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For those of you who have collected a few atheist, agnostic, or even deist quotes through the years, I've come up with what I hope will be an interesting way to share them. Rather than simply listing them all at one time, I thought it would be interesting to list them according to the author's name, alphabetically, beginning with the letter A and proceeding with a new letter with each new entry. You can include as many quotes from that author as you like (within reason), are from any other author whose last name begins with that later, but there will only be letter per day. So if you have a favorite author whose quotes you'd like to include, you'll want to start getting your list together and watching the forums closely for the moment when your letter presents itself. To get things rolling, I'll start us off with the letter A:


Adams, Douglas

"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife." - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move." - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." - Last Chance to See

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" - Last Chance to See

"A man didn�t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren�t there?" - as retold by Richard Dawkins in "Lament for Douglas"

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Adams, John

"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that has ever existed?"

President John Adams, Letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816

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And now for the B's:

Bierce, Ambrose
Entries from The Devil's Dictionary:

Bigot, n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

Deluge, n. A notable first experiment in baptism which washed away the sins (and sinners) of the world.

Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.

Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.

Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.

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Two from Arthur C Clarke

"Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future."

"I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent."


"Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these 10 things he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time...but he loves you." --George Carlin

"When a man ceases to believe in god, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything." --G.K. Chesterson

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

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Today's quotes are brought to you by the letter "D".

And since I'm a French teacher, I'm going with:
Diderot, Denis

"I believe in God, although I live very happily with atheists.... It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God."

"From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step."

"Scepticism is the first step towards truth."

"But if you will recall the history of our civil troubles, you will see half the nation bathe itself, out of piety, in the blood of the other half, and violate the fundamental feelings of humanity in order to sustain the cause of God: as though it were necessary to cease to be a man in order to prove oneself religious!"

"The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual."

"We encounter some phenomenon that is, in our opinion, beyond the powers of man, and immediately we say, 'Is it the work of God'. Our vanity will admit no lesser explanation. Can we not reason with a little less pride and a little more philosophy? If nature presents us with a knot that is difficult to untie, then let us leave it as it is, let us not insist on cutting it there and then and on employing for the task the hand of a being who thereupon becomes a knot even more difficult to untie than the first. Ask an Indian why the globe remains suspended in the air and he will reply that it is borne on the back of an elephant. And on what does the elephant rest? On a tortoise. And the tortoise, who supports that?"

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Richard Dawkins

�There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?�


"...it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions."


"Atheism means non-belief in the particular cult that happens to pervade the society under discussion. In America that means the cult of Yahweh, the God of the Jews commandeered by the Christians, Muslims and Mormons. Today, everyone takes it for granted that we are all atheists with respect to Thor and Wotan, Zeus and Poseidon, Mithras and Ammon Ra. If asked why you don't believe in Thor's hammer, you would probably say something like "Why is the onus on me to justify my nonbelief in Thor, given that there is not the smallest positive reason for belief?" You might go further and add that thunder, which was at one time attributed to Thor's hammer, now has a better explanation in terms of electric charges in the clouds. While technically agnostic about all those ancient gods, and about fairies and leprechauns too (you can't disprove them either), in practice we don't believe in any of them, and we feel no onus to explain why."


"My last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place."



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From various "D" authors:

Danelius, Byron:
"Religion provides the solace for the turmoil that it creates."

Darrow, Clarence:
"Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey."

Dick, Philip K:
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
"Dogmas of every kind put assertion in the place of reason and give rise to more contention, bitterness, and want of charity than any other influence in human affairs."

Dickinson, Emily:
"'Faith' is a fine invention, when gentlemen can see
But microscopes are prudent, in an emergency."

Darwin, Charles:
"But I own that I cannot see ... 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."

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Various "E" authors:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo:
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next."

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

Eco, Umberto:
"Fear prophets ... and those prepared to die for the truth, as a rule make many others die with them, often before them, and at times instead of them."

Edison, Thomas:
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."

Eliot, George:
"Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite."

Einstein, Albert:
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?


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Epicurus
If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.


Albert Einstein
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.



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Freud, Sigmund
"The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever."

Franklin, Benjamin
"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."

France, Anatole
"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

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