New Atheism Quotes & Sayings
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Top New Atheism Quotes
It is true that a great deal of the rhetoric of the new atheism is often just the confessional rote of materialist fundamentalism (which, like all fundamentalisms, imagines that in fact it represents the side of reason and truth); but it is also true that the new atheism has sprung up in a garden of contending fundamentalisms. — David Bentley Hart
Secular humanism proposes ... the complete implementation of the agenda of modernism ... what is necessary for it to occur is a ... New Enlightenment. — Paul Kurtz
And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a "new man" and a religion-free utopia? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration, they were not mass murders done by people who simply happened to be atheist. — Dinesh D'Souza
While science continually uncovers new mysteries, it has removed much of what was once regarded as deeply mysterious. Although we certainly do not know the exact nature of every component of the universe, the basic principles of physics seem to apply out to the farthest horizon visible to us today. — Victor J. Stenger
Spiritual: religion without any rules. All the comfort of fictitious friends with none of their demands. — Stefan Molyneux
The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics. — Marvin Perry
When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time — Svetlana Alexievich
Difficulties arise when reported observations seem to conflict with 'facts' that the majority of scientists accept as established and immutable. Scientists tend to reject conflicting observations ... Nevertheless, the history of science shows that new observations and theories can eventually prevail. — Ian Stevenson
Today evolution of human intelligence has advanced us to the stage where most of us are too smart to invent new gods but are reluctant to give up the old ones. — Ruth Hurmence Green
The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion. — G. Willow Wilson
Atheism has become a major threat to the church. New Atheists tend to be articulate and belligerent. They are aggressively engaging in "atheist evangelism," determined to stamp out every vestige of belief in God, which they insist is not only "stupid" but "wicked." — Dave Hunt
Oh, you knew that your deed would be preserved in books, would reach tghe depths of the ages and the utmost limits of the earth, and you hoped that, following you, man, too, would remain with God, having no need of miracles. But you did not know that as soon as man rejects miracles, he will at once reject God as well, for man seeks not so much God as miracles. And since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create new miracles for himself ... Oh, there will be centuries of free reason, of their science and anthropophagy ... Freedom, free reason, and science willl lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable." ... In short, the natural state of affairs is something rather than nothing. An empty universe requires supernatural intervention
not a full one. Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God. — Victor J. Stenger
Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy at New York University. This is how he explains his deep-seated antipathy toward religion: In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions ... in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper - namely the fear of religion itself ... I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and naturally, hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.1 That — Ravi Zacharias
The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. According to Renan, "The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedest of all men." — Eric Hoffer
That utterance of Jesus, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's," is one of the most revolutionary and history-making utterances that ever fell from those lips divine. That utterance, once and for all, marked the divorcement of church and state. It marked a new era for the creeds and deeds of men. — George W Truett
Here, new information, new empirical data, led to a direct challenge to the way in which the gods were envisioned. This new doubt encouraged a new kind of punishment for doubt. Set up about 438 BCE, the law against Anaxagoras's atheism held that society must denounce those who do not believe in the divine beings or who teach doctrines about things in the sky. — Jennifer Michael Hecht
Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself. — Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach
One may sigh for all that one loses in giving up the old religion ... but the new irreligion is the manlier, honester and simpler thing, and affords a better throry of life and a more solid basis for morality. — Charles Eliot Norton
The new atheism as an old atheism, except it's much more aggressive. The new atheism wants to destroy religion. That's a very different thing. The arguments are not new, it's the aggression that's new. — John Lennox
The supernatural Christ of the New Testament, the god of orthodox Christianity, is dead. But priestcraft lives and conjures up the ghost of this dead god to frighten and enslave the masses of mankind. The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused. The darkest wrongs are still inspired by it. The wails of anguish that went up from Kishenev, Odessa, and Bialystok still vibrate in our ears. — John Remsburg
"Heaven help us," said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another. — George Eliot
Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion changes its commitment to nonsense. — Victor J. Stenger
The piety of "having a personal relationship with Christ" ... is alien to the New Testament ... but evangelicals elevate it to the shibboleth of salvation! Unless you have a personal relationship with Jesus, buster, one day you will be boiling in Hell. Sheesh! Talk about the fury of a personal savior scorned! — Robert M. Price
He lacked the sort of ambition that JB and Jude had, ... that always made him think a fraction of them was already living in some imagined future, the contours of which were crystallized only to them. JB's ambition was fueled by a lust for that future, for his speedy arrival to it; Jude's , he thought, was motivated more by a fear that if he didn't move forward, he would somehow slip back to his past, the life he had left and about which he would tell none of them. And it wasn't only Jude and JB who possessed this quality: New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common. Ambition and atheism: "Ambition is my only religion," JB had told him ... Only here did you feel compelled to somehow justify anything short of rabidity for your career; only here did you have to apologize for having faith in something other than yourself. — Hanya Yanagihara
Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. — Richard Dawkins
I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.
However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.
For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future. — Phillip Adams
As a non-believer, I want the atheist case to be made. I want religious belief to be scrutinised and challenged. I want Britain to be a genuinely secular nation, where religious belief is protected and defended as a private matter of conscience. But I feel prevented from doing so because atheism in public life has become so dominated by a particular breed that ends up dressing up bigotry as non-belief. It is a tragedy. And that is why it is so important that atheists distance themselves from those who undermine our position. Richard Dawkins can rant and rave about Muslims as much as he wants. But atheists: let's stop allowing him to do it in our name. — Owen Jones
The New Atheists believe that science replaces the claims about the world that religion makes - and therefore makes religion redundant. Some of them think that a whole new moral system should be based on science. That's sounding more and more like religion itself to me. But the other unsettling way in which Humanism imitates religion - and perhaps the most notable one in the case of the New Atheists - is its claim that people who do not share its beliefs are not only mistaken but also deluded and perhaps even evil. The line I quoted above about opposition to evolution being a sign of insanity and possibly wickedness comes, of course, from Richard Dawkins.
[Curb your enthusiasm] — Michael Ruse
Essentially I see the new atheism as largely part of the crisis of the left. Having failed to carry through its agenda in relation to political and economic life it's rounding on religion, ignoring the fact that, in some key respects, many believers are likely to share leftist aspirations. — George Pattison
Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information? — John Maynard Keynes
The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity. — John Shelby Spong
Science discovered long ago that carbon is a source of life. The ashes of my faith have prepared the ground for the planting of seeds that have produced new forms of truth, morality and meaning on my own terms, not according to the dogma laid down by religious ruffians or a vengeful God. If, as believers claim, the word "gospel" means good news, then the good news for me is that there is no gospel, other than what I can define for myself, by observation and conscience. As a journalist and free-thinking human being, I have come not to favor and fear religion, but to face and fight it as an impediment to civilized advancement. — Steve Benson
The Atheist waits for proof of God. Till that proof comes he remains, as his name implies, without God. His mind is open to every new truth, after it has passed the warder Reason at the gate. — Annie Besant
An effort was made to spread this new materialist atheism with its Communist consequence "by the sword" (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion of neighboring countries with consequent further massacres and the extension of the area of despotic Soviet control ... This armed attempt at expansion was checked by Catholic Poland, the most immediately exposed victim, in what has been called "one of the decisive battles of the world. — Hilaire Belloc
[From a New York Times biography from May 27, 2010 entitled Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex']
Beauvoir herself was as devout an atheist as she had once been a Catholic, and she dismisses religions - even when they worship a goddess - as the inventions of men to perpetuate their dominion. — Simone De Beauvoir
At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything
in other words, utter savages. — Leo Tolstoy
Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position - one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story. — David Eagleman
Leave!' Hazel Motes cried. 'Go ahead and leave! The truth don't matter to you. Listen,' he said, pointing his finger at the rest of them, 'the truth don't matter to you. If Jesus had redeemed you, what difference would it make to you? You wouldn't do nothing about it. Your faces wouldn't move, neither this way nor that, and if it was three crosses there and Him hung on the middle one, that wouldn't mean no more to you and me than the other two. Listen here. What you need is something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don't have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that's all man, without blood to waste, and it needs one that don't look like any other man so you'll look at him. Give me such a jesus, you people. Give me such a new jesus and you'll see how far the Church Without Christ can go! — Flannery O'Connor
Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, whom the new issue of Discover Magazine rightly criticizes as "Darwin's Rottweiler," is self-defeating. — Steve Sailer
We can therefore express the major elements in the New Atheists' agenda as follows: Religion is a dangerous delusion: it leads to violence and war. We must therefore get rid of religion: science will achieve that. We do not need God to be good: atheism can provide a perfectly adequate base for ethics. — John C. Lennox
The only thing particularly new about the "new atheism" is its nastiness. — Robert Barron
Science is one , gods are many
science allows change and accept new tested things but religion not
science laws are same all over earth but religions have different — Er.teji
The significance and joy in my science comes in those occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, 'So that's how God did it.' My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan. — Henry F. Schaefer, III
An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid. — Carl Sagan
Look, I happen to agree with what George says about the interpretation of the New Testament, but I want to remind both of you to never play God. — Billy Graham
Rather than being handed down from above, like the Ten Commandments, they [the laws of physics] look exactly as they should look if they were not handed down from anywhere ... they follow from the very lack of structure at the earliest moment. — Victor J. Stenger
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. I recall it quite vividly.I was at school in England by then. The moment of awakening happened, in fact, during a Latin lessson, and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. I remember feeling that my survival confirmed the correctness of new position. I did slightly regret the loss of Paradise, though. — Salman Rushdie
The terrible error in the course of human civilization is undoubtedly the defective judgment that allowed religious authorities usurp the foundation of societal morality, in which all collective ethics of humankind must take a cause. This appalling blunder is comparable only to assigning the leper exclusive franchise to run beauty clinics in the society; this can only lead to cycles upon cycles of common infection syndrome. — Adebowale Ojowuro
The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship — Jonathan Haidt
I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.'
[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005] — Philip Pullman
God's nature is revealed most perfectly in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as recorded in the New Testament of the Bible, who was sent by God to reveal the divine nature, summarized in 'God is Love.' — George F. R. Ellis
It is reported in the supplement of the council of Nicaean that the fathers, being very perplexed to know which were the cryphal or apocryphal books of the Old and New Testaments, put them all pell-mell on an altar, and the books to be rejected fell to the ground. It is a pity that this eloquent procedure has not survived. — Voltaire
It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian 'become an Atheist,' but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pinned his faith to a negation. Such is our anguish of thirst! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder? — George Eliot
One had better put on gloves before handling the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it highly advisable. — Friedrich Nietzsche
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. — Charles Bukowski
Any well-established village in New England or the northern Middle West could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats. — D. W Brogan
However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW! — Friedrich Nietzsche
It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self-identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions. — Steve Volk
As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life. — C. Wright Mills
New struggles.
After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries
a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed.
And we
we must still defeat his shadow as well! — Friedrich Nietzsche
I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it it really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. — G.K. Chesterton
One thing is made of another, and nature allows no new creation except at the price of death. — Lucretius
The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Advance warning of Katrina's path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of His plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence ofGod,they wouldn't have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, as will come as no surprise to you, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80 percent of Katrina's survivors claim that the event only strengthened their faith in God. — Sam Harris
But if they did really refer to some kind of a "personal relationship," it would in effect be a case of channeling. I suspect this is why fundamentalists who condemn New Age channelers do not dismiss it as a fraud ... , but instead think that Ramtha and the others are channeling demons. If they said it was sheer delusion, they know where the other four fingers would wind up pointing! — Robert M. Price
The complex order we now observe [in the universe] could *not* have been the result of any initial design built into the universe at the so-called creation. The universe preserves no record of what went on before the big bang. The Creator, if he existed, left no imprint. Thus he might as well have been nonexistent. — Victor J. Stenger
Wilson's weakness was to be over-literal, or to assume that his opponents were. One treatise, The Uttermost Pit, demonstrated with considerable geological learning that there could not be space within the mineral bowels of the Earth for any chambers big enough to contain all the damned souls of the ages. A third, Going to Gehenna, purported to show that the biblical references to the infernal domain were in point of fact to real places of sinister repute, and not to anywhere metaphysical. Wilson lost no opportunity to argue, with any evidence he found to hand, that there could not be any hell or Hades, and so none should fear them. — Mark Valentine
This does not mean that the one presenting the hypothesis should be resolute to disbelieve his or her postulate but rather the person should be resolute to leave the expressed opinion should they be thoroughly convinced of its lack of accuracy and poignant truth. Whether this truth is made through poetic license and artistic dramatic presentation or through clinical analysis of facts or both, the truth must be embraced not merely denied by blind faith of either new atheism or religious ideals. New or old is of no consequence, only truth and compassion are of value. — Leviak B. Kelly
Even the great Thomas Paine, a friend to Franklin and Jefferson, repudiated the charge of atheism that he was not afraid to invite. Indeed, he set out to expose the crimes and horrors of the Old Testament, as well as the foolish myths of the New, as part of a vindication of god. No grand and noble deity, he asserted, should have such atrocities and stupidities laid to his charge. Paine's Age of Reason marks almost the first time that frank contempt for organized religion was openly expressed. It had a tremendous worldwide effect. His American friends and contemporaries, partly inspired by him to declare independence from the Hanoverian usurpers and their private Anglican Church, meanwhile achieved an extraordinary and unprecedented thing: the writing of a democratic and republican constitution that made no mention of god and that mentioned religion only when guaranteeing that it would always be separated from the state. — Christopher Hitchens
The philosophy of Atheism has its root in the earth, in this life; its aim is the emancipation of the human race from all God-heads, be they Judaic, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhistic, Brahmanistic, or what not. Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods, nothing but pain and persecution, have been man's lot since gods began. There is but one way out of this blunder. Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon the earth. — Emma Goldman
We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that require a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the even ... Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God. — Victor J. Stenger