#theism

I'd be more willing to accept religion, even if I didn't believe it, if I thought it made people nicer to each other but I don't think it does. ↗

— Andy Rooney

#meanness #niceness #religion #religion

How do you know it's not true if you don't believe in it? ↗

— Pete Hautman

#religion #religion

To say that atheism is not a religion is the equivalent of saying anarchy is not really a political creed ↗

— Bō Jinn

#atheism #christianity-islam #god #religion #religion

The natural is so awesome that we need not go beyond it. ↗

— Ruth Hurmence Green

#naturalism #religion #nature

The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky. ↗

— Anne Rice

#religion #religion

Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout. ↗

— Andy Rooney

#christianity #christians #devout #devouts #goodness

Religion... has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever... If someone votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says 'I must [not] move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'I respect that'... Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#religion #religion

There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#religion #religion

We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post- Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#religion

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests. ↗

— Baron D. Holbach

#fear #ignorance #religion #religion