Penn Jillette Quotes

I believe the fast track to atheism is reading the Bible. I've read it three times all the way through. It's a big part of our culture, a big part of our history. I don't just read things I agree with.

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths.

Who is this god person anyway?

A large psychic void is left by a loss of faith. So many Catholics have tried so many things to replace it.

God ceases to be God only for those who can admit the possibility of His non-existence, and that conception is in itself the most severe punishment they can suffer.

In reality, many people let go of religion later in life.

I find myself by default an atheist but fairly unhappily so. It would be bloody marvelous if there was a god.

He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity.

My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.

Revealed religion had no weight with me.

I don't believe in God anymore.

I grew up an Orthodox Jew, and now I'm not an Orthodox Jew. So I have sympathy for people who lose their faith.

I no longer believe that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God. And I don't believe in God as a figure in the sky listening to your prayers, things like that.

I questioned the blind faith demanded by my religion, which was Islam.

As a scientist, I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation . . . I am an infidel today. I do not believe what had been served to me to believe. I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. When it can be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond the gates of death, then will I believe. Until then, no.

If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares about how we are or what we do. ... Religious skeptics often become very bitter towards the end, as did Mark Twain. ... I know why I will become bitter. I will finally realize that I have had it right all along: that I will not see God, that there is no heaven or Judgement Day.

Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts - there is just too much misery and cruelty for that.

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

Great God! I'd rather be a Pagan.

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.

Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.

The story of the creation and similar things in it did not impress me very much, but on the contrary made me incline somewhat towards atheism.

It was here that I suspended my religious inquiries (aged 17).