Quotes for the unbeliever

[Silver]

I ended up reading three atheist non-fiction books these past few days, though one of them could technically be considered a short novella.

Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation.
Sam Harris' The End of Faith.
Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great.

I was going to read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but I became bored a few pages into it, mainly because it contained the same material that the other books contained.

From reading the books I did, I did not glean any new atheistic material from its contents as I had expected. I suppose all I read and already knew I had learned from internet forums in relation to atheism. What I did learn, however, was some interesting history that I had not previously known.

My main purpose of this thread, though, is to share some of the atheist related quotes that stood out for me amidst the other material.

6 quotes; Harris' Letters to a Christian Nation:

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Anyone who believes that the Bible offers the best guidance we have on questions of morality has some very strange ideas about either guidance or morality.

...religion allows people to imagine their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral...This explains why Christians [like yourself] expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide.

If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulty than killing a human blastocyst.

At this very moment, millions of sentient people are suffering unimaginable physical and mental afflictions, in circumstances where the compassion of God is nowhere to be seen, and the compassion of human beings is often hobbled by preposterous ideas about sin and salvation.

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

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9 quotes; Harris' The End of Faith:

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...most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.

If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us.

...The fact that unjustified beliefs can have a consoling influence on the human mind is no argument in their favor. If every physician told his terminally ill patients that they were destined for a complete recovery, this might also set many of their minds at ease, but at the expense of the truth.

The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.

[in reference to religious texts] A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified or even mandated, by resource to their pages.

The fact that religious faith has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument in its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its adherents made fundamental contributions to human culture.

Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time.

In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence.

It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil.

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8 quotes; Hitchens' God is not Great:

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Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.

...religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody...had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge.

Why do people keep saying, "God is in the details"? He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.

...to believe in a god is one way to express a willingness to believe anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

Humanism has many crimes for which to apologize. But it can apologize for them, and also corrects them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any unalterable system of belief.

To "choose" dogma and faith over doubt and experiment is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

Yet again it is demonstrated that monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.

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Feel free to share your favorite atheist quotes.