#atheist

John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's. ↗

— David Craig

#atheists #biologists #friedrich-engels #god #humanists

The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God. ↗

— Annie Wood Besant

#atheism #god #atheist

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176) ↗

— Stephen Batchelor

#belief #disbelief #metaphysics #reality #theism

Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#miracles #superstition #witchcraft #atheist

Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis. ↗

— Pierre Laplace

#atheist #god #humor #mathematics #napoleon

The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#carlyle #change #christian #comparison #direction

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#definition #god #truth #atheist

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. ↗

— Samuel Butler

#god #noremorse #prayer #satanism #men

The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists. ↗

— William Jennings Bryan

#atheists #back #children #faith #god

Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) - is arguably the first mandate for religious tolerance in human history. ↗

— Huston Smith

#christian #compassion #death #discipline #earth