26 Brutally Honest Atheist Quotes Worth A Read.
September 7, 2015 · by James Bishop · in Articles, Atheism. ·
Everyone likes honesty. So, I’ve collected 26 honest quotes from atheists that I have read. I think much of this will come to the surprise of many people (atheists, believers & others) who have experienced the foul tactics of Dawkins, and co. This list will certainly grow (New Atheists are never on shortage of foul, vitriolic statements), and I’ll include any new quotes in a second edition to this article.
Atheism is a faith based belief system:
Many of the New Atheists today like to purport that science and reason support their worldview. Ignore the fact that on an atheistic worldview there is no such thing as reason, and reason needed to do science in the first place. The atheist needs to posit that blind forces of nature from the finite beginning of a purposeless universe gave rise to their cognitive faculties and abilities. This is impossible, unless miracles are possible. At least on a worldview where God exists things like rationality among others (objective morality etc.) can be rationally held, and justified. However, there are atheists out there who don’t deny their view is faith based:
“I am an atheist. My attitude is not based on science, but rather on faith. . . The absence of a Creator, the non-existence of God is my childhood faith, my adult belief, unshakable and holy.”
-George Klein (‘The Atheist in the Holy City.’)
I think Klein’s honesty by affirming atheism to be a faith based position is going to send some atheists into orbit. See Dawkins in this short 1 minute clip hammering his little table with those meaty fists of his, quite literally (see: 1 min 08 secs.).
Proof for God:
To rule out God’s existence for certain one needs to possess a totality of all possible knowledge. No human can muster that. Of course the likes of Dawkins, and his prophets, will posit things like the flying spaghetti monster, or unicorns in order to downplay such an epistemic responsibility. It’s also this that is behind the whole “I just lack a belief” in God tactic that merely reduces the atheists position to a psychological state of mind. To that end even my dog counts as an atheist!
“All the proofs of God’s existence may fail, but it still may be the case that God exists. In short, to show that the proofs do not work is not enough by itself. It may still be the case that God exists.”
-Kai Nielsen (‘Reason and Practice.’)
On atheism objective morality does not exist:
“When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is not self—evident. . . Christianity is a system.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche (‘Twilight of the Idols.’)
“…to say that something is wrong because . . . it is forbidden by God, is . . . perfectly understandable to anyone who believes in a law-giving God. But to say that something is wrong . . . even though no God exists to forbid it, is not understandable. . . .” “The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone.”
-Richard Taylor (Atheist, ‘Ethics, Faith, and Reason.’)
“There is no objective moral standard. We are responsible for our own actions….” “The hard answer is it [moral decisions] is a matter of opinion.”
-David Silverman (Debate with Frank Turek: ‘Which offers a better explanation for reality -Theism or Atheism?’)
But remember this the next time the atheist tells you how evil, homicidal, and genocidal your God is! For something that doesn’t exist on their worldview (by that I mean morality), they sure like to use it, and use it in abundance! Is that rational? This is probably why New Atheists dislike, and try to distance themselves from their comrade Nietzsche. And I have utmost respect for Mr. Taylor. Not because I agree with him (okay, that does count a little if I’m to be honest), but because he is telling the truth, and not making up a zillion excuses like his New Atheist brethren seem to do.
Just those militant types!
“I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.”
-Christopher Hitchens (A talk in Canada on Free Speech, November 2006.)
“Mock them, Ridicule them… in public.”
-Richard Dawkins (“Reason” Rally)
“The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion … anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
-Steven Weinberg (‘A Designer Universe?’)
“If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.”
-Sam Harris (Interview: ‘The Temple Of Reason.’)
Now, please do hear me: I am not by any means suggesting that all atheists are like this (hateful, vitriolic etc.). They are not, and I know many pleasant atheists. I also understand the frustrations that many atheists have when dealing with Christians that also can come in the same fundamentalist form as those I quote above (who can be intolerant and anti-intellectual). But what I do affirm is that this is the method in which a growing number of atheists are coming across, and they seem to believe that this is fine. It is not fine. It’s hateful, and these people need to get a life. Seriously. The next time a Hitchens supporter sends a little invitation for me to attend an atheist gathering, I’ll probably give it a miss. What to make of Harris’ quote, I’ll leave that to the reader to decide.
Other atheists on those militant types.
“I think they are atheist fundamentalists. They’re anti-religious and they’re mean spirited, unfortunately. Now, they are very good atheists and very dedicated people who do not believe in God. But you have this aggressive and militant phase of atheism, and that does more damage than good.”
-Paul Kurtz (Quoted in: ‘A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists.’)
“The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist and the McGraths show why.”
-Michael Ruse (‘Front cover of The Dawkins Delusion.’)
Mr. Ruse, I agree! Especially having had read Dawkins book twice over for myself. I think philosopher of science John Lennox is rather apt: “Atheists are clearly divided about the aggressive approach of the New Atheists, and some find it positively embarrassing.” (‘Gunning for God.’)
No purpose in life.
“There is no purpose to life, and we should not want there to be a purpose to life because if there was that would cheapen life.”
-Dan Barker (Debate vs. James White: ‘The Triune God of Scripture Lives!‘)
Really? I would think that Dan had a purpose in saying this very statement… But this is true as on atheism all we are, are conglomerations of stardust, atoms and particles. Sometimes we happen to knock in to each other, and cause bad (remember we can’t even use a word like bad on atheism, it entails moral status) things to happen. Ultimately, we are a product of meaningless forces of nature, and with no purpose. This of course does not mean atheism is false, and that Christianity is true, but it shows us what we need to embrace on an atheistic worldview. Consider the following:
‘Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear … There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.’
-William Provine (‘Origins Research.’)
Not only does using evolutionary theory to discount God’s existence commit several fallacies (the genetic fallacy, the false-dilemma fallacy, and non-sequiturs), but there is also some truth to Provine’s statement. On atheistic evolution (as opposed to theistic, as many Christians hold), there is no room for morality, meaning, and free-will (but oh how atheists like exercising their “free-will,” and living their lives as if it has meaning). If true, it must be a reality of ultimate despair, but they will try to convince you that they don’t need God, or religion to be happy! Would that be considered rational?
On those atheists that deny Jesus’ existence.
It is not uncommon for those atheists (those who clearly know more than every PhD scholar in the field) to argue (which is often more of an opinion than an argument) that Jesus never existed. Oh, but this honest atheist doesn’t mind affirming the existence of every other (vast majority) of historical figures, but NOT Jesus! He never existed. THERE’S NO EVIDENCE! Oh, but just forget about that enormous plethora of ancient documents telling us about him, they don’t count.
“This sceptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth…. But above all, if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus’ existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. Certainly, there are all those discrepancies between one Gospel and another. But we do not deny that an event ever took place just because some pagan historians such as, for example, Livy and Polybius, happen to have described it in differing terms…. To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has ‘again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.”
-Michael Grant (‘Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels.’)
“It doesn’t seem to bother the deniers that they themselves have no specialization in the academic field they disparage because in any field of study there will always be at least some small contingent who go against the consensus. The existence of those outliers is justification enough for the deniers to say, “This business is far from certain, you know. Just look at these four people who disagree!” That’s how I feel when people in the skeptic community argue that Jesus never existed.”
-Neil Carter (‘An Atheist’s Defense of the Historicity of Jesus.’)
Historical illiteracy of internet atheists.
“One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who hangs around on discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person’s grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing.”
-Tim O’Neill (‘The Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews “God’s Philosophers.”’)
This is very true. When atheists aren’t telling me that Jesus never existed, they are instead telling me that he is a copy of some pagan-deity. A challenge of which I have looked at in-depth (since I don’t want to be a Christian if Jesus is a random copy of a hocus-pocus Egyptian myth, among others), and I’ve found atheists propounding this theory to be extremely intellectually dishonest. Like I mean really, really dishonest.
Atheists on the Jesus of history:
“It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’s death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”
-Gerd Ludemann (‘What Really Happened?’)
“That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so loft an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel. After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature of the history of Western man”
“The accepted epistles frequently refer to the Last Supper and the Crucifixion…. The contradictions are of minutiae, not substance; in essentials the synoptic gospels agree remarkably well, and form a consistent portrait of Christ.”
-Will Durant (‘Caesar and Christ.’)
“…the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea has a high final probability.”
-Jeffery Lowder (‘Historical Evidence and the Empty Tomb Story.’)
“While highly colored by religious bias, the amount of information we have about Jesus is still impressive in comparison to any other non-official person of his time, even when pared down the most essential details.”
-Neil Carter (‘An Atheist’s Defense of the Historicity of Jesus.’)
Since Jesus, the historical person, is of immense interest to me, I find these quotes rather profitable.
On the positive impact of religion, especially Christianity.
“Although I am a secularist (atheist, if you will), I accept that the great majority of people would be morally and spiritually lost without religion. Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion? Is it not comforting to live in a community where the rule of law and fairness are respected? Would such be likely if Christianity were not there to provide a moral compass to the great majority? Do we secularists not benefit out of all proportion from a morally responsible society?”
“Secularism has never offered the people a practical substitute for religion.”
“Succinctly put: Western civilization’s survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
-John Steinrucken (‘Secularism’s Ongoing Debt to Christianity.’)
To remove Christian evangelism from Africa will “leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.”
-Matthew Paris (‘As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.’)
Any atheist should bear this well in mind the next time one of them calls Mother Teresa “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud” (Christopher Hitchens), or tells us that God is the worst thing to ever be invented. I guess Steinrucken, and Paris hit that one on the head.
On the obvious design found in nature.
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose”
-Richard Dawkins (‘River Out Of Eden.’)
However, instead of positing God as the best explanation of such apparent design, Dawkins attributes it to aliens. This was discovered by a documentary called ‘Expelled,’ and you can view a short generic clip of Dawkins affirming this (see from 1 minute onward).
Hey! But if it excludes God a priori, go with that. That is what I call ‘naturalism-of-the- gaps.’ That is to simply apply a natural cause to a lack of current knowledge. Maybe we really will one day find that aliens seeded us here (I’m doubtful, since we haven’t even found aliens), but to kick God out of the equation is mere blind faith. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with the interviewer in the clip I provided since he suggests that the origin of life is evidence for God. That to me commits exactly what Dawkins did, except in its opposite form, the ‘God-of-the-gaps.’
Lastly, although Christopher Hitchens refers to the design of the universe, and not biology, his quote is worth the read: “I think everyone of us picks the fine-tuning one as the most intriguing… you have to spend time thinking about it, working on it. It’s not a trivial [argument].” (‘Christopher Hitchens Makes a Startling Admission.’)
A big (bang) headache for atheists.
According to the Secular Humanist Manifesto:
“Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”
This is contrary to all scientific evidence we have for a finite beginning of the universe. Oh, but wait! The universe is actually a multiverse! Something I hear often. Not only is a multiverse profoundly speculative (see my section: Science: Multiverse), it also requires a finite beginning. It is the denial of the big bang, and the desperate attempt to affirm a multiverse that tells me William Lane Craig’s argument from the beginning of the universe is quite effective, even though atheists try to accuse him of “tactics”. As they say Craig only wins debates “because he is a masterful debater. Craig has been honing his debate skills literally since high school.” Accuse him of anything but make sure not say that his arguments are sound, or give him any credit whatsoever! They even try to give advice for fellow atheists on how to debate him. |
