#atheism

…the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#creation-myths #mythology #science #science

Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partly with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself. ↗

— Emma Goldman

#atheism #bravery #secular #change

Atheism is partly the result of bad theology, an unpaid bill resulting from failures in depicting God. It is not surprising that many have rejected God when there has been so little to attract them to him. Perhaps they would not reject as readily the God disclosed in Jesus Christ, who is an event of loving relationally and relates readily to the temporal world. ↗

— Clark H. Pinnock

#love

A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear. ↗

— Peter L. Berger

#agnosticism #angel #angels #atheism #atheist

When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex. ↗

— Jon Krakauer

#inspirational #religious #inspirational

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#charles-darwin #religion #skepticism #men

The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#skepticism #love

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought. ↗

— Mark Twain

#inspirational #inspirational

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks. ↗

— Mark Twain

#agnosticism #atheism #atheist #freedom #god

I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist? ↗

— Umberto Eco

#chaos #creation #divine-will #omnipotence #theology