Atheism Quotes
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But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,' I said. On the contrary - we are found!' said Aesop. But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?' Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood.
Erica Jong
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Atheism is not just about not believing there is a God, but on the assumption that there is one, what kind of God is he?
Stephen Fry
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A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers-including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.
C. S. Lewis
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Atheism was an exceedingly rare phenomenon in antiquity: very few people believed there were literally no gods.
The word “atheism” itself, however, simply means “without the gods,” and one could be “without” them while still acknowledging they existed.
...atheism applied more normally to “anyone who rejected or neglected the traditional modes of honoring the gods.”
That is to say, anyone who abjectly refused to participate in the worship of divine beings could be labeled an atheist.
Such a person could expect a good deal of opprobrium and sometimes civil action.
The Christians were often accused of being atheists.
Obviously that was not because they denied the divine realm but because they refused to acknowledge (and act as if) it was inhabited by more than the one being they worshiped and refused to interact with it in traditional ways.
Bart Ehrman
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To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall.
William Winwood Reade
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With reason did the Athenians adjudge Diagoras guilty of atheism, in that he not only divulged the Orphic doctrine, and published the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Hercules to boil his turnips, but openly declared that there were no gods at all.
Athenagoras of Athens
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What time has been wasted during man's destiny in the struggle to decide what man's next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in.
Sean O'Casey
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Until the content of a belief is made clear, the appeal to accept the belief on faith is beside the point, for one would not know what one has accepted. The request for the meaning of a religious belief is logically prior to the question of accepting that belief on faith or to the question of whether that belief constitutes knowledge.
William Blackstone
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The union of church and state put the church under a political control... The church was thoroughly subordinated to the state.
H. J Eckenrode
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During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas - which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science.
Richard Feynman
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There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who, when danger is pressing in, will not acknowledge the divine power.
Plato
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Some people do not eat cow meat. I do so, provided it's tender.
Yajnavalkya
