Armin Navabi Quotes

Part of the beauty and wonder of being alive is the opportunity to make your own choices and create your own meaning.

If Complexity Requires a Creator, Who Created God?

Science doesn't claim to have absolute certainty about the world; it creates models that provide the best explanation based on the available evidence. If additional evidence is found, the model can be changed.

Not knowing the answer to a question is not a valid excuse for making up a fairytale to explain it.

Close analysis of 'miracles' have never led to any proof for a supernatural explanation, and, in fact, many have proven to be cheap magic tricks, hallucinations or primitive misunderstandings of natural phenomena.

There is no evidence to suggest that God helps people. There is, however, ample evidence that people can help themselves and each other.

If morality truly stemmed from an all-powerful deity, it would not change over time.

The religions that we have today are a small fraction of all religions that have existed throughout human history. The ones that we are left with have survived because they have more effectively adapted to attract and hold the allegiance of many people.

Just because an event's cause is not immediately apparent or understandable does not mean that it must have a supernatural origin.

There is no single outside force imposing meaning on the events of your life. There is no evidence whatsoever that people's life events conform to some sort of divine plan or predestination. Life is, objectively, meaningless; given the size and scope of the universe and our tiny role within it, it's absurd to think that we might have any sort of cosmically vital role.

An all-loving god would surely not damn his children to an eternity of torture simply for being born into a culture that believes in the wrong deity, follows the wrong holy book or attends the wrong type of church services.

This book was written by Armin Navabi, a former Muslim from Iran and the founder of Atheist Republic, a non-profit organization with upwards of a million fans and followers worldwide that is dedicated to offering a safe community for atheists around the world to share their ideas and meet like-minded individuals. Atheists are a global minority, and it's not always safe or comfortable for them to discuss their views in public.

With no evidence for an afterlife, we should recognize the true value of our current lives as our one and only shot at happiness. Wasting it on unfounded claims and ancient myths is an absolute tragedy.

Are things moral simply because God says so? Or does God give certain orders because they are inherently moral? This is the question at the core of Plato's Euthyphro dilemma, a problem that lies at the heart of religious debates about the divinity of moral authority (4). If morality exists separate from God's will, there is no reason to rely on God for moral behavior; one could have moral standards independently without divine feedback. On the other hand, if God creates morality simply by saying whether something is right or wrong, then that's not really morality; it's arbitrariness. Morality would become nothing more than the whimsy of a divine being blindly followed by humans.

As a case study of perceived miracles, let's examine the belief in thunder gods within certain cultures. Throughout history, there have been many thunder gods, spread out across multiple continents and civilizations (1). In most cases, the god created thunderstorms directly through his actions, whether this meant Zeus throwing lightning bolts or the beating of a thunderbird's wings. Today, when the scientific causes of thunder are well-known, such myths seem absurd and antiquated. At the time, though, believers likely felt that thunder was a miraculous event requiring such divine explanation.

The idea that a large group of people believing in something automatically makes it true is a logical fallacy called argumentum ad populum.

There are no holy atheist scriptures, no atheist pope and no atheist rituals, tenets, creeds, code or authority. Atheism cannot be held accountable for the activities of atheists in the same way that religion can be judged by its doctrine because atheism has no doctrines.

Some theists will use this line of defense when questioned about their beliefs: "Person X is very intelligent, and he believes in God. Who am I to say he's wrong?

I cannot say with absolute certainty that my wife is not a professional assassin hired by the People's Republic of China to exterminate me. But I don't spend time worrying about the possibility because there is no evidence whatsoever to support it.