them or putting them in an order of importance that would crown one of them (the most important one) as the concept of species. So I am inclined to interpret the persisting debates as more a matter of vestigial Aristotelian tidiness than a useful disciplinary trait. The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might -- hope against hope -- have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other area of human knowledge. Political correctness, in the extreme versions worth of the name, is antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. We might call it eumemics, since it is, like the extreme eugenics of the Social Darwinists, an attempt to impose myopically derived standards of safety and goodness on the bounty of nature. Few today -- but there are a few -- would brand all genetic counseling, all genetic policies, with the condemnatory title of eugenics. We should reserve that term of criticism for the greedy and peremptory policies, the extremist policies.... We will consider how we might wisely patrol the memosphere, and what we might do to protect ourselves from the truly dangerous ideas, but we should keep the bad example of eugenics firmly in mind when we do so. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations. |
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John Dewey (1859-1952)
Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it. It has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, as intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many. There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due. Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import. Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man. Religions have been universal in the sense that all the people we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless.... The older apologists for Christianity seem to have been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor, as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment. Apologists for a religion often point to the shift that goes on in scientific ideas and materials as evidence of the unreliability of science as a mode of knowledge. They often seem peculiarly elated by the great, almost revolutionary, change in fundamental physical conceptions that has taken place in science during the present generation. Even if the alleged unreliability were as great as they assume (or even greater), the question would remain: Have we any other recourse for knowledge? But in fact they miss the point. Science is not constituted by any particular body of subject matter. It is constituted by a method, a method of changing beliefs by means of tested inquiry.... Scientific method is adverse not only to dogma but to doctrine as well.... The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified. We are a people of many races, many faiths, creeds, and religions. I do not think that the men who made the Constitution forbade the establishment of a State church because they were opposed to religion. They knew that the introduction of religious differences into American life would undermine the democratic foundations of this country.
James A Haught: Repudiated Militant Atheism "Dewey repudiated what he called militant atheism. He felt that people have innate religious qualities, such as compassion for sufferers, an urge to improve life, and a sense of awe before the mysteries of existence. However, by the standards of conventional religion, Dewey was an atheist." |
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Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but his memory.
Religion provides the solace for the turmoil that it creates.
An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths.
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
When every event was a miracle, when there was no order or system or law, there was no occasion for studying any subject, or being interested in anything excepting a religion which took care of the soul. As man doubted the primitive conceptions about religion, and no longer accepted the literal, miraculous teachings of ancient books, he set himself to understand nature.
But I own that I cannot see ... evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.
Fanaticism is ... overcompensation for doubt.
When you make the argument that this [reference to God in the Pledge] is no longer religious but is civil, or political, or patriotic in its orientation, you are trivializing religion. You are trivializing the meaning of God.
Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
It is a fixed American opinion that whenever and wherever churches have been able to invoke the power of the state in their behalf, the effects have been disastrous to moral character, to spiritual ideals and the good order of society.
Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
Religion has shifted to take in every change in the winds, so that its obedience to American culture and political trends is apparent. As lifestyles have changed, so has the theology of the churches. Manifest destiny became social gospel with barely a backward glance.
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.
Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ...
The plain message conveyed by the new administration is that George W Bush's America is a Christian nation, and that non-Christians are welcome into the tent so long as they agree to accept their status as a tolerated minority rather than as fully equal citizens. In effect, Bush is saying: "This is our home, and in our home we pray to Jesus as our savior. If you want to be a guest in our home, you must accept the way we pray."
Having learned from the time I was at school that there is nothing one can imagine so strange or so unbelievable that it has not been said by one of other of the philosophers; and since then, while travelling, having recognized that those who hold opinions quite opposed to ours are not on that account barbarians or savages, but that many exercise as much reason as we do, or more; and having considered how a given man, with his given mind, being brought up from childhood among the French or Germans becomes different from what he would be if he had always lived among the Chinese or among the cannibals ... I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.
There can be no doubt ... of our dependence upon forces beyond our control. Primitive man was so impotent in the face of these forces that g , especially in an unfavorable natural environment, fear became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fear created gods.