The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.
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?
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
A person isn't considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way. Insanity isn't supposed to be a communicable disease. If one other person starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it's a religion.
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Be open minded, but not so open minded that your brains fall out.
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
If people are good because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
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?
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. 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?
This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.
or simply:
