A. J. Jacobs Quotes

Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

Today the intelligence of the world denies the miraculous. Ignorance is the soil of the supernatural. The foundation of Christianity has crumbled, has disappeared, and the entire fabric must fall. The natural is true. The miraculous is false.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

I've taken a stand against religion for as long I've been able to write and think.

I'm a stone-cold atheist.

Atheism is having a heyday in the born-again United States.

I gave up religious thinking a long time ago and am really just an agnostic now.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don’t believe in, we quickly discover that I don’t believe in that god, either.

Society must fight against this belief in God as it fought against idol worship and other narrow conceptions of religion. In this way man will try to stand on his feet. Being realistic, he will have to throw his faith aside and face all adversaries with courage and valour. That is exactly my state of mind.

I don't respect religon. I don't respect superstitious thinking and that is what religous is.

I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

Atheism is a very positive affirmation of man's ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems.

I don't have any relationship with God and I've never wanted it. I don't believe in fate or in any superior entity; if a plane crashes and people die, it's not because Heaven said so.

I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures. ... Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you. ... As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it.

Atheism comes into rather a bad press and I suppose I'd rather describe myself as a humanist... I don't believe in God. I don't believe there is a God.

An atheist is a man who looks through a telescope and tries to explain what he can't see.

Atheism is the lack of belief in a god (or gods). It makes no claim. It merely rejects the claim that a god (or gods) exists. Nothing more.

I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don't buy the argument that, well, it's harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what's true.

In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.

I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.

Without religion, also there is a way, it could be this way, through education, through scientific findings, then you get conviction. Not necessarily really love other, but for their own interest they are showing love, compassion to other like that.

I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot).

In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.