Atheist Quotes:

The ancient author of the fictional creation story can be credited with the greatest brainwashing in history having only used 5 words. "In the beginning, God created..."
-Anonymous

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
-Albert Einstein

When you understand why you dismiss all other Gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
-Stephen Roberts

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
-Richard Dawkins

Surely you do not believe in the gods.
What's your argument?
Where's your proof?
-Aristophanes

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
-Christopher Hitchens

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
-unknown

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
-Delos McKown

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky.
-George Carlin

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.
-unknown

Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, controls people, and deludes people
-Carlespie McKinney

Gods are fragile things; They may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
-Chapman Cohen

By simple common sense, I do not believe in God.
-Charlie Chaplin

All thinking men are atheists.
-Ernest Hemingway

There are two classes of men: Intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.
-Abu Ala Al-Ma'arri

Faith means not wanting to know what is true.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all.
-Gene Roddenberry

Religion is just mind control.
-George Carlin

A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
-Henry Mencken

Atheism is the voice of a few intelligent people.
-Voltaire

Suppose we've chosen the wrong God. Every time we go to church we're just making him madder.
-Homer Simpson

Prayer has no place in public school, just like facts have no place in organized religion.
-Superintendent Chalmers

Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church.
-Unknown

Religions are all alike, founded upon fable and mythologies.
-Thomas Jefferson

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, or of a God.
-Thomas Edison

All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance, and ferocity.
-Baron D'holbach

People who don't like their belifs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs.
-Unknown

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
-Unknown

Two hands working can do more than a thousand hands clasped in prayer.
-Unknown

I'm not an "atheist." How can you not believe in something that does not exist?
-Whitney Brown

An idea does not gain truth as it gains followers.
-Amanda Bloom

Religion is the opium of the masses.
-Karl Marx

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.
-Tom Robbins

The first requisite of the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
-Karl Marx

Religion is against women's rights and freedom. In all societies women are oppressed by all religions.
-Taslima Nasrin

The bible and church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women's emancipation.
-Elizabeth C. Stanton

I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
-Frederick Douglass

The sailor does not pray for wind, he learns to sail.
-Gustaf Lindborg

Every man thinks god is on his side. The rich and the powerful know he is.
-Jean Anouilh

Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.
-Jesse Ventura

Fear is the mother of all gods. Nature does all things spontaneously by itself without their meddling.
-Lucretius

This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.
-John Adams

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.
-James Madison

Faith is believing something you know ain't true.
-Mark Twain

All religions are pieced together out of elements which seem so at odds with reason that any intelligence laughs at them.
-Pierre Charron

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
-Richard Dawkins

As people become more intelligent, they care less for preachers and more for teachers.
-Robert Ingersoll

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.
-Richard Dawkins

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
-Seneca

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
-Thomas Paine

Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.
-Blaise Pascal

All religions have been made by men.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

Gods always behave like the people who created them.
-Zora Hurston

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
-Benjamin Franklin

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the gods, then knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
-Baron D'Holbach

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.
-Benjamin Disraeli

You believe in a book that has sticks turning into snakes, and you say we are the ones that need help?
-Dan Barker

You can't convince a believer of anything; Their belief is not based on evidence, but a deep-seeded need to believe.
-Carl Sagan

I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
-James Buchanan

Religious leaders will always avail themselves of public ignorance for their own purpose.
-Thomas Jefferson

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

Believing in gods always causes confusion.
-Pearl S. Buck

It is better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however reassuring.
-Carl Sagan

The most heinous crimes have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
-Gandhi

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.
-Mark Twain

For much of history, religion may have been a necessary evil, but why has it been more evil than necessary?
-Arthur C. Clarke

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and greatest cruelty.
-Ilka Chase

Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.
-Sigmund Freud

Faith is the determination to remain ignorant in the face of all evidence that you are ignorant.
-Shaun Mason

The inspiration of the bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it.
-Robert Ingersoll

The greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called religion.
-Thomas Paine

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God. This saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
-Edward Abbey

All natural institutions of churches appear to me as human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind.
-Thomas Pain

Doctrines like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.
-Edward Abbey

The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.
-Benjamin Franklin

Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason, and morality.
-Baron D'Holbach

The bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of the Christian Dogma.
-Abraham Lincoln

A believer that is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than a drunk man is happier than a sober one.
-George Bernard Shaw

All thinking men are atheists.
-Ernest Hemingway

Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
-Arthur C. Clarke

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
-Sigmund Freud

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would neither be created nor destroyed it would simply be. What place then for a creator?
-Stephen Hawking

My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn't believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I'm agnostic.
-Carl Sagan

All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Does God Know the Future?

This is a huge question that most people either don't think about, or realize the implications of.

First I'd like to point out a couple links.

whywontgodhealamputees.com

Godisimaginary.com Proof #6- "God's Plan" This points out some major disturbing implications if God really knows the future.

Those are fascinating sites with 50 arguments against God as portrayed in the Bible. Some of which made me laugh in their simplistic nature. I was already an Atheist long before I came across that site which actually addressed some of my own reasons for dropping my own faith. It only made me think deeper on a few more things.

Some websites that I list below attempt to refute Marshall Brain's websites. Check them all out and come to your own conclusions, but don't accept anything at face value, not even what I'm writing. Think for yourself on the implications of everything.

brainisignorant.blogspot.com

weknowgodisreal.wordpress.com

Marshall Brain's Godisimaginary.com Proof #6- "God's Plan" starts off with this:

"God's plan" is the way that Christians traditionally explain things like amputations, cancer, hurricanes and car accidents. For example, if a Christian dies a painful and tragic death because of cancer, she dies as part of God's plan. Her death has a purpose. God called her home for a reason. Even if something bad happens to a Christian, it is actually good because it is part of God's plan.

That is very disturbing, and unfortunately, is what some people believe without realizing the further implications of statements like that. I've heard things like that from others, and I'm sure you may have, too.

Marshall Brain's Godisimaginary.com Proof #6- "God's Plan" goes on to say:

You can see how pervasive "God's plan" is by looking in Christian inspirational literature. For example, if we look in the book A Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, we find this remarkable paragraph in Chapter 2:

Because God made you for a reason, he also decided when you would be born and how long you would live. He planned the days of your life in advance, choosing the exact time of your birth and death. The Bible says, "You saw me before I was born and scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in your book!" [Psalm 139:16]

There is also this:
Regardless of the circumstances of your birth or who your parents are, God had a plan in creating you.

Under this view of the universe, God plans everything.

That's not very fair. Some people refute Rick Warrens book by saying he's not a credible theist, and that his interpretation of the verse "You saw me before I was born and scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in your book!" [Psalm 139:16] is flat out wrong. They also refute it by saying "God doesn't know the future because we have free will, so anything can happen."

• What qualifies one person's interpretation of a verse to be more correct than another interpretation? A degree in theism? The higher score on an IQ test? There are theists in the fields of every different religion. To say one religion is the correct one over all other religions is saying that EVERY theist of any other religion with a college degree in their fields are wrong and less intelligent than your religion's theists are. That is arrogant and condescending.
  

• If that Bible verse is wrong, then what other verses like that in the Bible are wrong? Some people say that the authors of the individual books in the Bible were "inspired," not dictated.
  

• If God didn't "dictate" to the authors, then whatever is written throughout the Bible can be limited to only an individual author's beliefs, ideas, and stories that he's been told and believes from what has been passed down through oral tradition. Anything that is written in the stories in the Bible can be purely falsified disinformation. Anything written from a 3rd person perspective that long ago cannot be proven to be an eye-witness account. The author of any of those books only knows what he was told and what he believes if he was not a witness.

• What do people mean when they say it was "inspired?" That God sent them feelings and emotions to grab ink and a quill and put these stories to paper? If that is the case, and every one has free will, then even if God "inspired" them to put those stories to paper, then they can write whatever they want. It doesn't have to be truth in any way. They have the free will to write whatever they want.
  

• If God doesn't know the future, then everything that happens is just a coincidence. That includes the Bible, the discovery of all the texts, and King James forming a group tasked with putting the Bible together in it's current form.

• What is the point of any kind of plan at all with an undetermined future? Any plan God makes may never come to pass in the first place if free will prevails. It's all just chance and coincidence.
  

The Big Question: What is the Meaning of Life?

Think of it this way. What is the BIG God's plan? "Zoom out," if you will, and imagine yourself in space looking down at earth. Look at the big picture, and not just isolated events that happen to individual people, wars with countries, natural disasters and such. Next, ask yourself these questions.

• Why did God created humanity in the first place, and what was the point?
  
• Where was he going with this idea?
  
• What's in it for him?
  
• What would be the end result be for humanity as a whole?

To answer those questions, people say read the Bible. Things start to get weird from there. The Bible tells the story of Adam and Eve. God created the Universe, Earth, plants, animals, and also two people from dust and a rib all in a 6 days, and on the 7th day he rested. There's already a couple questions I have at this point.

• How can he create the universe and the earth from nothing at all, but need dust from the earth to create Adam, and then Adam's rib to create Eve?

• Why did it take 6 days when he has the power to create it all in just 1 billionth of a second?

• The 7th day is the Sabbath, as we all know. Why did he "rest" on the 7th day when he was already done with the Universe and the Earth in the first 6 days? That implies that he was going to do more work on the 8th day and so on. Everything in existence was already here, so he was naturally resting because there was nothing more to be created.

• And why would he even need to rest in the first place? I guess he gets tired.
  

• Why did God make the 7th day of the week a holy day of rest then?

Sounds a little strange already, but he's God, he can do whatever he wants. And being all-powerful as he is, there's no reason he wouldn't do something like that even if he didn't need to.

Next he creates the garden of Eden. In this garden, he creates a tree with magical fruit that when when eaten, bestows wisdom of some sort. But God doesn't want them to eat the magical fruit, so he tells them that they better not, or else they'll die. Better stay away from that! I'm sure we know the rest, but ask yourself these things before you dwell on it any further:

• If they ate the fruit, they would gain wisdom? Did God create them dumb, then?
  

• What is the point so far? An experiment of some sort? To have a couple dumbed down pets?

• Why create the temptation of the Tree of Life with fruit that when eaten, is punishable by death in the form of mortality? That's like saying that eating the fruit will give you cancer that will eventually lead to your death.

Next comes a big conundrum:

• If God knows ANYTHING about the future, as soon as he created the tree of life with the "wisdom fruit" on it, he would have known that Eve was going to eat it.

Well, maybe he either doesn't know the future then, or just didn't "look into it" before that. It's safe to say that it is impossible to know the future because it hasn't happened yet.
That puts a limit on a supposedly all-powerful God.
===(More on Future to come in another Blog posting)===

• Where did the "talking serpent" come from that suckered Eve into eating the fruit? It doesn't mention the "talking serpent's" creation so far in the story. Sure God created all the animals including snakes already, but they couldn't talk.. right? Well, it turns out that the "talking snake" is that pesky Satan guy, who can apparently shape-shift.

• If Satan can shape-shift, then what are the limits on his powers?==(More On Satan to come in another blog posting)===

• If God knows what you're thinking at all times, then why didn't he intervene with Eve or Satan while Satan was tempting her, and while Eve was contemplating on eating the fruit?

• What's in it for Satan to have tempted Eve? To laugh at them when God punished them?
  

Satan lived in heaven, didn't like something God did and started a war and was cast down to Earth, or so the story goes. Thank you God for sending that asshole down here for us to deal with. Every story needs a bad guy, I guess.

• If Satan was here this early in the story, and isn't written to have been created with Adam and Eve, then God obviously had something else going on before Earth.

• Heaven had to exist before Earth in order for Satan to have developed his supposed history of being Gods favorite angel, starting a war, then being cast down here on Earth. If heaven already existed, then what was his reason then for making the Universe and Earth as a side "project?"

• If God's punishment to Satan was casting him down to Earth, then maybe the Earth was created as his prison.
  

• Maybe the "war" was going on while God was in the 6 day process of this creation, got fed up with Satan's antics, then cast him down here and banned him from heaven. That's actually not a valid reason if God can just will the Universe into existence in just 1 billionth of a second.
  

• If God knows the future, then why was Satan his favorite angel if he knew he would turn against him and eventually start a war? If God doesn't know the future, then that can't apply.

===(Or can it? [link to "future" blog in progress])===

• Why would God cast the evil Satan down to Earth to let him mess with us in the first place? Why would he even allow Satan to do so?
  

• What if Satan doesn't exist? Then every story in the Bible mentioning him and demons is a LIE. The temptation of Jesus story and Jesus casting the "Legion, for we are many" demons out of the swine, for example, are lies.

===(Exorcism Topic coming soon)===

• What else in the Bible is false then?

• If Eve was made from Adam's rib, then wouldn't she be considered to be of Adam's genetic material, basically making her Adam's sister? Their children would be born mentally retarded because of incest, and their children's children would just be one huge regressive slope further and further into retardation. It's safe to say God had to mess with the DNA in the womb, then.
  

• If God messed with the DNA of the generations of incest children originating from Adam and Eve, who by nature, are supposed to be born retarded, then why are there so many birth defects that originate in the womb today? Why doesn't he mess with the DNA of children anymore?
  

• If the creation story isn't true, then what IS the creation story? The answer to this question being right or wrong has a PROFOUND impact on ALL religions and their creation stories. If it isn't true, then we didn't "spontaneously appear." Evolution, the Big Bang, and many other theories are true. All of which have evidence supporting them.
  

My Summary

Something is not right here. I already have over *20* questions and valid points with answers that don't seem to make much logical sense! And that's just barely into first couple chapters in the Bible. Almost everything in the Bible can be fundamentally regressed all the way back to some of these basic questions. God is kind of a weird dude. Maybe then, the creation story isn't entirely true and is just a story passed down by ancient man through generations of oral stories and tradition. The problem with oral tradition is that it's word of mouth. Word of mouth being passed down is problematic in that things get skewed, embellished, altered, and exaggerated to glorify that culture, and that culture's religion. They can be entirely false rumors from the beginning for disinformation and manipulative purposes. That seems to be the most likely of cases. So If that's truly the case with the Bible's creation story, then why should any other story and words of the ancient authors of the Bible be taken any more seriously and as truth? Every religion and culture has their own creation stories, and of course their own Gods. And some of them are incredibly far fetched. Why is this one any different? Maybe it's time to start thinking outside the box and keep an open mind, and NEVER jump in head first into any belief system too hastily without doing your own research and critical thinking.

Once I started thinking like this about things in the manner I demonstrated above and about all things in the Bible, I immediately became an Atheist long ago. When I became a Christian, I jumped in head first with all these preconceived notions without thinking and only accepting what I learned at face value. That is, until I applied reasoning, logic, and critical thinking to try to understand the very nature of God and his personality, reasons, and intentions. I hope to show you ways of doing this and maybe you will free yourself from the emotional burdens of guilt and fear of punishment in an afterlife.