New Atheists Quotes

For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a 'misfiring of something useful', it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive.

Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d'Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this "scientism" have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other "new atheists" – Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist – religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and "poisons everything." They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.

But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that s ~ Karen Armstrong

The New Atheists are not open or willing to go where the evidence leads, unless that evidence sustains their own naturalistic assumptions. They have covertly reduced all philosophical thought and deduction to
ironically-fait h! ~ Ravi Zacharias

When did atheists become so evangelical? I mean, if you don't believe something to be true, wouldn't you just ignore it? That's certainly what I do. Whether it's leprechauns or a congressional debt reduction plan - if I'm convinced it's fiction, I simply put it out of my mind. Not the atheists. They are obsessed with faith and religious practice. Their identities and their works are one big reaction to that which they hate. No longer content to simply dismiss God and those who follow in Him, the New Atheists have created a cult of unbelief. ~ Laura Ingraham

God is Santa Claus for Grown-Ups. ~ Oliver Markus

For new atheists, the science is settled, the data is conclusive and the book (no, not the "Good Book") has been written. Time for everyone else to pack up and move on to other business, like, presumably, accumulating wealth and fulminating at the sight of the nearest Christmas tree. The militant atheist wants nothing more than to spoil the believer's spiritual journey. That's both mean-spirited and radically unenlightened. Though more than 95% of the world finds some meaning in faith, God-hating comic Bill Maher shrugs this off as a "neurological disorder." His version of a quest for knowledge was a series of scathing jokes at the faithfuls' expense in the documentary "Religulous." The latest incarnation of the thought-eschewing secularist is American Atheists spokesman Dave Silverman, who sums up the argument this way on atheistnexus.org: "Religion is my bitch." He has also tweeted, "Yes it is a myth. Deal with it. All delusions are myths." It's these snarky and condescending rejections, not of faith itself but of those who profess it, that reflect a total unwillingness to learn something new about human nature, the world around us and even of science itself. While the neo-atheists pay only cursory attention to dismantling arguments for God, they spend most of their time painting his followers as uncultured rubes. The fact that religion has inexplicably persisted, even despite Copernicus, Darwin and the Enlightenment, doesn't seem to have much sociological meaning for them. ~ S.E. Cupp

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

If you want to know why the "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Atkins sell so many books, the answer is that they're offering the modernist version of the good old-fashioned theological term "assurance." They are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying "religion" is gone ~ N. T. Wright

We live at a time that is notable for the polemical nature of discussions about identity, consciousness, rationality, agency, memory, and feeling. 'New atheists' and reductive materialists conduct gladiatorial debates against defenders of faith and enemies of reductionism. Lots of heat is produced, but, alas, little light is shed. How marvelous it is, then, to see this fine new book by Lenn E. Goodman and Gregory Caramenico. Here is a learned, illuminating, and decidedly non-polemical treatment of the classic questions of soul, mind, and brain-an exemplary work of scholarship. ~ Robert P. George

Their [the new atheists] treatment of the religious viewpoint is pathetic to the point of non-being. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing. ~ Michael Ruse

So, if someone like Richard Dawkins indignantly protests that his passion about these sorts of things -- the passion that drives the "God Delusion" -- should not be taken as a religious passion, I am happy to accept that. I do nevertheless think that often Dawkins and company show the sociological characteristics of the religious. This comes across particularly in what Freud calls the narcissism of small differences, the hatred of those who are close to them but not quite close enough. Just as evangelicals can differ bitterly over the true meaning of the host, so the New Atheists loathe people like me who (like them) have no religious belief but who think that science as such does not refute religion.
[Is Darwinism a Religion? - Michael Ruse] ~ Michael Ruse

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

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 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

It is my sense that more of us live in worlds like those portrayed by David Foster Wallace than those mapped by either new atheists or religious fundamentalists. It is this sort of contested, cross-pressured, haunted world that is "secular" - not a world sanitized of faith and transcendence, flattened to the empirical. ~ James K.A. Smith

I'm not John Lennon. I'm John Lennox. Now, 'imagine a world without' Stalin. The New Atheists are often silent about [the wrong done by atheists]. ~ John Lennox

The rational scientists - and "new atheists" - believe the "sensitive, caring" postmodern Pluralists are loopy and "woo-woo," and that the traditional religious fundamentalists are archaic, childish, and dangerous. The postmodern Pluralists think that both the Rational scientists and the traditional fundamentalists are caught up in "socially constructed" modes of knowing, which are culturally relative and have no more binding power than poetry or fashion styles; this "knowledge" gives the Pluralist an enormous sense of superiority (although in their worldview, nothing is supposed to be superior). And the traditional fundamentalists think that both the modern Rational scientists and the postmodern Pluralists are all unbelieving heathens, bound for an everlasting hell, so who cares what they think anyway? ~ Ken Wilber

Our athiests are pious people. ~ Max Stirner

The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms.

Religious fundamentalists also develop an exagerrated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This tendency makes critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feurerbach, Marx and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate. As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy it is essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth. It is also morally and intellectually conservative. Unlike Feurerback, Marx, Ingersoll or Mill, these new Atheists show little concern about the poverty, injustice and humiliation that has inspired many of the atrocities they deplore; they show no yearning for a better world. Nor, like Nietzsche , Sartre or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the resources to create a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have priv ~ Karen Armstrong

These new 'hybrid' F1 cars represent an extremely complex project. ~ Luca Cordero Di Montezemolo

This looks like the red room of pain," she says. My mouth drops open. My little prude has been expanding her reading horizons. I choke on my laugh, and a couple of people turn to look at us. I narrow my eyes. "You read Fifty?" I ask quietly. She blushes. Amazing! - the woman is capable of blushing. "Everyone was reading it," she says, defensively. Then she looks up at me with big eyes.
"You?" "I wanted to see what all the hype was about." She does that blink, blink, blink thing with her eyelashes. "Did you pick up any new techniques?" she says, without looking at me. I squeeze her hand. "Would you like to try me out and see?" She turns her face away, pressing her lips together - horribly embarrassed. ~ Tarryn Fisher

We could never light another match, and if China continues to build one coal-fired power plant a week, we are doomed. China is going to have to have new technologies made available to it to stop this. They're not going to live in poverty. ~ Jay Inslee

Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like. ~ Christina Westover

Gert was always of the mind that she wouldn't go to another church except the Catholic Church. So when I would date her in New York City, and later when we went to Oxford before we got married, we always went to the Catholic church. ~ Wesley Clark

A spider web of 'patriots for profit', operating from the highest positions of special trust and confidence, have successfully circumvented our constitutional system in pursuit of a New World Order. ~ Bo Gritz

I found that the majority of people who stopped at my table [ at the Comic Con] last didn't even know who Winnie the Pooh was, and the new feature was just opening in the theaters. ~ Mike Royer

This problem with illegal immigration is nothing new. In fact, the Indians had a special name for it. They called it "white people." ~ Jay Leno

The federal government can't remodel every firehouse and buy every new policeradio in the name of Homeland Security. ~ Bob Inglis

On a sleepy morning that I keep waking up to pull my necktie tight
And when I pass through my classroom door
I can start walking with my chest puffed out just a little
The wind blows through such ordinary days

I realized I heard it
I realized I felt it
Now in my chest that started to tremble
I realized it was coming already
I saw off
The millions of stars that were disappearing
I waved my hand
Saying, "Good for you"

I look down at the corner of the hallway in middle of cleaning
I think it's a strange thing
Even though the time inside of me has stopped
It feels like I'm living through different days
Dust falls and accumulates like snow

I realized you're waiting
I realized you're calling
Now in this time that started to tremble
I realized I found it
My lost memories recalled
My story
Of eternity
It's ending

I started running before I knew it
My hand was being pulled along by you
Yesterday was far away, tomorrow was right ahead
That natural fact made my heart dance

I realized I heard it
I realized I felt it
Now in my chest that started to tremble
I realized it was coming already
A new sun overcame thousands of mornings

I realized you're waiting
I realized you're calling
My soul is trembling
I realized I found it
I saw off
The day that's able to disappe ~ Lia

Another funny thing about living in this city is how easy it can be to lose track of people. We're all so busy, always rushing around, so wrapped up in our own stuff. It stops occurring to us to check in with friends. I mean REALLY check in with them. ~ Ryan Kelly

You know what we need?"
"A new plan?" asked Lissa.
"A miracle?" asked Eddie.
I paused and glared at them both before responding. Since when had they become the comedians here? "No. ~ Richelle Mead

Weak logic, inconsistencies and alienation from the people are common features of authoritarianism. The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own lightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large. Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

Somebody said he came from New Orleans, where he got in a fight over a Cajun queen. And a crushing blow from a huge right hand, sent a Louisiana fella to the Promised Land. ~ Jimmy Dean

The funny thing about stop signs is that they're also start signs. ~ Maureen Johnson

All the time we were there, you could see that dead squirrel right out in plain sight. Whenever anyone mentions New Hampshire, that squirrel is always what I think of. I bet I've thought about that squirrel a million times. ~ Wally Lamb

Rousseau's ideas brought about-he moved the political process to the very centre of human existence by making the legislator, who is also a pedagogue, into the new Messiah, capable of solving all human problems by creating New Men. 'Everything,' he wrote, 'is at root dependent on politics.' Virtue is the product of good government. 'Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.' The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century. ~ Paul Johnson

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new. ~ Nick Cave

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality. ~ Richard Rohr

People get surprised by my choices. But that comes from me looking for something new. ~ Maggie Cheung

I'll quote from Ecclesiastes to the Catholics, from the Koran to the Muslims, from the Torah to the Jews, from Aristotle to the atheists. ~ Paulo Coelho

The truth on top of me right like a marshmallowy sackful of soft sweet simple things, the feeling was colourful and clear and gentle and full of certainly and it pummelled me gently inside and out, and I understood. I understood these battles I'd been having with my parents and why an adventure away from Oscar felt like such a terrible thing.
I didn't want to leave him. I didn't want to sit by a new window in a strange house in a foreign country and not be able to talk to him. Oscar was the reason. He was the reason I wanted to stay. ~ Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

Tad's mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren't is more fun than where you are. ~ Jay McInerney

May you find the confidence and courage to climb new heights. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The feeling of being a digression not the link in the argument,
a new direction, an offshoot, the limb going on elsewhere,
and liking that error, a feeling of being capable because an error,
of being wrong perhaps altogether wrong a piece from another set
stripped of position stripped of true function
and loving that error, loving that filial form, that break from perfection
where the complex mechanism fails, where the stranger appears in the clearing,
out of nowhere and uncalled for, out of nowhere to share the day. ~ Jorie Graham

The best thing is to grieve for the people you loved and lost, and then welcome and love the new people life puts in front of you. ~ Mark T. Sullivan

They are not grey roots! This is my new fifty shades of grey OMBRE hairstyle! ~ Tanya Masse

Oh no. Maybe I'd gotten too cocky. I was still relatively new to this friend business. Had I screwed up even asking? Should I have waited for her to offer up details? ~ Gwenda Bond

The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious. ~ Luc Sante

We also have a growing population of unwelcome out-of-town wildlife species that have come here and clearly intend to stay. Two invasive species in particular have caused serious concern: Burmese pythons, and New Yorkers. The New Yorkers have been coming here for years, which is weird because pretty much all they do once they get to Florida is bitch about how everything here sucks compared to the earthly paradise that is New York. They continue to root, loudly, for the Jets, the Knicks, the Mets, and the Yankees; they never stop declaring, loudly, that in New York the restaurants are better, the stores are nicer, the people are smarter, the public transportation is free of sharks, etc. The Burmese pythons are less obnoxious, but just as alarming in their own way. ~ Dave Barry

He cleared his throat. "Yes. I hate to both you this evening but I'm the new interim marshal in Gallatin Canyon and I'm involved in an investigation. ~ B. J. Daniels

The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had a sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's story but, insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom. ~ Willa Cather

The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold. ~ Jacob Bronowski

Now you listen to me," says Ove calmly while he carefully closes the door. "You've given birth to two children and quite soon will be squeezing out a third. You've come here from a land far away and most likely you fled war and persecution and all sorts of other nonsense. You've learned a new language and got yourself an education and you're holding together a family of obvious incompetents. And I'll be damned if I've seen you afraid of a single bloody thing in this world before now ... I'm not asking for brain surgery. I'm asking you to drive a car. It's got an accelerator, a brake and a clutch. Some of the greatest twits in world history have sorted out how it works. And you will as well." And then he utters seven words, which Parvaneh will always remember as the loveliest compliment he'll ever give her. "Because you are not a complete twit. ~ Fredrik Backman

Don't listen to the prevailing majority points of view. If you have new ideas, push them. ~ Leroy Hood

Always be willing to step out of the crowd to make a new friend. - Jeannie Fields-Dotson ~ Gary Chapman

There's nothing special about being born. Not a thing. Most of the universe is just death, nothing more. In this universe of ours, the birth of a new life on some corner of our planet is nothing but a tiny, insignificant flash. Death is a normal thing. So why live? ~ Johan Liebert

Let go of what was and embrace what to be. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Khesot was looking not at the map but at us, his old eyes sad.
I winced, knowing what he'd say if asked: that he had not been trained for his position any more than nature had suited Bran and me for war.
But there was no other choice.
"So if Hrani takes her riding up here on Mount Elios, mayhap they can spy out Galdran's numbers better," Branaric said slowly. "Then we send out someone to lure 'em to the Ghost Fall Ravine."
I forced my attention back to the map. "Even if the Marquis fails to see so obvious a trap," I said, finally, smoothing a wrinkle with my fingers, "they're necessarily all strung out going through that bottleneck. I don't see how we can account for many of them before they figure out what we're at, and retreat. I say we strike fast, in total surprise. We could set fire to their tents and steal all their mounts. That'd set 'em back a little."
Bran frowned. "None of our attempts to scare 'em off have worked, though--even with Debegri. He just sent for more reinforcements, and now there's this new commander. Attacking their camp sounds more risky to us than to them."
Khesot still said nothing, leaning over only to tap out and reload his pipe. I followed the direction of his gaze to my brother's face. Had Branaric been born without title or parental plans, he probably would have found his way into a band of traveling players and there enjoyed a life's contentment. Did one not know him by sight, there was no sign in his worn dress o ~ Sherwood Smith

Sometimes when you get on a new movie you kind of how to figure out the way other people work and it can be like being the new kid in high school where you're just trying to find out where your place is on the movie or on the set. ~ Luke Wilson

If these examples are typical, then 75 to 95 percent of the productivity gains from many major new technologies were realized only after decades of improvements in the implementation. ~ James Bessen

To understand a new idea, break an old habit. ~ Jean Toomer