Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas . . . for it is the assertion of a universal negative.
Interpretation
Atheism is a bold belief as it denies the existence of a universal concept, namely God.
Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that atheism is a particularly audacious stance because it claims that there is no deity. This assertion of a 'universal negative' challenges the deeply rooted beliefs in many cultures, making atheism a significant philosophical position that goes against the grain of traditional theism.
In practice
In a debate on religion, one might use this quote to highlight the challenges of asserting atheism.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
A thief is a man in need. A liar is a man in fear.
Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.
If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of Philosophy.
Which is worse, Risa often wondered, to have tens of thousands of babies that no one wanted or to silently make then go away before they were even born
This earth indeed is the very Body of God, and it is from this body that we are born, live, suffer, and resurrect to eternal life. Either all is God's Great Project, or we may rightly wonder whether anything is God's Great Project. One wonders if we humans will be the last to accept this.
Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
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