Luther Burbank Quotes

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the responsibility to acquire information, digest and use it to understand what you can.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

Atheism is the absence of religion. We don’t really need atheism. We just need to get rid of religion.

It is much to be lamented that a man of Franklin's general good character and great influence should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers.

For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.

All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties.

The lack of understanding of something is not evidence for God. It's evidence of a lack of understanding.

This is why rational people - anti-religionists - must end their timidity and come out of their closet and assert themselves.

Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong... As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from.

I'm proud to be an atheist - it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.

Atheism thrives on bad religion.

I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion - I am fighting for reason.

The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.

The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue - questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.

Mystery is the essence of divinity

I can definitely make an argument for atheism. I was very educated in scripture and dogma and the church, particularly the Catholic Church. I could not possibly know that I disagreed with religion unless I knew what I was disagreeing with.

Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay, than they think.

Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious

The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.

One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else.

There is a dispute about the existence of God. Both sides try to hide that they killed Him - even before He came into being.

An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid.