Quotes on Agnostic

What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: He gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.

The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.

The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.

But whether I become a believer or remain an agnostic, my belief or disbelief must derive its source from within, not from without. I, myself, must create its symbols. The transcendental is that which produces its own form. I will never discover its secret if I do not find it in my own heart; if I do not possess it already I shall never be able to acquire it.

Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.

The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.