Atheism Is Born Quotes

Maybe awful things is how God speaks to us, Vernon thought, trudging up the lightless tunnel. Maybe folks don't trust in good things no more. Maybe awful things is all God's got to remind us he's alive. Maybe war is God come to life in men. Vernon pushed on toward the light of day. He stepped out onto the ledge and into the heat, and it felt like leaving a theater after the matinee had shown a sad film, the glare of sunshine after the darkness far too real to suffer. ~ Alan Heathcock

I don't think God is so jealous about our worship of Him that He will want to separate those who serve His purposes, serve His goodness, because they have read a book, even one written by an atheist, and have been moved, or because they have wanted to be fair all their lives, but have never stepped in a church, from those who have heard God's words in church or read His words in the Bible and become convinced by them. ~ Dorothy Day

Fame, power,money,love. The moon, the stars, the whole galaxy. Give it to me.My fetish is domination; not of men, not of my self, of everything. A shiver goes up my spine when I watch other bow their head, In my previous life I must have been a born great queen ~ J.J. McAvoy

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago. ~ Greg Iles

I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be. ~ Warren G. Bennis

For truth is strong next to the Almighty. She needs no policies or stratagems or licensings to make her victorious. These are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. ~ John Milton

Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth. ~ Elijah Parish Lovejoy

Love is patient and love is kind. Damn! Why'd it have to be the two qualities I wasn't born with? ~ Jarod Kintz

If you look up 'atheism' in the dictionary, you will probably find it defined as the belief that there is no God. Certainly many people understand atheism in this way. Yet many atheists do not, and this is not what the term means if one considers it from the point of view of its Greek roots. In Greek 'a' means 'without' or 'not' and 'theos' means 'god.' From this standpoint an atheist would simply be someone without a belief in God, not necessarily someone who believes that God does not exist. According to its Greek roots, then, atheism is a negative view, characterized by the absence of belief in God. ~ Michael Martin

Law is born from despair of human nature. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life; a man is not completely born till he has passed through death. ~ Benjamin Franklin

When the time travel is eventually doable technologically,
yesterday was dead a man who is going to be born tomorrow. ~ Toba Beta

As you know, the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention to make the pope and the monks more powerful and turn a whole kingdom into hypocrites. ~ Voltaire

I will never be one of the happy stupid that were born somewhere. This way of life is excellent for the imagination. It develops your paranoia. You feel paranoid when you don't understand a country, and being paranoiac is excellent for fiction. ~ Amelie Nothomb

I am convinced that the way forward for the human race is to recognize and protect the fundamental right of sovereignty over consciousness, to throw off the chains of our divisive religious heritage, to seek out forms of spirituality (or no spirituality at all if we so prefer) that are truly supportive of liberty and tolerance, to help the human spirit to grow rather than to wither, and to nurture our innate capacity for love and mutual respect. The old ways are broken and bankrupt and new ways are struggling to be born. Each one of us with our own talents, and by our own choices, has a part to play in that process. ~ Graham Hancock

My voice, I have to say, is kind of miraculous because I was born with a cleft palate. ~ Gale Gordon

Why, my man is created from the outside, that is, he is inauthentic in essence- he is always not-himself, because he is determined by form, which is born between people. His "I", therefore, is marked for him in that "interhumanity." An eternal actor, but a natural one, because his artificiality is inborn, it makes up a feature of his humanity-to be a man means to be an actor-to be a man means to pretend to be a man-to be a man means to "act like" a man while not being one deep inside-to be a man is to recite humanity. ~ Witold Gombrowicz

Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to help make others so. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

1For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. 2A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. 3A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. 4A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance. 5A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and a time to turn away. 6A time to search and a time to quit searching. A time to keep and a time to throw away. 7A time to tear and a time to mend. A time to be quiet and a time to speak. 8A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace. ~ Anonymous

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. ~ H.L. Mencken

The piano keys represent the genome. We each get different keys, and the keys don't change throughout our life: we die with the same piano keys, or genome, we're born with. What changes is the sheet music: the epigenetics. That sheet of music determines what tune is played - what genes are expressed - and those genes determine our traits - everything from IQ to hair color. ~ A.G. Riddle

The Christian life is not limited to prayer, but requires an ongoing dedication and courage born of prayer. ~ Pope Francis

When a man or woman is born again by the Spirit of God they will give evidence of it in part by striving to live a holy life. ~ Alistair Begg

Being moral and disciplined is hard work. Being wicked requires no effort at all -- one merely indulges every desire and impulse, no matter how hurtful or immoral. By claiming to be born wicked, Rockton ensures that he doesn't have to struggle to be good. He can just protest that he can't help himself. ~ Sabrina Jeffires

Music is a way of life, it's everything. I play drums and that's what I believe I was born to do. ~ Elvin Jones

Being human is a divine gift. It is also not necessary that we overcome all our sins and become saints.We need to realize that we are born imperfect and will remain so until death. ~ Gian Kumar

It is best to be born in April or August when the life-giving Sun is in its exaltation sign Aries or Leo, its home, for then we enter the sea of life on the crest-wave and are backed in the battle of existence by an abundant fund of vim and energy. ~ Max Heindel

A couple of months ago I had a dream, which I remember with the utmost clarity. (I don't usually remember my dreams.)
I dreamed I had died and gone to Heaven. I looked about and knew where I was-green fields, fleecy clouds, perfumed air, and the distant, ravishing sound of the heavenly choir. And there was the recording angel smiling broadly at me in greeting.
I said, in wonder, "Is this Heaven?"
The recording angel said, "It is."
I said (and on waking and remembering, I was proud of my integrity), "But there must be a mistake. I don't belong here. I'm an atheist."
"No mistake," said the recording angel.
"But as an atheist how can I qualify?"
The recording angel said sternly, "We decide who qualifies. Not you."
"I see," I said. I looked about, pondered for a moment, then turned to the recording angel and asked, "Is there a typewriter here that I can use?"
The significance of the dream was clear to me. I felt Heaven to be the act of writing, and I have been in Heaven for over half a century and I have always known this. ~ Isaac Asimov

My last son is leaving to go to college; my grandchildren are being born. My mother is living with me. ~ Sally Field

It would be more consistent that we call [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. ~ Thomas Paine

When we are needy Christ does His best work, but be warned. Someone, maybe even some well-meaning soul, is going to tell you, "Don't worry. God will never give you more than you can handle."
I double-dog-dare you to find that in the scriptures. The closest you can come is found in 1 Corinthians 10:13: "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it."
This talks about an escape from temptation; it does not say that you will not be faced with more than you can handle. The mother whose baby is born and dies, the father who loses his eyesight in a construction accident and can no longer provide for his family, the child who hurries home from school every day hoping that his mother hasn't yet succumbed to the cancer that he sees ravish her body day by day . . . all of these souls have more than they can handle - on their own.
But with Christ as their companion on the journey through life - and only with Christ - all things are possible. Without Him, we fail no matter how far we manage on our own. We can never cross over without Christ and His all-access Atonement. ~ Toni Sorenson

We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love. ~ Tim Farrington

If you ask the religious person "What do you believe in?" he will tell you about one thing. But if you ask him "What do you not believe in?" he will tell you about many, many things! And if you ask an atheist "What do you believe in?" he will say "Nothing." The only difference between an atheist and a religious person, is one thing. If one thing isn't there, there would be no difference at all! When I say I am losing my religion, I am not saying that I'm losing my belief; but I am saying that I'm losing my disbeliefs. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I know I was born and I know that I'll die
The in between is mine
I am mine ~ Pearl Jam

But failure to disprove something is not a good reason to believe it. ~ Richard Dawkins

Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self- collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his behaviour. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Darkness entered into, darkness realized, is the point of departure for all profound expressions of Christian hope. 'Meaningless darkness' becomes 'revelatory darkness' when it is confronted by the courage of a thoughtfulness and hope that is born of faith's quest for truth. ~ Douglas John Hall

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored. ~ Daniel Dennett

It's often said when a baby is born so is a grandparent; well, for me it turned out that when I was born it was also the birth of a Ding Dong. ~ Lisa A. Tortorello

How could something new and pure issue from this? It may be from the remotest regions of the spirit that words and figures will come, images and gestures, veiled and unveiled as in a dream. When they meet in their heady course, and the spark of the wonderful is born from the marriage of strange and most strange, then I will know I am facing the new radiance. It will give me a dubious look because, even though I have conjured it up, it exists beyond the concepts of my wakeful thinking; its light is not daylight; it is inhabited by figures which I do not recognize, but know at first sight. Its weight has a different heaviness; its colour speaks to the new eyes which my closed lids have given one another; my hearing has wandered into my fingertips and learns to see; my heart, now that it lives behind my forehead, tastes the laws of a new, unceasing, free motion. I follow my wandering senses into this new world of the spirit and come to know freedom. Here, where I am free, I can see what nasty lies the other side told me. ~ Paul Celan

The term that best describes me now is 'secular humanist.' ~ Charles M. Schulz