Reasonable Doubt

ATHEISTS | AGNOSTICS | HUMANISTS

NON-BELIEVERS | FREE THINKERS

SECULARISTS | RATIONALISTS

SKEPTICS | PAGANS | HERETICS

“Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions.”
-Frater Ravus

“If god has spoken, why is the world not convinced?”
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Atheism Defined
American Atheists
Pew Research Center: Facts About Atheists
Atheist Alliance
Friendly Atheist

“Let us never imagine that faith can ever be furthered by suppressing doubt, let alone by suppressing evidence. All truth is one, and religion must be as eager as science to know the truth as far as man can perceive it.”
-Leslie Weatherhead

“Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.”
-Carl Sagan

I don’t know the truth.
And neither do you.

"God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific evidence."

-Neil de Grasse Tyson

“Let us exhort everyone to their utmost to think outside and beyond our present circle of ideas.”
-Richard Jefferies

“Whatever the humblest men affirm from their own experience is always worth listening to. But what even the cleverest of men, in their ignorance, deny, is never worth a moment’s attention.”
-William Barrett

“Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence. It will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.”
-Bertrand Russell

“The key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational, logical minds.
-Taslima Nasrin

“The greatest obstacle to discovering the truth is being convinced that you already know it.”
-Ashleigh Brilliant

“I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.”
-Bertrand Russell

“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.”
-Ferdinand Magellan

“This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.”
-John Adams

Top Atheists in the World Today
Freedom From Religion Foundation
Arguments for Atheism

Patheos: The Free Thinker
Atheist Revolution
Atheist Scholar

Infidels: The Secular Web
American Humanist Association
Richard Dawkins Foundation

IMAGINE NO RELIGION

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.”
-Richard Feynman

“All thinking men are atheists.”
-Ernest Hemingway

Ignorance: When you don’t know the difference between belief and certainty.

“The thoughtful layman often feels that the churches are far more concerned to defend a hoary tradition than to follow the moving light of new insights and understanding; far more concerned to defend historic language than to discover the truth.”
-Leslie Weatherhead

“The god of traditional believers is the great absentee of the universe.”
-William Alger

"I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science.”
-Charles Darwin

“One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview—not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. The really striking thing is that it would not take much effort to establish validity in most of these cases… but people prefer reassurance to research.”
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I think religion stops people from thinking.”
-Bill Maher

“Rational arguments don’t usually work on religious people. Otherwise there would be no religious people.”
-Gregory House, MD

“Never believe anything. Once you believe anything, you stop thinking about it. The more things you believe, the less mental activity. If you believe something, and have an opinion on every subject, then your brain activity stops entirely.”
-Robert A. Wilson

“Atheism is not a conscious act of turning away from all gods. It is simply the final destination for those who think.”
-Guy Harrison

“If there is a god, atheism must seem to him as less of an insult than religion.”
-Edmond De Goncourt

THINK FOR YOURSELF

“And if there were a god, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.”
-Bertrand Russell

“What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding.”
-Richard Dawkins

“The bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.”
-Mark Twain

"After coming in contact with a religious person, I always feel I must wash my hands."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?”
-Kurt Vonnegut

“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.”
-Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Keep your faith-based religion
out of my reality-based life.

“The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on nothing; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing.”
-Thomas Paine

“The gospels are not in any literal sense holy, they are not accurate, and they are not to be confused with reality.”
-Bishop John Shelby Spong

“The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.”
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.”
-John Dewey

“I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for departed individuals, or of a personal god.”
-Thomas Edison

“All great truths begin as blasphemy.”
-George Bernard Shaw

SEEK TO UNDERSTAND

“When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
-Stephen Roberts

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
-Richard Dawkins

“Traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place revelation, god, ritual, or creed above human needs and experience do a disservice to the human species. Any account of nature should pass the tests of scientific evidence; the dogmas and myths of traditional religions do not do so. There is insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of a supernatural; it is either meaningless or irrelevant to the question of survival and fulfillment of the human race. “
-Humanist Manifesto

“My only wish is to transform friends of god into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, and Christians into whole persons.”
-Ludwig Feuerbach

“The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible.”
-Thomas Jefferson

"The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by homo sapiens is that the lord god of creation, shaper and ruler of the universe, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history."
-Robert Heinlein

“A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it.”
-David Stevens

I respect myself too much to believe in any religion.

“Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”
-Bertrand Russell

“What have been the fruits of Christianity? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
-James Madison

“Religion pulls human beings backwards, it goes against science and progressiveness. Religion engulfs people with a fear of the supernatural. It bars people from laughing and never allows people to exercise their choice.”
-Taslima Nasrin

“You find as you look around the world that every single bit of human progress, every improvement in criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better race relations, every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”
-Bertrand Russell

“I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.”
-Thomas Jefferson

THERE IS NO GOD

“I am not prepared to hand over to any other person, though wise and learned, or any institution however ancient or sure of its position, my inalienable right to search for an ever-growing and ever-expanding truth. I believe the craving for security in belief is one which arises from within ourselves, and can only be met adequately from resources which are within ourselves. It seems to me that it is far more important for a soul in evolution to believe a few things because it has struggled, thought and suffered to discover and possess them, than it is for it to have a comfortable and orderly faith which it has adopted from any source outside itself.”
-Dr. Raynor Johnson

“In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in god and in personal immortality.”
-Clarence Darrow

“I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects. And freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science.”
-Charles Darwin

“It doesn’t work because it’s true, it’s true because it works.”
- William James

“I believe the simplest explanation is that there is no god. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
-Stephen Hawking

“Believing is easier than thinking. Hence, so many more believers than thinkers.”
-Bruce Calvert

“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”
-Thomas Paine

“The present use of the bible by the average Christian teacher is one of the greatest obstacles to human brotherhood and inter-racial understanding which existed. But what can you expect from a church whose ministers are under strong moral pressure to repeat parrot-like their own least valuable heritage in unselective fashion, and day by day spend their time reciting ancient poems often enshrining a purely parochial view of the universe, and reading and rereading uncritically and often ad nauseam stories of old unhappy days and battles of long ago. I have come to the painful conclusion that for a very large number of the supporters of religion, their religious views are infantile psychological systems which have been acquired under the stress of the early years of life which give emotional satisfaction to the particular psychological make-up of the individual concerned and which have never been tested by the touchstone of intellectual objectivity and also of emotional reality.”
-Canon Pearce-Higgins

Religion is the practice of using nonsense in order to explain ignorance.

“Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration: courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.”
- H. L. Mencken

"Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand."
-Karl Marx

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
-Carl Sagan

"God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance."

-Neil deGrasse Tyson

Reason Not Superstition
Ethics Not Dogma
Respect Not Worship
Courage Not Fear
Fact Not Myth
Morality Not Religion
Clarity Not Delusion
Good Not God
Skeptic Not Cynic
Pragmatism Not Ideology

QUESTION EVERYTHING

"You know, my faith is one that admits some doubt."

-Barack Obama

“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.”
- Socrates.

“Reason is the mistress and queen of all things.”
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
-Bertrand Russell

“It is of greatest importance that humanity should now and again take out its beliefs for spring cleaning.”
-Julian Huxley

"No amount of belief makes something a fact."

-James Randi

“Why did god plague us with the power to think? Why do you deny the one faculty which lifts mankind above all creatures on earth: the power of his brain to reason?”
-Lawrence & Lee (Inherit the Wind)

“What does god mean to me? Not a damned thing. Religion is all bunk.”
-Thomas Edison

“My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.”
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.”
-William Shakespeare

“As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
-Kurt Vonnegut

“There is more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds ever written.”
-Alfred Lord Tennyson

Best of Stephen Fry on Religion
The Thinking Atheist: Farewell to Faith

THE CASE AGAINST GOD

“The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.”
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“Belief is the death of intelligence.”
-Robert Anton Wilson

“My heart will never worship that which my mind has rejected. To try to force me to do so would not only be dishonest, but would mean living in spiritual denial.”
-Bishop John Shelby Spong

“Gods are fragile things. They may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.”
-Chapman Cohen

“Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?”
-Epicurus

"What one man calls god, another man calls the law of physics."

-Nikola Tesla

“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.”
-Richard Dawkins

Two hands working can do more than a thousand hands clasped in prayer.

“Faith is belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”
-Ambrose Bierce

“Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith.”
-Sam Harris

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
-Buddha

“Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview, nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to new things.”
-Stephen Jay Gould

“An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.”
-Madalyn Murray O’Hair

“It has long been obvious that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people.”
-Daniel Dennett

THE EYE OF REASON

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
-Thomas Jefferson

“The world holds two classes of men: intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.”
-Abu Ala Al-Ma'arri

"I'd rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief."
-Gerry Spence

“I don’t believe in god because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.”
-Clarence Darrow

“Many people think that religious belief should be above challenge or somehow out of bounds. I disagree. There is a lot of good to be found in the world’s religions. I would never deny that. However, the dark side of religion cannot be overlooked. When claims for the existence of gods negatively impact world peace, the education of children, the development of new medical cures, safety and justice for women, and the progress of science, they must be challenged.”
-Guy Harrison

“Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.”
- H. L. Mencken

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
-Kurt Vonnegut

“God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of god. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of god that we shall ever see.”
-Frank Lloyd Wright

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

“Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains. But it can put mountains where there are none.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

“Some answers may elude us forever, but that’s okay. Not knowing is never a reason to give up, declare that a god did it, and go home. Ignorance should not be feared and it’s never a good reason to fill in the blanks with gods. Admitting ignorance and being mature enough to live with it is far more honest and respectable than making up answers.”
-Guy Harrison

“I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a god who cares about how we are or what we do. At the end of my life I will finally realize that I have had it right all along: that I will not see god, that there is no heaven or judgment day”
-Kurt Vonnegut

BEWARE OF GOD

"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help."
-Robert Heinlein

"God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say that god did it."
-Carl Sagan

"Religion is like drugs. It destroys the thinking mind."

-George Carlin

“The bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.”
-Abraham Lincoln

“No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives. I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.”
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“If the bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?”
-Justin Brown

“Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.”
-Arthur C. Clarke

“If it can be destroyed by the truth is deserves to be destroyed by the truth.”
-Carl Sagan

Don’t pray in my school.
And I won’t think

in your church.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
-Christopher Hitchens

“Science adjusts its views based on what is observed. Religion is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.”
-Tim Minchin

“Let’s teach our children about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is so much more glorious, awesome and even comforting than anything offered by any scripture or god concept that I know of.”
-Carolyn Porco

“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.”
-Thomas Paine

TRUTH IS FREEDOM

“I regard belief in god as something everyone should and must question furiously until a moment comes in their life when they can question no longer.”
-Daily Mail

“I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment, to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure. That is all that agnosticism means.”
-Clarence Darrow

“When I was a kid I had an imaginary friend and I used to think that he went everywhere with me, and that I could talk to him and that he could hear me, and that he could grant me wishes and stuff. And then I grew up, and I stopped going to church.”
–Jimmy Carr

“Tell me there is a god in the serene heavens that will damn his children for the expression of an honest belief! Tell me these men are in hell; that these men are in torment; that these children are in eternal pain, and that they are to be punished forever and forever! I denounce this doctrine as the most infamous of lies.”
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Atheism Defined
American Atheists
Pew Research Center: Facts About Atheists
Atheist Alliance
Friendly Atheist

“The biggest, the greatest harm that religion did for me is that it quelled my natural wonder about the world. I didn’t really wonder about science. I felt that there was this answer to everything. Everyone knows the real answer: It’s god! I feel so cheated by that. That’s why I wish I could sue the church. Because I didn’t let my natural wondering continue, the thing that makes me the most human, the thing that makes me the most different from other species–my natural desire to know the answer. It cut that off for me. And I just think that is the most heinous thing that religion does.”
-Julia Sweeney

“Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.”
-Gene Roddenberry

“When man is freed of religion he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.”
-Sigmund Freud

“Belief is the death of intelligence.”
-Robert Anton Wilson

Intelligent. Not because you think you know everything without questioning.

But rather because you question everything you

think you know.

“Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”
-Bill Gates

“I don't understand religion at all. I think it's all nonsense.”
-Andy Rooney

"Faith is the absence of reason, the suppression of knowledge, and the willful denial of reality."

-WFLA

“Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do. Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are our intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.”
-Bill Maher

Top Atheists in the World Today
Freedom From Religion Foundation
Arguments for Atheism

Patheos: The Free Thinker
Atheist Revolution
Atheist Scholar

Infidels: The Secular Web
American Humanist Association
Richard Dawkins Foundation

Atheism Defined
American Atheists
Pew Research Center: Facts About Atheists
Osho: There is No God

OPEN MINDED

“It is all so simple once we have committed mental suicide by agreeing that the church cannot err.”
-Dr. Vincent Taylor

“I was at first very unwilling to give up my belief in Christianity, but disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, and was at last complete.,. I can now hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true… It is a damnable doctrine.”
-Charles Darwin

“At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.”
-Sigmund Freud

“Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.”
-Emmett F. Fields

Top Atheists in the World Today
Freedom From Religion
Patheos: The Free Thinker
Infidels: The Secular Web

Old Testament Tales: Stolen From Other Cultures

American Humanist Association
Richard Dawkins Foundation

“Mankind is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement. He must set intelligence and will to the task.”
-Humanist Manifesto

"And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of all of us; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly."

-Isaac Asimov