Quotes on Positive Atheism

It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense, which cramps and restrains our nature.

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.

It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.

Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil

It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it.

I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.

What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger.

Life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .

The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.