Quotes about agnostic

George Bernard Shaw -

Belief in God meant belief in the old tribal idol called Jehovah and I would not pretend I did not know whether it existed or not.

Lisa Kleypas - Smooth Talking Stranger

I'm agnostic," I told him. "I'd be an atheist, except I believe in hedging my bets.

Stephanie Perkins - Isla and the Happily Ever After

I don't know what I believe. I guess that makes me a Christmas tree agnostic." He smiles. "I like it and you're a Yom Kippur atheist.

S.T. Joshi - Atheism: A Reader

The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, immorality, impoliteness, or any of the other smokescreens used by the pious to deflect attention from the central issues at hand.

John Fowles - The Magus

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

Alejandro Amenábar -

I was brought up Christian, then I was agnostic and then I realized I was atheist... This movie [Agora] is about fundamentalism and hate.

Charles Templeton - Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith

If God's love encompasses the whole world and if everyone who does not believe in him will perish, then surely this question needs to be asked: When, after two thousand years, does God's plan kick in for the billion people he 'so loves' in China? Or for the 840 million in India? Or the millions in Japan, Afghanistan, Siberia, Egypt, Burma ·.. and on and on?Why would a God who 'so loved the world' reveal his message only to a tiny minority of the people on earth, leaving the majority in ignorance

Steve Wozniak -

I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself.

Clarence Darrow -

I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.

Carl Sagan -

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to uptime causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the Universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and you be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddl

Lisa Tuttle -

I am, perhaps, too intellectual, too modern, for my own comfort! How lovely it would be to sink into the warm comfort of established religion.

Mark Twain -

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

Sean S. Kamali -

For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.

Sean Kamali -

For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements gives us organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.

Sean S. Kamali -

In any modern society encouraging your child to cut himself is an unthinkable act, but only with religious belief becomes part of the culture, and demands respect.

Peter L. Berger - A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.

T. K. Decker -

Atheists are spiritual slackers, right? We are the stoners of the cosmos. We think we’re all over-intelligent, free-thinking, free-spirited, uber-cool, hippy-dippy, science-minded, leaning-to-the-left, hedonistic, children of Theodorus the Atheist. We’re all like “Dude, I don’t need no stinkin’ deity” and if we came face-to-face with the Grim Reaper himself we’d say, “No worries, Bro, let’s do this! Game over!

G.M. Jackson - Debunking Darwin's God: A Case Against BioLogos and Theistic Evolution

God did not create evolution--evolution created God. The evolution of religion is as follows: animism--polytheism--monotheism--agnosticism--atheism. As history progresses, people worship fewer and fewer gods, and the one God becomes the incredible shrinking god. He shrinks and shrinks until he becomes insignificant. More and more theists go about their business as if God isn't there. Some even become agnostics or atheists.

Voltaire -

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciproc

Protagoras -

Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life.

Steve Albini -

No, not at all. I’m an atheist. You could say that I’m agnostic, but that’s just a certain kind of atheist (laughs). An atheist is someone who lacks a belief in a supernatural, and that’s me. I can’t say with absolute certainty that there is nothing beyond the material world, but there’s no reason for me to think there is. If I were a gambling man I would put all my money on there not being anything other than this universe.

David G. McAfee -

Believers often forget that most atheists used to be religious, that many non-believers used to think they had a personal relationship with their God and they used to 'feel' the power of prayer. They've since learned that it was all a farce, that their feelings were internal emotions and not some external force.

Jeffrey Rasley - Godless-- Living a Valuable Life Beyond Beliefs

The more I learn, the less I know.

Ruth Downie - Semper Fidelis

[regarding the sacrifice] It was all very professionally done, even to a man whose religion consisted mostly of half formed and unanswered questions, it was strangely reassuring.

Isaac Asimov -

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't

Roger Zelazny - Creatures of Light and Darkness

A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that I be forgiven for anything I may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness.  Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which I may be eligible after the destruction of my body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure sa

Voltaire -

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.")

Henri-Frédéric Amiel -

A belief is not true because it is useful

Carl Sagan -

You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.

Abhijit Naskar -

Christ the man died long ago, but Christ the idea of love, still exists, not in any church, rather in the mind of humans.

Abhijit Naskar -

The point is, being a Christian does not mean hating or belittling the non-Christians. Being a Muslim does not mean hating or belittling the non-Muslims. Being an Atheist does not mean hating or belittling the religious people. In a civilized society, diversity in religious orientation should be the reason for celebration, not the cause for hatred and differentiation.

Abhijit Naskar -

The argument against faith is all based upon the rigorous analysis of the scriptures, and not upon the objective observation of the actual individual sensation of faith. Historical experiences of the Kingdom of God gave rise to all the scriptures in the world, but the scriptures themselves don’t account for the actual globally prevalent psychological element of faith or divinity in the human mind. Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal c

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite -

Unknowing, or agnosia, is not ignorance or absence of knowledge as ordinarily understood, but rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One, and that therefore He is only truly to be approached by agnosia, or by that which is beyond and above knowledge.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

All religions are guesswork

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

My gut instinct is that these heavens and hells exist nowhere else except in our hearts and minds

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Don’t curse the gods you will feel shame when you have to call on them for help

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

God is powerful. Even those who claim not to believe in him fear him. Though their mouths may confess to disbelieve in him, their hearts yearn for him.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

All atheists will go to heaven. If god exists, not believing in him does not take him away and he cannot justly condemn those who seek him earnestly and cannot find him. He would even reward their earnest search for him.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

He is an atheist anyone who does not believe in my god and the wrath of god is upon him; I am in my right to meet that wrath on him," thunders the fanatic

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

You can't have it both ways. Either you believe in my god or you go to hell

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Atheists are the most honest of the human race. These people are unable to live a double life; they are unable to lie to themselves. Of course it's an evolutionary handicap, and if that handicap was widespread, our species would run the risk of extinction

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

From the club of what atheist call false hope and false god (which offer solace to weak minds), atheist are calling you to their club of no god and no hope (which offers nothing in return. Join the club only if you are a strong minded individual capable of handling your life alone without the help of gods. )

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

I know what is going on in the heart of an atheist. Deep anguish that there is nothing beyond, nothing to live for, nothing to give him hope. I know because I endured the same predicament.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

After losing faith, even an atheist feels a yawning void in his soul that needs filling; there is nothing imaginable that he can fill with it. It was all along meant to be filled with the sacred, with the unknown and unknowable power. That's the curse or blessing of humanity

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Good gods are scarce because the majority of gods are created by evil men

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Why do religious believers hate unbelievers? The feel threatened by them, they feel besieged by them. Religions consider themselves as separate tribes in their own rights and feel like unbelievers will one day overrun their strongholds

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Every word that comes after "And the Lord told me. . . “is a pious lie

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Some people are so stiff and inhumane as the dogma's they believe in

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Give me something to worship whatever.” Cries the human soul

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Spiritual leaders, priests and prophets are lamps burning in the dark, seeking meaning for humanity.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Science cannot disprove god. Science studies the things that are. The eternal question is who or what made them to be

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Why doesn't the pope convert to Calvinism? Why doesn't the Dalai Lama, convert to Christianity, why doesn't Billy Graham convert to Islam, Why doesn't the Ayatollahs convert to Buddhism, Why isn't Buddhism swept away? Religious leaders know that all religions are equal; they know that no one of them has the monopoly to the knowledge of God. They know that each religion is trying to find the hidden God and that no one religion can claim to have found him beyond doubt. That's why they remain where

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Can really anybody put his hand on his heart and profess to know beyond doubt what happens on the other side of this life?

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

There is nothing behind the curtains of religions, people put there whatever their imaginations can fathom

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Once you believe that god is not a private property of anybody, you are on your way to becoming a new messiah. Maybe your own if not the world's

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Theology is like assuming that there is a black cat in a dark room where in fact there is no black cat, and endeavoring to study the cat's properties and how it may have evolved from its ancestors.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

The eyes of god are upon you, I mean the eyes of society. We are prisoners of societies in which we live

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

You take away my golden dreams and my visions of paradise, in its place you wake me up and hand me your reasons and facts and crude reality. You have ruined my life. If I commit murder or hang myself, let the god I used to pray to repay you in full.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

If you believe that God is good and that He loves you without regard to whom you are or what you do, you will worship Him wholeheartedly. You will praise him with thanksgiving. If you believe He is angry against you, you will come to him with fear and trying to appease his anger. And you don't know when His anger will be over. Such a god keeps you in a perpetual psychological anguish. That is the typical kind of god we usually worship. That is the typical god approved by authority.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Each mind conceives god in its own way. There may be as many variation of the god figure as there are people in the world

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

God has not yet revealed himself to no one in no unclear terms. Religions are attempts to find him on that level they are all equal

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

What is needed is not that a religion be true, meaning that what it claims exist beyond the ink it is written with in a holy book. That is hard to prove. What is important is that a religion be a good system to help us mere mortal deal with our short and troubled life in the universe. Whether what we hope for in the afterlife materializes or not is not important, what is important is that we believe it will materialize and that gives us hope.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Much terror in religion is not the will of god, it is created by power hungry clerics who thirst for absolute power and claim it for god. God does not seek power, he is already powerful.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

No one knows what god thinks of anything. He only knows and no one can claim to penetrate into his mysteries. Those who do that are liars and must be avoided at all costs

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

It's utter arrogance to think that we can know what god ought to be or do. If we don't understand we must continue our search or recognize our ignorance

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

All religions are "revealed" and "inspired". After all nothing happens without the "will" of god.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Don't create unbelief or doubt in people's minds. When you do so you ruin their lives and you have nothing to give them in its place. It's ok if people delude themselves those delusions keep their day running.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

An atheist is a disappointed true believer he is an angry and hungry soul who has failed to find a real god to whom he can anchor his hope

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

All religions are man-made God has not yet revealed himself beyond doubt to anybody.

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

When you have doubts about God, the right position to take is agnosticism, atheism is outright arrogance

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

The more time you invest into studying religion, the more likely you are to disbelieve in the gods

Bangambiki Habyarimana - Pearls Of Eternity

Religion is a theory about everything that needs to be proved only after death those who prove or disprove it never come back to us to tell the story

Abhijit Naskar -

If history has shown anything, it is that where there is a God, there is an institution trying to lock up that God in its lifeless structure of orthodoxy, in order to have authority over people and sell tickets to the Kingdom of that God. Thus emerged all the pompous lies about the extraterrestrial Kingdom of God or Heaven.

Bertrand Russell -

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there a

Jim Butcher - Death Masks

I wouldn't burden any decent system of faith by participating in it... I'm not agnostic. Just nonpartisan. Theological Switzerland, that's me.

James Frey -

Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is biology, but what is the song?

Meggie Royer -

My lack of faith in God is not a dilapidated house.It does not need to be razed to the ground or burned down to cinders.I refuse to be the wounded woman on a crossthat you crucify with your disapproval like nails;I will only be the woman who believes in thunderstormsthe same way lightning loves the tops of trees it strikesevery time it gets tired of being pent up in an unforgiving sky,the only difference is that I believe these are natural weather phenomenons,not God’s belly rumbling or synapses

Carl R White -

Belief is a wonderful way to pass the time until the facts come in.

Abhijit Naskar - The Krishna Cancer

No text, being human creation, is free from flaws – it is the human mind that should be conscientious enough to accept their good elements and discard the bad ones.

Matthew Quick -

Why would god allow the Holocaust to happen? If god made everything, why did he invent sin to trick us and then hold our sins against us? Why are there so many religions in the world if god created the world and wants us to be Christian? Why does god allow people to fight wars over him? What if you were born in a different culture and never even heard of Jesus Christ—would god send you to hell for not being Christian? And if so, do you believe that's fair? Why are men always the leaders in your

Timothy J. Keller -

God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill 'graciously'--that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across all humanity, regardless of religious conviction, race, gender, or any other attribute to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world.

James C. Dobson - Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future

As I indicated in an earlier chapter, it is so important to pause and think through some of these basic issues while you are young, before the pressures of job and family become distracting. Everyone must deal with the eternal questions sooner or later. You will benefit, I think, from doing that work now. As I said earlier, whether you are an atheist, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew, a New Ager, an agnostic, or a Christian, the questions confronting the human family are the same. Only the answers wi

Robert G. Ingersoll - Vol 1: Lectures

The real difference is this: the Christian says that he has knowledge; the Agnostic admits that he has none; and yet the Christian accuses the Agnostic of arrogance, and asks him how he has the impudence to admit the limitations of his mind. To the Agnostic every fact is a torch, and by this light, and this light only, he walks.The Agnostic knows that the testimony of man is not sufficient to establish what is known as the miraculous. We would not believe to-day the testimony of millions to the

G.K. Chesterton - The Complete Father Brown

It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossib

Mokokoma Mokhonoana -

An agnostic is a creature that is religiously skeptical whenever it is told that God exists … or that He doesn’t.

Thomas Henry Huxley - Volume 5: Science and Christian Tradition: Essays

When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite s

Robert Flint - Agnosticism

...properly a theory about knowledge, not about religion. A theist and a Christian may be an agnostic; an atheist may not be an agnostic. An atheist may deny that there is God, and in this case his atheism is dogmatic and not agnostic. Or he may refuse to acknowledge that there is a God simply on the ground that he perceives no evidence for his existence and finds the arguments which have been advanced in proof of it invalid. In this case his atheism is critical, not agnostic. The atheist may be

Julian Huxley -

We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc.

S.T. Joshi - Atheism: A Reader

The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should not be cowed by exaggerated sensitivity to people's religious beliefs and fail to speak vigorously and pointedly when the devout put forth arguments manifestly contrary to all the acquired knowledge of the past two or three millennia. Those who advocate a piece of folly like the theory of an 'intelligent creator' should be held accountable for their folly; they have no right to be offended for being called fools until they establish that they are n

Thomas Henry Huxley - Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, 'Try all things, hold fast by that which is good'; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of m

Stephanie Perkins - Isla and the Happily Ever After

I don't know what I believe. I guess that makes me a Christmas Tree Agnostic.

Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger

A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and inve

Mary Karr -

But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this. Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the

Chila Woychik - On Being a Rat and Other Observations

Let’s face it: suffering discredits goodness. I’m agnostic in practice though faith-based in theory. I used to pray but now know he’ll do what he darn well pleases when he darn well pleases. Will he listen? Maybe. We have a book that says so, but how much happens beyond that book, I can’t say. That’s agnosticism in its bleakest and most honest form. Don’t judge me, yet believe me when I tell you that years of abuse tend to wring out every ounce of one’s ability to understand and adhere to faith

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