Whittaker Chambers Quotes

All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many.

The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.

When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century... I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

The overwhelming majority of social scientists were irreligious or even anti-religious. This led them to believe that religion was a disappearing and unimportant factor in human affairs.

The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.

What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.

This issue is whether or not our government should be infusing religion into the public schools. Our churches are very strong in this nation and I think that's great and everybody should have the ability to worship as he or she sees fit. I choose to worship not believing in God and government should not thrust a religious idea down my throat.

I believe in the separation of church and state. The government has the right to say what happens in a civil case, like in a court house. And religious people have a right to say what happens in a church congregation. They are two completely separate things.

... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction betweenour present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.

I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that those who believe in belief are wrong, because belief is waning fast, and the props are beginning to buckle.

I am an atheist, I have no religious beliefs. And obviously I don’t believe in spirituality of some kind.

I think the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends toward the elimination of religious superstition.

By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.

Since the Court took God our of our schools, we've gotten exactly what we should expect: godless schools.

Many people are trying to remove religion from public life. Under the banner of pluralism, cultural and political leaders are seeking to push all talk about God out of the public arena.

I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness.. I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.

The death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times condones it. The belief lingers on, of course, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth.

The secularization of Western culture was accompanied by the elevation of art to the position of a substitute religion to replace Christianity.

We have the most religious freedom of any country in the world, including the freedom not to believe.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish - where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

There has been a religious revival because - let me put it like this, the people that weren't traditionally religious, conventionally religious, had a religion of their own in my youth. These were liberals who believed in the idea of progress or they were Marxists. Both of these secular religions have broken down.

Toleration made the world anti-Christian.

God, once imagined to be an omnipresent force throughout the whole world of nature and man. has been increasingly tending to seem omniabsent. Everywhere, intelligent and educated people rely more and more on purely secular and scientific techniques for the solution of their problems. As science advances, belief in divine miracles and the efficacy of prayer becomes fainter and fainter.