Dan Barker Quotes About Religion
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It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.
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It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions.
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You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say "God is love" they will claim that you are taking things out of context!
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Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing "Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.
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I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil—you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself.
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In any open question, we should argue from what we do know to what we do not know. We do know that fervent legends and stubborn myths arise easily and naturally. We do not know that dead people rise from the grave.
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All you have to do is walk into any children's hospital and you know there is no God. Prayer doesn't make any difference. Those people pray for their beloved children to live and they die.
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I'm proud to be an atheist - it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.
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There is no evidence for a god, no coherent definition of a god, no good argument for a god, good positive arguments against a god, no agreement among believers about the nature or moral principles of a god, and no need for a god. We can live happy, moral, productive lives without such belief, and we can do it better.
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I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.
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Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.
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We were blood brothers, pals forever. He was my very best friend. Nobody else could see him. I now know he was just pretend.
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I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.
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I have an Easter challenge for Christians. My challenge is simply this: tell me what happened on Easter. I am not asking for proof. My straightforward request is merely that Christians tell me exactly what happened on the day that their most important doctrine was born.
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If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.
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Not thinking critically, I assumed that the successful prayers were proof that God answers prayer while the failures were proof that there was something wrong with me.
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For my money, I'll bet on reason and humanistic kindness. Even if I am wrong I will have enjoyed my life, the existence of which is under little dispute.
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To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance. That implies that everyone else (such as the opposing football team, driver, student, parent) is de-selected, unfavored by God, and that I am special,above it all.
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Freethought is respectable. Freethought is crucial. Freethought needs to be publicized.
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There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling - absolutely essential to mental health and happiness.
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To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance.
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There is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, during his entire lifetime. This does not disprove his existence, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who was supposedly widely known to have made a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed.
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How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost ?
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The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed Christian notions.
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Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence? After all, don't we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines?
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Some theists, observing that all 'effects' need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.
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