Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don’t believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart’s content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others – while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity – so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities … but there, there. Enough. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. 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. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p5
We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge. Christopher Hitchens
If you’re all going to take it a la carte and decide which bit you believe I still want to know on which authority you don’t believe it. Christopher Hitchens vs Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Public Library debate 4th June 2007
I think that most people who say they believe in God ... actually believe in belief in God. Daniel C Dennett
I can’t even read this. Proposition Alpha ... It’s in Turkish. But I believe it’s true. Daniel C Dennett, Good Reasons for Believing in God AAI 2007
We can pass the buck to the experts. ibid.
The insist that they don’t understand. They make a special, marvellous glory of the fact that the central propositions of their faith are incomprehensible even to the experts. Now this is just bizarre. ibid.
There are no good reasons for believing that god exists. And plenty of good reasons for believing that God does not exist. But there are several good reasons for declaring a belief in God. ibid.
They just don’t think about it ... Whatever those formulae mean ... it’s true. ibid.
They think that belief in God is for some reason obligatory. ibid.
They contrive to believe in God. ibid.
Strategic reasons: Their fear of God, their fear of a vengeful God ... Catastrophic collapse of consensus ... There are very good reasons to lie ... The belief by so many religious people that they have to cling tenaciously with white knuckles to their religious declarations. ibid.
Can we reason with them? No. ibid.
The very discussion of the issue undermines the consensus. ibid.
We are threatening them with a choice between betrayal and lying. ibid.
They passed the buck to the deceived. ibid.
We have to confront the murkiness. ibid.
The Concorde fallacy: When one makes a hopeless investment: I can’t stop now. ibid.
What we’ve seen is the evolution of the God concept in the last few thousand years from Yahweh [mountain] ... to the Ground of all Being. ibid.
The weathering of the God concept. ibid.
We all know people who deny that they’re atheists. Daniel Dennett, lecture Global Atheist Conference 2012, ‘How to Tell You’re an Atheist’
There’s the cognitive dissonance. ibid.
Of those 54% [UK] census Christians ... Half of them hadn’t attended a church service in the last year. ibid.
The son of God – how can you believe that? ibid.
There are better ways to help people lead better lives. ibid.
The unembarrassed exploitation of this convenient dodge by critics – as if they had never noticed how they are availing themselves of a parlour trick. ibid.
How do you tell wishful thinking from genuine belief? ibid.
Scientists know the anguish of confronting awful facts. ibid.
An adaptation of religious beliefs to be impenetrable in this way. ibid.
Cartoon [son to mother]: Aren’t you a little old to have an imaginary friend? ibid.
I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough. Daniel C Dennett
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire
Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. Voltaire
You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence; it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe. Carl Sagan
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Carl Sagan
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief. Sigmund Freud
Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. Sigmund Freud
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief. Sigmund Freud
The old beliefs will be brought back to honour again. The whole secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the demonic. We will wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race. Adolf Hitler
I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose. Clarence Darrow
By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? ... Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidently unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil. H L Mencken, The American Mercury February 1926